By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) November 24, 2019 (Update: December 7, 2019: we now know Giuliani has been meeting in Ukraine with Andrii Artemenko and is still meeting with Lutsenko, Kulyuk, and Shokin!; December 19: added bullet-points)

WESTON — Herein is a preview/excerpt of Brian Frydenborg’s brand new eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia: An Epic Saga with Companion Sections in Fifteen Parts, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials

Available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook

(You don’t have to own a Kindle or Nook, you can use free apps to read!)

• The media has consistently miscovered “Ukrainegate,” portraying it at worst as a separate scandal from Trump-Russia/the Mueller probe, to, generally, at best, a related scandal. 
• But a deeper exploration reveals Ukraine has been at the center of Trump-Russia from almost the beginning.
• Not only are the same issues involved going back to even before Ukraine’s Orage Revolution (2004-2005) a decade-and-a-half ago, but many of the characters involved before in Trump-Russia and of note in the Mueller probe have ties to the people involved now in more recent Ukraine developments, or, it is even the same people involved in both.
• The saga involves two main threads:
  1. Russian mafia and Kremlin-linked people (often the exact same thing) connecting with Trump and/or people who were close or would be close to Trump, starting in the 1980s and through the present.  Central to all this is Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich, close to Putin and who had many operatives in the U.S. making contact with Trumpworld.
  2. A massive Eurasian gas scheme that seems to have been planned by Mogilevich and other mobsters and the Russian government since at least the mid-1990s, only a few years into Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.  The scheme amounted to billions of dollars and was designed to corrupt Ukraine’s ruling class to bend to Putin’s will and keep Ukraine under de facto Russian control.
• Multiple people involved in both schemes would cross over and join the other or become entwined in both.
• This has culminated with the now infamous Rudy Giuliani forays into Ukraine’s politics, with his and Trump’s efforts to get Ukrainian officials—including multiple presidents—to smear former Vice President and current 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden based on disinformation and propaganda with zero factual basis.
• The smears on Biden are based on circumstantial associations with no evidence, but the only evidence we do have—circumstantial or otherwise—is that, after both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got involved, there was positive movement on corruption issues, including with Burisma, the gas the company on the board of which sat Hunter during the positive developments.
• Biden’s involvement in Ukraine was actually part of the West’s overall effort to reduce corruption in Ukraine and, therefore, to weaken the tools by which Putin dominated Ukraine and kept it from reducing corruption and orienting itself with the West politically, economically, and militarily, despite the wishes of Ukraine’s people.
• Essentially, Ukraine is the center of the main front line in the New Cold War between the West and Russia.
• In this New Cold War, Trump’s actions are essentially handing victories over to Putin.
• Putin’s efforts amount to an effort to corrupt the U.S. system through Trump to change it into what Ukraine resembled under Putin’s old stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, who was deprived of a cheated victory in the Orange Revolution (2004-2005) and driven out of power in the (Euro)Maidan Revolution (2013-2014).
• Since then, Ukraine has been plunged into occupation, annexation, and civil war, all orchestrated by Putin.
• The efforts by Trump to force Ukraine into helping him attack his political rival, Joe Biden, center on Ukraine’s desperate efforts to secure military and diplomatic support in its struggle against Putin’s Russia.
• Most tellingly, the people against whom Biden and the West worked against to fight corruption in Ukraine have untied with Giuliani and Trump to advance Trump’s and Putin’s interests at the expense of Western influence, democracy, and transparency. 

These issues that have now exploded this all into impeachment for Trump show the union of the two main threads in ways that make the corruption and duplicitousness of Trump and the bad actors in Ukraine painfully obvious, erasing any doubt about whether or not the Trump Administration and the Kremlin are working to advance their shared goals at the expense of longstanding U.S. interests in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Preface

Trump’s current Ukraine insanity is just an extension of old Trump-Russia and the media still does not know how to cover it.

As the Hunter Biden “story” keeps receiving attention, the myopic mainstream media—just as in 2016—is unable to present a coherent big-picture understanding of what is happening or how things fit together.  In a stunning lack of self-awareness, its top news outlets are once again playing into Trump’s and Putin’s hands, sabotaging the Democrats and spreading Kremlin and Republican disinformation.  The roots of much of this lie with the media’s overall failure both to understand the bigger picture of the Trump-Russia saga and, in part as a result, to realize that these “recent” Ukraine scandals are not something new so much as a continuation of the old Trump-Russia saga that was the focus of the Mueller probe.

The only way to get anything approaching a full sense of what is going on with Ukraine, Trump, Russia, and the media is to painstakingly trace the threads of corruption and Russian influence operations related to Putin’s Ukraine drama, Putin’s and his top mafia boss’s co-opting of Trumpworld, and the actors involved throughout the many stages of this overall saga.  These threads can be traced from their origins in the 80s and 90s directly into today’s White House and the battlefields in Ukraine.  Only then will the centrality of Ukraine to the whole Trump-Russia saga be understood, only then can the full scale of the horror be comprehended, but it can and must be.  The threads are solid and come together to form a powerful and clear line of remarkable influence of the Russian government in Moscow’s Kremlin and Russian mafia into the major players, policies, and decisions of the Trump White House.  As this exploration will make clear, simple logic and the sheer amount of billowing smoke plumes coming from so many points obviously show that Trump has been raised up and co-opted by Russian influence to the point of being an asset—whether willingly or if he is too stupid to realize it, he is a “useful idiot”—for Putin and his allies.  Even if the actual flames are obscured, the heat can be felt as we choke on the smoke: those fires still exist and are presented here even if most of the top media news outlets, playing Trump’s and Russia’s game in their inability to sustain focus, have largely missed these conflagrations.

Table of Contents (Main chapters)

I. Introduction: Trump and Putin, Playing the Media Like a Fiddle

II. A Song of Gas and Politics Prologue: How a Meeting in Tel Aviv May Have Set Up Two Decades of Ukrainian History

III. How A Russian Web Enveloped Trumpworld Starting in the 1980s & Kept Expanding

IV. A Song of Gas and Politics Part One: The Chess Pieces Begin to Move

V. The Collapse of Russia’s European Influence

VI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Two: A Game of Revolution

VII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Three: Putin’s and Manafort’s Gaslighting of Ukrainian Politics

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Comes to America and Trumpworld when Trump Is Hurting for Cash

IX. The Curious Case of Michael Cohen: Linking Trump and Ukraine

X. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Four: Putin’s Triumph in Ukraine

XI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Five: Hubris and Revolution

XII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Six: The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma

XIII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Seven: Manafort Crosses the Not-So-Narrow Sea & a Shady “Peace” Deal, or, How Our Saga’s Two Main Threads Unite

XIV. A Song of Gas and Politics Epilogue: Trump and Giuliani Bring Everything Together Full Circle (but the Media Misses It)

And, included below in this preview: XV. Conclusion: Collusion Beyond What Was Imagined and the Need for a Media Self-Correct

“Chaos Is a Ladder”

What makes Giuliani’s escapades in Ukraine so useful is that they present amazing illustrations of the overall dynamics of Trump-Russia, with all the key elements.  There is some sort of past event or incident involving someone who stands up to Putin and Trump—in this case Joe Biden and his push against Shokin specifically and corruption in Ukraine in general—and then the gaslighting begins.  Reality is turned on its head and then barely tangential facts—e.g., Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma—are blown enormously out of proportion.  A mostly demonstrably false narrative is built from a few tiny kernels of truth to try to tear down an opponent of both Putin and Trump in ways that help advance both their interests, in this case helping Trump in the 2020 election and seeing that Putin’s influence is extended in Ukraine.  The false reverse narrative is repeated and amplified so much that it becomes reality for a great many and even more so casts doubt where its creators want it to be: whether the e-mails of Hillary Clinton or Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, the fantasy narrative forms the backdrop for all other discussion.  People not even in the camps of Putin or Trump will buy into the narrative, then, or at least let it enter their calculus.  The very propagation of the narrative puts those slandered by it on the defensive, forcing them to adjust and react on ground not of their choosing.  What is constant throughout are lies, repetition, deliberate manipulation of the media, corruption, co-opting of parties that should be more neutral—the media, the State Department, Ukraine’s presidency and prosecutor generals—and an emphasis on factional loyalty best exemplified by following the lead of a cultish leader.  Whether Trump’s 2016 campaign or Putin’s second presidency, this is how these two and their camps operate.

If we may quote Game of Thrones again, both Putin and Trump are strong devotees of the Littlefinger School of Politics, which proclaims that “Chaos is a ladder.”  Confusion, disinformation, war, they all can be useful to those who know how to manipulate them for personal gain.  Ideals like democracy and the rule of law?  At Lord Petyr Baelish’s School, they are simply “a story we agreed to tell each other over and over ’till we forget that it’s a lie.”  Fools cling to such ideals and when they try to manage the chaos with such “illusions,” they lose.  They fail to realize the main truth: “The climb is all there is,” that all that matters is the pursuit of power.  This is how Trump and Putin live and how they govern.  They actively seek to undermine, then destroy, ideals and institutions so that all that remains is horse-trading.  In a world stripped away of ideals, the raw power of Trump, Putin, and their models suddenly become far more attractive. 

Trump has helped make this the true battle of American politics now, just as that is what Putin has done in Russia and what he aims to bring back to Ukraine, which he is currently doing with Team Trump’s help.  Zelensky is a perfect example: the young idealist is trapped, for either he assists Trump in his quest to damage Biden, thereby undermining the very ideals and personality of Zelensky’s that got him elected—turning himself into the opposite of that on which he campaigned, corrupting himself and Ukraine’s institutions in a way that serves Putin’s long-term goal to reestablish corruption as the fuel of Ukrainian politics—or he stands strong on his principles in a way that earns Trump’s disfavor, causing Ukraine to lose aid and support when his nation is spread thin standing up to Russian war, occupation, and corruption.  Zelensky loses no matter what, and Putin gains no matter what.  All that is required are lies, their repetition, and a willing partner in power: Kuchma and Yanukovych before, and now the far more powerful American president.  Trump truly is the biggest seed of doubt about the West Putin could ever hope to realistically have planted in such a position of power: nations and factions that work with Trump are still repelled by him and, therefore, the United States; they move away from the U.S. in their hearts and see working with America more as a naked power move than being representative of any true affinity or value system.  In doing so, they are more open, at least subconsciously, to the Russian model.  And since Trump clearly favors Russia, being closer to Trump brings them closer to Russia, too.  And if they move away from Trump and the America?  Russia is there, too, watching and waiting: you make your devil’s bargain one way or another, and Putin is the devil behind it all.

To be sure, Putin plays Littlefinger’s game (spoilers in that link) far better, but Trump is still dangerously good at enough elements of it to succeed.   From the war in Syria to Brett Kavanaugh, from border detentions to journalists’ assassinations, pretty much any issue for either man is approached with this gaslighting model.

As noted, Trump, Republicans, Russians, their agents, and Shokin himself have lied, engaging in a chaotic assault on reality by subscribing to not the obvious reality but its opposite: not that Biden had put his son’s position at risk to push for a prosecutor general in Ukraine that would actually tackle corruption, but the lie that Shokin was actively looking into Burisma and that Biden had him removed to protect his son and Burisma’s corruption.  That lie—we already established it was completely unsupported by any substantive evidence, and Shokin can certainly not be thought of as credible—has become the mantra in a Kremlin-style disinformation campaign of the Republican party, Trump, his White House, Giuliani and his associates, and Shokin himself, along with the Kremlin and its media arms joined with right-wing American media, much to their discredit and disgrace.  The even bigger disgrace is the impression of false equivalence put out by all too many of the more respectable outlets.  The favoritism shown Hunter Biden is far from rare and he is far from the poster-child of nepotism, but there is a place for a conversation about his preferential treatment.  Yet that place is not the 2020 election cycle, since the actions of the father—a different person and regarding whom zero evidence exists he did anything other than put aside thoughts of his son’s job with Burisma when engaging in Ukraine policy as a representative of the United States Government advancing the interests of the United States and its ally Ukraine—are not the actions of the son and since the Trump family, whom Biden hopes to oust from the White House in November 2020, are in a league of their own crassness in American national-level politics.  The counternarrative pushed by Trump, Giuliani, their associates in the U.S. and Ukraine and by extremist Kremlin and American media fly in the face of clear reality, and that their counternarrative at all even has a major place in the public discussion is already a defeat.  And with more and more of an unholy alliance between Kremlin media, American right-wing media, and even media in other countries, this will only get worse.

Furthermore, the manipulations that got to this point are also are blatant and beyond doubt.  Between the approval of Javelin missiles for Ukraine near the time when Manafort’s and Mueller’s cases were frozen, the offer made to Poroshenko for a state visit, the May pre-inauguration meeting with Zelensky’s top advisor (if Parnas is to be believed), and the phone call with Zelensky that sparked an impeachment drive in America, that is four possible examples we know of so far of attempts at an improper quid pro quo involving actions prescribed for Ukraine’s government designed to benefit Trump politically in exchange for policy favors from the Trump Administration. At least three of these involved Giuliani.

While there are so many different key players in Trump’s own administration raising grave concerns over his Ukraine actions, they are being extensively laid out and discussed well elsewhere.  What is overwhelmingly clear—no matter how much detail is released or not beyond that initial “transcript” that is not a transcript and the whistleblower complaint—is that Trump withheld both U.S. military aid to Ukraine that had been approved and authorized by Congress through law and the offer of other benefits to pressure and bribe the newly-elected Ukrainian president to go after Trump’s most formidable political rival in the upcoming 2020 presidential election as a personal favor (remember that “bribery” is one of the only specific offenses outlined in the U.S. Constitution as impeachable).  Between the American and Ukrainian sides, no one misspoke, there was no ambiguity, no confusion, no misunderstanding: by the end, the parties knew what was being asked for, and what was being dangled in response was also quite clear.

The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In this extraordinary Trump-Russia saga, both ends of his maxim have been easily satisfied as far as proving Ukraine is of a nefarious centrality in collusions between Trumpworld and Putinworld.  But nether end is met with the claims made by Trump and his people about the Bidens in Ukraine.  The media must internalize this going forward and immediately shutdown even the mention of any “wrongdoing” when it comes to the Bidens in any discussion about Ukraine in the context of 2020.

The only hope of beating Trump and Putin at their game of chaos—especially since the well-documented reality is so blatantly clear on one side and so absent from the other—is for the media to steer clear of the false gods of whataboutism (a classic Soviet-style propaganda technique well utilized by Team Trump) and false equivalence; bowing down to them does not make news “fairer” or “neutral.”  It must stop doing Trump’s and Putin’s work for them, stick rigorously to the facts, avoid overdoing speculation, and shutdown and deprive of oxygen the false flames of the Bidens in Ukraine “scandal,” which only exists as it does because of the mainstream media’s myopia.

Ukraine: The Heart of Trump-Russia

Besides not falling for and being used by Russian and Trumpian propaganda, the media also needs to see the bigger picture for what it actually is and to actually start explaining it to people far more robustly than it has tried before.  As it is, the larger tapestry is being missed, obscured, or only partially described in everyday mainstream coverage, and this is a huge problem, since if the public is not even really aware of what is happening, it cannot be properly alarmed about it, let alone make informed choices about how we as a nation should respond.  Simply put, analysis must be better and more robust.

The first and most immediate way to start fixing this crisis is for the media to begin presenting the reality of the current Ukraine firestorm as being the latest in a long series of Ukraine issues that form the heart of the Trump-Russia saga, which hardly ended with the release of the Mueller report.  Too many of the presentations of what is now hurtling Trump and America into impeachment have characterized it as something separate and distinct from the Trump-Russia scandal and its accompanying Mueller probe.

Yes, this chapter is easier for people to understand on its surface than the massive Trump-Russia scandal since it is a smaller chapter of a much larger, more complicated whole.  But that is like saying a piece of lettuce is easier to understand than a salad.  A piece of lettuce is not much by itself, but as part of a salad, it is so much more and has far more meaning, the same as a word in a sentence or a scene in a movie: the true meaning cannot be grasped in isolation.  Framing this as part of the old Russia scandal rather than some bright shiny new scandal is a necessary first step, then.

The next step is to find an easy way to demonstrate how these new developments tie into the older ones.  And Giuliani must be given credit for perhaps presenting the easiest opportunity to be able to do so with the cast of characters he has assembled in Ukraine.

Overall in our exploration, we have here so many threads coming together it can be challenging to keep track of their interweaving parts.  But in Ukraine this year, thanks to Giuliani, we have these key figures from earlier in our narrative working on behalf of or in coordination with Team Trump at the expense of the Bidens: Firtash, Kislin, Artemenko, and Shokin.  In Kislin and Artemenko, we have people who go back to early stages of Russian organized crime elements—especially tied to Mogilevich—that would be allied with Putin engaging Trumpworld and Ukraine, respectively.  Kislin is then later getting a future Party of Regions official an apartment in a Trump property.  We then have in Firtash a bridge to the main gas scheme and Manafort, who also hooks up with Artemenko, who, in turn, brings us up to the “peace” plan episode once Trump is president.  With Shokin we have the post-Maidan Biden situation, and then they all come together.  And they come together with the assistance of newer players in our discussion: Lutsenko, Kulyuk, Parnas, Furman, Fuks, diGenova, Toensing, Rep. Sessions, Solomon, and Sean Hannity, something of a goofy version of the Legion of Doom that took on the Justice League (the Legion of Doofuses?).  This second list brings people with connections to Trump, right-wing media, and Ukraine’s corrupt underbelly into the mix.  They are all joined by Secretary of State Pompeo, the White House, U.S. right-wing media, Kremlin run-and-linked media, and most Republicans in Congress in pushing the false narratives and standing by while the lies spread and people’s careers and lives—even U.S. policy—are ruined by them.  Here, we have Ukrainians, Americans, Republicans, Trump confidantes, media personalities, politicians, prosecutors, and mobsters and all holding hands in broad daylight working to advance a Russian agenda.  We see how Putin uses media, politicians, intelligence operatives, “businessman,” and organized crime like a modern general uses combined arms tactics.  Coming together, they represent decades of planning and preparation on the part of the Kremlin and its Russian mafia allies to both dominate Ukraine and co-opt Trump and people around him to turn him and his people into their useful idiots.

There are various words that can describe so many nefarious actors acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power and organized crime surrounding one person and his associates for decades and continually reengaging him and his people at different points on related issues with the same and/or connected people, but one of the words for sure is not “coincidence.”  Add to that more abstract description that we are dealing with the Presidents of the United States and Russia, and the word coincidence is even more surely not applicable in an exponential sense.

While there is also a good number of other connections between Trumpworld on one side and Putinworld on the other, here we have kept the focus on where those networks meet in Ukraine or are related to Ukraine.  No other topics in the Trump-Russia saga bring as many nefarious players together for nefarious purposes.  Thus, just this chunk alone—a significant portion of, but by no means all—of the Trump Russia saga, is deeply illuminating.

The Trump-Putin Assault on Biden in Ukraine Just the Latest Battle in Russia’s War with the West

As we consider Joe Biden’s earlier efforts in Ukraine, it is crucial to remember Ukraine’s identity crisis.  On one side, there is the old Ukraine, firmly in Russia’s orbit through a system of corruption and oligarchic machination in which gas and other resources are leveraged in ways to maintain Kremlin political control in Kiev.  On the other side, we have a younger Ukraine, looking eagerly to the West—the EU and America—that wishes for transparency, freer and fairer democracy, accountability, and independence from both Russian and oligarchic control.  Biden’s request concerning the prosecutor was very much a part of helping the second Ukraine rise at the expense of the first, part of longstanding U.S. policy since the end of Cold War, helping to advance American interests by seeing Ukraine transform into a fellow democracy committed to the rule of law, fighting corruption, and avoiding conflict in Europe. In this tug of war over Ukraine, those who foster conflict, thrive on corruption, and disdain the rule of law along with democracy are aligned against Biden and with Putin.  With Giuliani’s band of brigands trying to attack Biden, support shady prosecutors in Ukraine, oust a principled head of Naftogaz, restore Firtash to power, and corrupt hard-pressed leaders, it is clear which side Giuliani and Trump have chosen.  Putin has his own soldiers to do his dirty work in Ukraine, to be sure, but when Trump sends in Giuliani with his own people to come work on the ground with Putin’s allies and agents, we have an unprecedented amplification of Putin’s reach and capabilities because of his co-opting of the Trump Presidency.  And this is hardly limited to Ukraine: from Ukraine to Syrian Kurdistan, we are seeing the real-life effects of this play out and, to be sure, the U.S. is losing while Trump and Putin are winning.

In one way or another, all these folks mentioned here are working to further Trump’s and Putin’s interests in Ukraine are all contributing to undoing the reforms Joe Biden pushed for in Ukraine, reforms to make it less corrupt and less susceptible to Russian machinations.  Here, we have the most obviously blatant examples of agents with strong, direct, clear ties to Trump, Putin, and the Russian mafia all colluding together to boost Putin’s interests in Ukraine at the expense of reform long desired by both the West and Ukrainians themselves as well as to help Trump and damage Trump’s strongest electoral opponent, Joe Biden.  Here, the gas scam players and Team Trump are one team, with veterans from many a past campaign coming off the benches to work with younger blood.  Here, we see how Ukraine and gas really are at the heart of Trump’s candidacy and presidency as well as the heart of Putin’s relationship with Trump.

It could not have been executed more brilliantly by Putin: a sitting American president in 2019 uniting his agents with those of Putin and Mogilevich to advance perhaps Putin’s most important foreign policy goal: Russian dominance of Ukraine through corruption to the detriment of pro-Western forces in the country.  Ukraine is, then, ground zero for the New Cold War, the prime focus of competition between Russia and the West, viewed as an essential prize for Putin and Russian nationalism at he seeks to expand his influence into Europe.  This is not hyperbole: since the federal investigation into Giuliani and his Ukraine mischief includes a broader counterintelligence probe over concerns he may be the target of foreign influence operations, former FBI counterintelligence agent and current lecturer on national security law at Yale University Asha Rangappa notes this “means that the FBI believes …[Giuliani] may pose a national security threat to the United States.”

It is also crucial to note that the approach of the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political, media, and business elites of neighboring and other countries, all coupled with disinformation and misinformation operations and eventually joined with hacking and cyberwarfare—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do and has done much the same thing throughout Europe, has done the same to the U.S., and will keep trying to do so.

Putin’s Campaign to Turn America into His Ukraine

Tellingly, throughout this tale, we see here corrupt Russians, Ukrainians, and others from former Soviet Republics who are usually linked to the Kremlin trying to actively engage and collude with Team Trump in corruption by appealing to Trump’s personal interests (as opposed to America’s).  They see themselves and the corruption of their old-school post-Soviet systems supported by Putin in Trump and his candidacy, then his Administration.  That they even think this blatantly corrupt, bribery-and-extortion-laden approach will work with an American president speaks volumes about how low Trump has brought the United States, its credibility, and its reputation, as well as why Trump and Putin like each other so much.

The irony is that we are seeing something of a repeat in history.  Meddling in an election, Putin pushed for an easily pliable crony to take power in a foreign country.  Using corrupt methods but in a free and fair election and facing divided opposition, his candidate triumphed, yet in the span of four years, the extreme obsequiousness shown to Russia coupled with blatant corruption rubbed voters the wrong way.

This could describe either Yanukovych or Trump.  The people did rise in 2014 to oust Yanukovych, but it remains to be seen whether or not this will happen in America.  Many Ukrainians viewed Yanukovych and his Party of Regions not as pro-Russian but as “Russian-controlled,” and Trump and Republicans are facing similar views among many Americans.  For voters to make a truly informed decision in 2020, the media must realize that the Ukraine scandal propelling Trump and the nation towards impeachment is not separate at all, but the latest chapter in America’s Greek tragedy.  We fail to see how Putin uses the same techniques against America as he does against Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, and Europe.  And our willful inaction is empowering Putin to just keep doing it more and more to us and more and more around the world.

The number of people with close ties to the Kremlin and pushing for Russia’s interests—especially when it came to Ukraine—working for, or colluding with, Trump’s presidential campaign and presidency is a modern singularity without parallel and makes clear that Trump’s campaign was highly compromised by foreign agents.  Foreign interests interfering in American elections and co-opting top officials in their then-new American constitutional order was one of the greatest of all the major fears of the Founding Fathers, and Trump would have been their nightmare.  On leaving office, George Washington himself told us in his magisterial Farewell Address that “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

In tragic plays, from ancient Greece to Shakespeare, our heroes failed often because they failed to learn from their mistakes and adjust, hence the tragedy format.  As Trump tries to make Putin-and-Yanukovych-style corruption the norm in American politics, will Americans, the media, Democrats, progressives, and maybe even some Republicans learn from theirs, or will the third decade of the twenty-first century in the U.S. become a tragedy as well?  Time will tell, but based on how people are behaving now and especially on how the media has miscovered Trump’s efforts to use America’s Ukraine policy to score a political hit job on his most intimidating opponent, it seems not.

What many people forget is that Mueller’s probe consisted of two parts: a criminal probe about which he was required by law to write and submit a report and a counterintelligence probe that would be far broader about which he was required to share nothing.  Asha Rangappa, the former FBI counterintelligence agent cited earlier, has written extensively about the Mueller probe and has been careful to make these points repeatedly.  More recently, she noted that the counterintelligence probe that was a huge portion of the Special Counsel’s overall probe may still be ongoing and that knowing if this is the case is important.  Even if it is not, her broader point is key, because Trump-Russia is not just the Mueller report, nor was Mueller’s full investigation simply what was in the Mueller report.  Those larger issues are at the heart of everything dealt with in this piece.

President Trump has acted to benefit Putin on everything from sanctions to Syria, Ukraine being just one hot front in a many-front war that still includes an active home front in America.  These operations thrive on chaos, which is only amplified by poor media coverage.  It is far past time for respectable media to frame “Ukrainegate” in its proper Trump-Russia context, presenting the full and clear picture to the American people of how Ukraine has been at the center from 2016 through today and is central to understanding Trump-Russia collusion, Trump’s rise to power, and Putin’s war against Western democracy.  It must do so by the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses, and it must do so without juxtaposing demonstrable lies about Biden, Trump’s most threatening opponent.  Doing otherwise advances Putin’s interests by gaslighting the American people and committing election interference to the benefit of the Kremlin.  Especially after 2016, there is even far less excuse to miss the big picture, so the idea that the media would not know any better can no longer be an argument: laziness or carelessness would in this case make the media a willing useful idiot for Russia’s anti-American plans.  The media still can and must course correct and avoid a repeat of 2016 or worse, as the survival of both our American republic and the West itself may very well depend on it.

November 23, 2019

UPDATE: December 7, 2019: Giuliani is as of now back in Ukraine and has been meeting with Shokin, Lutsenko, Kulyuk (Kulyk), and even Artemenko. The layers of incrimination and collusion keep adding up!

A Song of Gas and Politics is available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook!

A sample of reviews below:

See related articles: Ukrainegate Proves the Media Has Learned Almost Nothing from 2016, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma, and Time to Play Hardball with Russia

In the interest of full disclosure, the author interned for then-Senator Joe Biden for the last quarter of 2006.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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Team Trump’s assaults on Mueller and McCabe are only the latest salvos in an intensifying Trump/GOP war on the rule of law and democracy itself

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) March 19th, 2018

Photo by author

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AMMAN/TEL AVIV/HAIFA — One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athenian democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were somewhat democratic and then failed, or democratic in appearance but oppressive in spirit. These systems had little protection for dissenters and/or minorities, and used democracy for some to destroy it for others. They were Tocquevillian tyrannies of the majority, built on exclusion of both “the other” and those not in lock-step with the ruling faction.

Such systems are obvious in Erdoğan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, Duterte’s Philippines, but less obvious in many other places.

And today, under the leadership of Donald Trump and an increasingly craven Republican Party, the United States of America is moving in this direction.

I’m old enough to remember a time, not so long ago, when both major parties could be counted on to support the rule of law—a core foundation of true democracy—at a bare minimum. 

That is no longer the case.

At this point, it would be good to understand what we mean when we say “democracy.” In a pure, technical sense, there are no democracies today: every modern national system avoids direct rule by the demos, the people, in favor of a system in which the demos choose from among themselves a number of representatives to govern.

Modern democracy can be understood to transcend the 1.) necessary but not sufficient mechanism of popular elections and to extend to include among the sufficient conditions: 2.) a justice and law enforcement system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool of self-empowerment and oppression of others by those in power (this necessitates some degree of judicial independence), i.e., “rule of law”, 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, 4.) and a population free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality (although organized differently, these requirements roughly line up with the UN General Assembly’s list of the “essential elements” of democracy).

The typical political candidate usually asks you to vote for her to use the system and improve it to benefit you, the voter.

Trump and many of his fellow Republicans campaign to go to war with the system, to destroy.

By their virtue and abilities and with the power of the people behind them, they will sweep away the bureaucracy, institutions, politicians, laws, rules, and norms that supposedly hold us back. There is no love or praise of the system or working within it; the system is rotten to the core, there’s nothing to work with, it only has flaws, deserves only anger and contempt. They need to take existing legitimate problems and grossly exaggerate their intensity or to completely fabricate problems that do not exist but that play into people’s preconceived notions and prejudices to create a climate where their obscenities become acceptable.

Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak the language of such politics, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” Umberto Eco noted Orwell’s Newspeak makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

There can be little doubt that this describes what Trump and his advance guard of language warrior beserkers are doing today in their war on reality. Such propaganda and the sheer stupidity of many people dancing together emerge in a horror of a feedback loop: more and more people are receptive to more and more absurd lies and distortions that only help to increase the numbers of the herd of credulous creatures lapping up lies like manna from Heaven. 

The dire threat to democracy today is the weaponization of the press (with which Trump is already long at war) concurrent with weaponizing the people, who, in turn, weaponize elections, the victors of which, in turn, can weaponize the justice and legal system into a political tool to stay in power, reward supporters and punish opponents, and control or bend the media to its will, corrupting or destroying all four of the key elements of healthy democracy. If this is allowed to happen, it is always with some combination of the ignorance of those voters who buy into the rulers’ propaganda, voters’ tacit approval, and/or voters’ enthusiastic embrace of a system that explicitly favors them and explicitly discriminates and punishes those with differing views and/or identities; it is always because of, not in spite of huge swaths of the population.

Thus, Trump and his Republican allies target the justice system—the FBI, including former Director James Comey, the just-heavily-pressured-to-resign and now formally fired former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and the FBI agents conducting the Russia probe; the Department of Justice, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff and their Russia probe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his predecessor, Sally Yates, as well as former tough-on-Russia U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara; various courts and federal judges, including the FISA court and its Republican-appointed judges; and other people and agencies—the professionals of which dare to serve the Constitution as their oath demands before serving Trump the man and his partisan agenda. 

The firing of McCabe, the “memo” baselessly attacking the FBI and Justice Department from the ridiculous and disgraced Trump acolyte Devin Nunes, Nunes’s fellow House Intel Republicans nakedly trying to cover for Trump in prematurely ending their Committee’s investigation into Trump and Russia and their baselessly disputing the intelligence community’s strong consensus that Putin acted to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the 2016 election, and now calls from Team Trump to terminate Mueller’s probe (and just after it was revealed that Mueller subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Russia-related documents) along with more Tweets from the president himself attacking those involved in the Russia investigation—including Trump’s first direct attack against Mueller and his team—are just the latest salvos in a clear effort to not only clearly obstruct justice turn the people against true non-partisan public servants in the justice system and to pave the way for partisan hacks eager to do Trump’s bidding, an effort that (of course) has the full and active support of Putin’s Kremlin and its army of cyber-Cossacks.

NBC News

We are seeing with Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions a clear lack of vigor in pursuing civil rights and voting rights/suppression cases so central to allowing fair play in our society and elections, a lack of vigor that directly aids GOP efforts to twist elections in ways that tip the odds considerably in its favor. We are seeing that Trump’s allies in Congress seek to undermine everything related to the Russia probe and, instead, call for unwarranted investigations into Trump opponents—including Hillary Clinton—or even those investigating him. Trump and the GOP-dominated Congress will also have the opportunity to appoint and confirm more federal judges in his first term than any president in the last 40 years. All of these bits and pieces add up to a very real danger of a one-party state in which the rules and laws are twisted to allow that party to unfairly maintain control, in which the levers of justice and law enforcement are used as tools to suppress efforts to challenge this unfair use of what is supposed to be “a government of laws, and not of men,” to quote John Adams.

This is what happens in Turkey, Russia, and the Philippines, as well as in many other places more outwardly autocratic when a new leader comes to power and cleans house, installing minions ready to serve the Dear Leader, not the people or the state. In these places, the Dear Leader equates himself with the state and loyalty to himself with patriotism for the nation; Trump isn’t even being careful about his attempts to do just that.

With Rachel Brand, the no. 3 top official at the Department of Justice, resigning earlier this year, if Rosenstein quits or is fired or also has to recuse himself, Trump will likely have the Department’s leadership in his pocket, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and whatever likely partisan loyalists Trump appoints and Republicans confirm to replace Brand and/or Rosenstein. This could place Mueller’s entire Russia probe into jeopardy, since, with Sessions having had to recuse himself from the Russia probe (which enraged Trump) because of his own Russian entanglements, the replacements of Brand and Rosenstein could act on behalf of Trump and end the investigation with little to stand in their way. And we now that Trump is even considering firing Sessions and replacing him with Trump loyalist and current E.P.A. head Scott Pruitt, who would not be under obligation to recuse himself and could easily squash Mueller’s entire probe.

This is not normal, and this is entirely unprecedented in American history. The people and the media and elections failed, their pillars crumbling, to prevent a man who so clearly had contempt for the rule of law from becoming president; now, the last pillar that can prevent us from a real danger of becoming a banana republic—a generally professionally-run non-politically-partisan justice system that is faithful first and foremost to the Constitution and its rule of law—is under siege. The women and men manning its ramparts are doing an exemplary job of standing up to tyranny, but they need help from the people and the press and elections that will punish those laying siege, not reward them.

See related articles by the same author on Comey firing: With Comey Firing, Trump Moves America Closer to Banana Republic Status; How We Respond Is Vital to Preserving Our Democracy and on much of the deep history Mueller is almost certainly looking into between Team Trump & Team Russia: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind; also see his June 22, 2017, article for The Jordan Times: Ideal governance in ‘the rule of law, and not of men’

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 8, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) April 8th, 2017

Mohamed Al-Bakour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AMMAN — I had originally titled this piece “Time to Put Up or Shut Up, Donald.” As I continued to write, though, reports that Trump was considering military strikes against Assad’s government for his horrific recent chemical weapons attack on civilians designed to terrorize his own people surfaced on Tuesday, April 4th; that ensuing Thursday, April 6th, it was time for your author here to (finally) have some fun and go to a party, and by the time I got home, when I had already thought the odds of Trump eventually hitting Assad were greater than those of him not hitting him, the strikes had already been launched, necessitating something of a reworking of my article.

There is a lot to digest here.

*****

Can Trump Succeed Where Obama Failed?

Full disclosure: I voted for Obama twice and enthusiastically but I would say the biggest mistake of his presidency was backing away from his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used them to barbaric effect against his own people back in the fall of 2013. At that time, Assad and his forces were reeling and U.S. military action targeting his forces, especially the Syrian Arab Air Force, would have been decisive in changing the trajectory of the Syrian Civil War, especially since a robust Western entry and enforcement of no-fly zones would have prevented Russia’s subsequent robust entry in the fall of 2015.

Now, in the spring of 2017, the situation is quite different: Assad has obliterated many of the rebel strongholds, most notably (and most tragically) Aleppo, and ISIS, too, has been severely weakened, facing its final days in Mosul, Iraq, one of its two last major strongholds, and in the process of being encircled in its other stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, its “capital;” furthermore, not only does Assad’s government have the active of support of the Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah and of Iran’s military on the ground (among other Shiite militias), but it also enjoys the robust military support of Russia and its vaunted air force. And even though Assad’s military has been whittled to down a shell of its former self(even his Syrian Arab Air Force is running low on parts and serviceable craft and can ill afford aircraft losses), with his allies, he is in far stronger position now than he was when Obama backed away from striking Syrian forces in 2013, even if heavily dependent on these allies.

And still, the most powerful military force on the planet—that of the United States, which in 2015 spent more on its military than Russia and the other six largest military spenders in the world combined—can easily make a huge impact, and let those who employ the use of chemical weapons against civilians, or support those who do, know that there will be a costfor such actions. And it seems a warning shot has now been fired to that effect.

Before backing away from striking Assad, Obama spoke in the Rose Garden  on August 31st, 2013, asking a question:

Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make no mistake — this has implications beyond chemical warfare. If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?

We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us.

His words ring just as true today.

Obama sadly, and rather pathetically, did not put serious action behind his eloquent words about why we needed to support an international system where the use of such weapons of mass destruction as well as mass killing were not tolerated. The Republicans later skewered Obama for backing away—even as most of them hypocritically criticized his proposed military action at the time (many even signing a formal letter stating he needed authorization from Congress to act) before he backed away from it, a decision Obama made in part because they would not support him; Trump himself tweeted at Obama not to attack Syrian forces back then.

Since then, Republicans proceeded to criticize Obama for having a weak strategy even while offering precious few specifics that differed from Obama’s strategy, as did Trump, who, just as hypocritically as the others in his newly adopted Republican Party, also repeatedly asserted Obama’s weakness was responsible for the horrors in Syria up through his recent April 4th press conference with King Abdullah of Jordan that took place just hours after the recent Syrian government chemical attack in the Idlib area of Syria.

I figured that Trump, ever the narcissist, values his public perception as much as anything, and after beating up on Obama’s weakness for years, and given a chance to show himself to be the more “decisive” and “macho” “man” in a situation that had no choice but to be compared to Obama’s waffling in the fall of 2013 , would most certainly at least be tempted to reverse his pro-Russia and somewhat pro-Assad policy and to act to punish Assad where Obama declined to do so. As I watched him speak on the issue over the past few days, Trump even seemed genuinely moved by the horrific images of dying babies and other civilians coming out of Idlib.

And putting aside these considerations of personality here, there are very good reasons for Trump to have done what he did.

*****

Why Trump Was Right

Before Trump fired cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield, Assad and his Russian backers were clearly feeling they could do anything they want and get away with it and feared no U.S. intervention; impunity would be their modus operandi, there would be no political settlements, no “peace negotiations;” no, Assad and his backers were going to continue to systematically exterminate any whiff of opposition, city by city, town by town, corpse by corpse. Concessions? To rebels? To terrorists? To “terrorists?” One must simply ask: why would he need to comply with the demands of the international community? What pressures existed that would actually constrain Assad or extract any concessions, especially when Russia—one of the most powerful nations in the world and with the most centralized power structure at the top of any major world power—would just lie and claim “terrorists,” not at the Syrian military, were to blame for whatever atrocity Assad (or Russia) had perpetrated, or that the atrocity in question had not happened at all, as it has for years? Does anyone think rhetorical flourishes from the West, Turkey, and Arab League members would change anything? When Russia has vetoed seven different United Nations Security Council resolutions against the Assad regime, with Russia’s ground, naval, and air forces (along with Iran and Hezbollah and other Shiite militias) inside Syria energetically empowering Assad to operate knowing there would be no substantive consequences no matter what atrocity he committed—even if he killed hundreds of thousands of people with indiscriminate attacks and the deliberate targeting of civilians, even if used outlawed chemical weapons to kill his own people—what on earth is left to compel Assad to even feel the need to negotiate, let alone stop his mass slaughter of civilians?

The sad answer in our real world as it exists today is clear: one thing, and one thing only…

Military force exerted by the United States of America. 

Especially with Russia operating in Syria supporting Assad, only the United States could lead any kind of military force to challenge the above status quo. Nothing else could give Assad pause or cause him to consider restraint. But the United States showed Assad that even with the Russian military there, his forces were not safe if President Trump, the U.S. Military’s Commander in Chief, decided to strike at him, which he did. And for all of Russia’s tough talk, its military and air force are far inferior in quality and numbers to their American counterparts, so the idea that Russia would risk a serious military confrontation with the United States over Syria is ludicrous because it would only result in devastating defeat at the hands of the United States with no chance of saving face and only a high cost as a result, much worse than any cost that could be inflicted on the U.S. After all, Putin is not stupid enough to engage in a nuclear war that would destroy both nations and likely the world over the likes of Bashar al-Assad. Thus, what was also demonstrated for the world to see how little Russian protection actually meant for Assad in the face of U.S. military might.

In this situation, there were two options: do nothing serious and allow a regime that has no interest, inclination, or reason in its mind to negotiate or concede anything to continue to kill anyone it pleases and destroy anything it wants anytime it pleases while facing no consequences, or the United States can hit back, send a message, and force Assad to bend to the will of the world by behaving less barbarically towards his own people or face serious consequences, from warning punitive strikes to major degradation of his armed forces to exile and/or the fall of his government.

And contrary to what you might hear, this can be good for mitigating the conflict overall. After all, as I wrote three years ago, the current dynamics are clear: with Assad and ISIS both waging war on the people of Syria, nothing will stop the flow of refugees that risk destabilizing Syria’s neighbors that include multiple major U.S. allies—a flow that has helped spur an explosion of right-wing insanity in both Europe (where Russia is “weaponizing” the refugee crisis to damage the EU) and America, a right wing insanity that feeds the rise of radical Islamic extremism even as the war in Syria does the same—unless the war stops and/or safe zones are established, as nothing will convince the more than five million Syrians who have fled Syria (and that number only counts those registered by the UN: Jordan alone is estimated to have around 800,000 unregistered Syrians, compared with only 633,000 registered ones; this doesn’t even get to the more than 6.3 million internally displaced people, or IDPs, inside Syria) to return home as long as an impudent Bashar al-Assad feels he can kill at whim and will while the world makes noise but ultimately shrugs its shoulders. These dynamics also feed the growth in violent Islamic extremism in a vicious feedback loop.

I hear and read too many “experts” present a false Sophie’s choice: either we let Assad win or ISIS wins/the war doesn’t end. Well, in case you’re missing it, ISIS is on the verge of having its “caliphate” destroyed—thanks to a slow but steady strategy of Obama’s that was clearly coming to penultimate fruition even before Trump was sworn in (a fact that won’t stop Trump from taking credit for it)—and history shows that non-intervention in brutal wars involving mass killings (e.g., Cambodia and Rwanda) can allow killing to continue unabated for a long time and can lead to genocide, while well-executed intervention (e.g., WWII, Bosnia, and Kosovo) stops or at least partially halts mass killing. 

Now, of course, there is a possibility that the intervention will fail or make things worse—a possibility exaggerated by the recent memory of Iraq, more of an aberration of Western intervention in its relative mass incompetence than the post-Cold War norm—but any attempt to solve any problem in life risks making that problem worse, so that possibility is, by itself, an illogical reason to not intervene, a total cop-out, and a path to inhuman nihilism.

As one man—Kassem Eid—who survived the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack that nearly prompted Obama to attack Assad noted yesterday:

If you really care about refugees, if you really care about helping us, please, help us stay in our country… we don’t want to become refugees, we want to stay in our country, help us establish safe zones…please take out Assad’s air forces so they won’t be able to commit more atrocities.

The United States and its allies are more than capable of doing just that, and if Trump’s action is not a one-off—and let’s be honest, this ego-driven narcissist with authoritarian, even fascistic tendencies has had his first real exercise of power and he will love it, not in the least because he has earned global praise for it (and only it), so it very likely will not be a one-off—the likelihood is more than not that this is all going to be mainly handled by professionals in the U.S. military, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis is no Donald Rumsfeld. As detestable and anti-refugee as Trump is, because of his decision, there is now a greater chance than at any time since 2013 for the much-needed establishment of safe-zones protected by the international community.

It will also teach Russia that its recent run giving the West the finger has not empowered it as much as it thinks actually and makes Russia even weaker, with Russia unable to prevent American intervention in Syria even with its military there and seeing its investment in expanding its power there destroyed, exposing its troops to risk while supporting a WMD-using thug and making it even more so one of the most hated countries in the world and especially hated by a Sunni Muslim population (most of Alawite/Shiite Assad’s victims are Sunni Muslims) with a tiny fringe more susceptible to violent radicalization than any other group at present, keeping in mind that Russia has an oppressed Sunni Muslim population that has produced a notable number of anti-Russian terrorists and terrorist incidents since Russia’s conflicts in the Russian republic of Chechnya, the Caucasus overall, and the country of Afghanistan before that). As I wrote before, Russia intervened from a position of desperation and weakness, and Russia’s weak hand has only improved marginally for all its efforts but has also saddled it with more responsibility.

Trump’s strike will certainly make Iran question the cost of its support of Assad along with helping to limit the expansion of Hezbollah’s power.

Also, as was I pointed out also back in 2013, there is still little risk to the U.S. and a high-probability of success in striking Assad’s air power, military bases, or heavy weapons, which are difficult or impossible to hide. Hezbollah, Assad, and ISIS have enough on their hands to devote much to any “response” to the U.S.

Finally—and again, I will repeat I thought Obama’s inaction (and the Republican-led Congress’s vocal lack of support) were a mistake in 2013—there is an important difference between now and 2013. Back then, as I noted above, Assad’s forces were being pushed back and U.S. intervention may have led to the toppling of his government, and this not long after the disillusionment of the experience of Libya’s post-NATO-intervention problems (although I still would say that the intervention was successful in saving many lives preventing a civil war from being prolonged, but more on that another time); no other major power had intervened in Syria and thus owned the conflict, to speak, and that was another solid argument Obama could have put out on the side of non-intervention, even if non-intervention was still the weaker overall argument. Today, Russia is heavily involved in Syria, far more than the U.S., and it is hard to imagine Putin simply pulling out and letting the situation devolve into chaos, a result that would be blamed in large part on Russia and that would hurt Putin’s prestige and his own credibility when it comes to Russia intervening anywhere. With another great power invested besides America, unlike in 2013, the idea that the toppling of Assad would result in anarchy and a terrorist safe haven is less of a likelihood, since now two great powers will be heavily invested in the outcome if the U.S. becomes more heavily involved and actions lead to Assad’s ouster or weakening.

If you let your justifiable hatred of Trump get in the way of your support of even someone like him doing more than anyone has yet to help the long-term situation of Syrian refugees—if you refuse to understand that these strikes may be the first step in creating paths for Syrians to safely return to Syrian soil—you care more about your personal feelings and personal politics than actually helping refugees at worse, or are incredibly myopic at best.

*****

Causes For Concern

Don’t get me wrong: there are things about this that worry me. 

I respect the U.S. military and Mattis and have faith in both of them, and it’s virtually impossible for a president to micromanage a major U.S. military operation without massive influence from his secretary of defense, and as awful as Trump is, at least in a situation like Syria today, I’d be more worried about a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld combination than a Trump-Pence-Mattis combination (though unquestionably Bush is better individually than Trump), and I think Mattis will impress Trump with his competence as any operations unfold and will gain more influence in this way. 

Having said that, I’m also scared about a Trump that gets a taste of military success, and am especially terrified with a North Korea now acting up when military aggression as a U.S. response on the Korean Peninsula would initiate a bloodbath that would make Bush’s Iraq invasion look mild in comparison, and especially so if Trump feels military adventurism is a preferred course when he is having a miserable time in domestic politics, which could lead to who knows what down the road.

I also worry that Trump being seen as the savior of Syrian refugees would make people forget about how awful his refugee and immigration policies are. I’m further worried that this will make people lose interest in his Russian scandals and make the Republican Party feel it will have cover again to obstruct and distract from the investigation after such actions (see the drama of Devin Nunes) had cost them. And I’m worried that this action may partly legitimize Trump and his dangerous program when, apart from this action, he and his program are not worthy of legitimization, only opposition and resistance.

So I will continue to vigorously oppose Trump and his agenda overall. But because I care passionately about human rights, stopping mass killing and genocide, and seeking a long-term situation for refugees and the Syrian Civil War, I will support his efforts to to go against Assad.

Political Considerations

But the move made a tremendous amount of sense for Trump and his administration for political reasons, and the chance Assad gave him to act was also something of a political gift from heaven.

For one thing, Trump has had a miserable first few months on the domestic front, without a single major accomplishment he could take credit for thus far and nearing the end of his 100 days, with self-inflicted wound after self-inflicted wound resulting in likely the worst first 100 days of any president.

In other words, Trump might be looking at no chance of a major accomplishment whatsoever during his first 100 days; a domestic accomplishment still seems a remote possibility, leaving only the realm of something dramatic in foreign policy, which before Assad’s chemical attack, and during a week in which his team had signaled acceptance of Assad’s rule over Syria, there had seemed few openings of this type either. Acting against Assad would credibly give Trump a big “win” at a time he desperately needs one and might even be his only chance for one.

Speaking of desperate, Trump’s approval-rating average had dipped below 40%, a historic low for so early in a presidency; this opportunity was one of the only ways on the horizon for Trump to be able to bring his poll numbers up anytime soon.

He was also about to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at a time when his administration was a disgrace and after months of bashing China; Trump’s strike immediately allowed him to move from a position of humiliation to one where he could project power while hosting Xi, who expressed private empathy for Trump ordering the strikes even as China did not offer public support. It will be interesting to consider what effect if any this will have on North Korea and on America’s efforts to enlist Chinese aid in dealing with North Korea.

And, of course, the elephant in the room for the entirety of Trump’s presidency so far has been the Trump Campaign and Trump Administration’s deeply disturbing ties to Russia, Putin, Russian money, and Russian organized crime, including Russia’s obvious efforts to help Trump defeat Clinton in the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. Striking the Assad regime, Russia’s only true in-power ally outside of the states of the former Soviet Union, while Russia’s forces are actively engaged in supporting Assad has provided Trump with an excellent opportunity to take some of the heat off of him and his people as well as to demonstrate he is not beholden to or being controlled by the Russians amid hardly-purely-speculative accusations and suspicions be might be. In other words, Trump could go on offense in his weakest area, deflecting attention away from his biggest scandal—and possibly the biggest scandal in American history—and acting in a way that could reassure some of his less strident critics and give his supporters some much needed-assistance and cover to be able to, in turn, provide cover for him (though, substantively, nothing he has done here does anything to address the possible realities of past issues with ties to Russia, but perception is very powerful in politics and this move certainly affects perception in Trump’s favor).

In other worse, Trump personally had so much to gain and so little to lose with competently executed, limited strikes at this stage. 

In addition, at least some of Trump’s people must realize that the Democratic Party is still far less extreme that the Republican Party; unlike the Democrats, who said no to a takeover by the Bernie Sanders wing, the Republican Party has been hijacked by extremists for years, and, as I have noted, Democrats have been far more bi-partisan in their support of presidential foreign policy and national security than Republicans, so there was a good chance many Democrats would support this move in addition to Republicans and it seems that this is the case thus far.

Thus, politically, it was the best move Trump could have made with no other good options in sight. In some ways, it could even be called a no-brainer. If I were one of Trump’s political advisors, I would definitely have recommended this action.

*****

Apart from the political considerations, the far more important considerations involve the actual policy and substantive non-domestic-political considerations and the human lives affected by this strike. And as someone who truly hates Trump and sees him as the threat to democracy and the world order that he is, it is here that as a student of policy and a person who cares about saving lives and preserving international norms that it is easy for me to support this action enthusiastically, despite my misgivings for the man calling the shots behind it.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 9, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) February 9th, 2018; a version of this article was also published by War Is Boring; this is based in part on research from a series of previous articles published from July, 2016 to July, 2017, the latest being Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, with over 62,000 (now over 77,000) views and growing!

Support Brian and his work by donating here. 

Carter Page after dropping off requested documents to the House Intelligence Committee (photo from @jeremyherb)

AMMAN—When it comes to the strange odyssey of Carter Page, it is important to take a look at his background in relation to Russia and the further backstory to his backstory.

Back in the mid-2000s, future Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort set up shop in Ukraine to do some consulting work, bringing his protégé Richard “Rick” Gates to assist, both of whom have now been criminally charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team.

On one level, the duo ran the politics for disgraced Ukrainian pro-Putin politician Viktor Yanukovych—prevented from crookedly taking power in late 2004/early 2005 by the Orange Revolution, who won Ukraine’s presidency in 2010 in large part because of Manafort’s efforts and the scheme detailed below, and was driven out of power in 2014 by Ukraine’s (Euro)Maidan Revolution—and his Party of Regions, working with various Viktor Yanukovych and Putin allies.

On another level they all worked with Putin-linked mobsters and oligarchs in one of the most elaborate and complex money laundering schemes in history, and perhaps the one with the most far-reaching consequences, as detailed earlier by me in Newsweek.

This plot involved massive natural gas deals between Russia and Ukraine, and their main intermediary, RosUkrEnergo (RUE), was half controlled by Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas giant and most of the rest was controlled by Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who is a Putin, Yanukovych, and Russian mafia ally who is wanted by U.S. federal authorities for possibly separate, possibly related criminal activity. 

The basic gist of the scheme goes like this: Gazprom would generally sell gas to Firtash through RUE at a significantly lowered price, and then Firtash would mark up the prices when selling to Ukraine; the profits to the tune of billions were then allegedly laundered by the Russian mafia and used to bribe and control Ukrainian politicians to bend them to Putin’s will and increasingly make Ukraine’s political system subservient to Russian interests.

Ukrainian politicians not in Putin’s pocket resisted this arrangement, leading to a major dispute over the gas deals in January, 2006, with Russia shutting off Ukraine’s gas in the dead of winter. A new deal even more favorable to Putin & co. was reached that would make RUE the exclusive, direct supplier of all Russian and Central Asian gas imports, one that would, along with Gazprom, sell to a new joint venture between RUE and Naftogaz called UkrGazEnergo that would sell all gas going to Ukraine’s industrial customers while RUE would sell to Naftogaz to sell to Ukraine’s residential and municipal customers. This only dramatically increased the corrupt markup opportunities involving Ukraine’s gas, further cheating and angering Ukrainians.

Another part of the deal—which the author of this very article was the first, and apparently only analyst, to point out in the context of this larger scheme—involved the major Russian state-owned power company RAO UES: RAO UES would pay for and import Ukrainian-generated electricity to sell in Russia and Ukraine would provide this power from the gas Ukraine was paying RUE for that had been bought by UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine. Specifically, Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO UES in return for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE or another Firtash company apparently buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo. The gas would then be sent to Ukrainian power plants, which would then generate the electricity that would go to RAO UES, which would then sell that electricity in Russia. Obviously, this scheme would give Firtash additional points at which he could mark up prices and generate a profit, and it is telling that gas already being transited by Russia’s Gazprom pipelines into Ukraine through RUE—itself half-owned by Gazprom—was being used, after it was paid for by Ukraine for a high price, to generate electricity that would be used in Russia.

This confusing arrangement makes no logistical or logical sense, as it would be easier for Russia to just bring gas from Gazprom to RAO through Russia, but when viewed through the prism of allegedly generating illicit funds used to dominate Ukraine politically, then it makes perfect sense.

This is where Carter Page enters the picture: he moved to Moscow in 2004 to set up Merrill Lynch’s office there, working there until 2007. During this period—in which the deals were scouted, negotiated, sealed, and put well into practice—he claims to have advised both Gazprom and RAO on major deals, and, despite his warped, very pro-Russian worldview (he thinks Bill Browder’s Magnitsky Acts championing human rights and punishing Russia and others for human right violations are like “the blacklists of the McCarthy era”), he is clearly steeped in knowledge of the energy sector and regional geopolitics, possessing both a master’s degree and a PhD from highly prestigious universities. The apparently informal meet-and-greet, wine-and-dine roles he often played offered him perfect opportunities to soak up gossip from drunk gas executives celebrating their blatant corruption, and, as later revelations have made abundantly clear, Page was only too eager to engage in conversations and information trading when it came to such deals. Even if Page was hardly a major player, it is hard to accept that he did not know what was going on, at least to some degree, with the whole Eurasian gas scheme detailed above, as he was advising not just one but two major entities involved on opposite ends of the corrupt process and during the crucial time of the run-up to that process’s inclusion of RAO into Gazprom-intensive scheme. Thus, it is extremely likely he had some inkling of the improper nature of the RAO-Gazprom dealings and how they helped to undermine U.S. interests in the region in pushing Ukraine away from the U.S. It seems this did not bother him, just as Russia’s current moves to undermine the U.S. seem not to bother him, as repeated television interviews have made crustal clear.

For those arguing against Page’s importance—that he was just small fry—it should not be forgotten that George Papadapolous was also junior in his position with the Trump campaign but that this fact has not kept him from being in the center of the firestorm, with Papadapolous playing a key role in linking the Trump presidential campaign to Russia and sparking the longstanding FBI’s Trump-Russia probe now led by Mueller. Papadapolous has already plead guilty to charges levied by Mueller of lying to the FBI and has become a cooperating person of interest in Mueller’s probe.

After his stint in Russia, Page founded an investment firm, Global Energy Capital LLC, in 2008 with Sergey Yatsenko, Gazprom’s ex Deputy Head of its Finance and Economics Department (who was among a number of Russians and Russian officials with whom Page met during and after the time he was attached to Trump’s campaign). By 2013, Page was calling himself “an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin.” 

Page’s pro-Kremlin views even helped spur a three-man Russian spy ring to try to recruit him in 2013, a ring that was busted and charged by none other than Preet Bharara, later fired by Trump. The one member of the ring not protected by diplomatic immunity was convicted and sent to prison, while the man with whom Page interacted, Victor Podobnyy, avoided prosecution because of his diplomatic cover. At the time, Podobnyy posed as a Russian UN diplomat while acting as an undercover Russian intelligence operative, reaching out to Page and discussing Gazprom with him.

More recently, it was found out Carter Page was under one FISA-warrant FBI surveillance investigation beginning in 2014 and a second one that was renewed three times starting in October 2016 (meaning this second one was approved by Chief Justice John Roberts-approved federal judges four times as former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa pointed out) as a result of concerns arising from his Russian contacts and activities. 

Eventually, Page was one of a handful of foreign policy advisors Trump was able to name in 2016, hired by Trump’s campaign even after advising two major Russian companies involved in the Ukraine gas scam. Trump’s campaign was the most pro-Russian campaign of any major party nominee since the end of WWII, and the only changes that it insisted be made to the 2016 Republican Party Platform were to weaken statements of support for Ukraine in relation to its conflict with Russia.

Page is also mentioned in the fairly standard-type (and surprisingly bipartisan) paid opposition research effort that culminated in what is known as the Steele dossier, compiled by ex-intelligence official Christopher Steele.

Despite its aforementioned banal origins, the dossier—along with Page’s being the subject of a thrice-renewed FISA warrant—has become the subject of massive politicization and blatant distortion that is part of an assault by the Trump Administration and much of the Republican Party on the very concept of the rule of law and is currently foreshadowing a constitutional crisis. 

These efforts are centering on accusations that the FBI and Department of Justice conspired against Trump and abused their power in seeking surveillance on Page, accusations mentioned in a memo declassified by and allowed to be released by President Trump himself against the wishes of the FBI. This memo was authored by the office of Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and a strong Trump ally who chairs the House Intelligence Committee.

Nunes became the subject of House Ethics Committee investigation for his disgraceful conduct trying to protect Trump by engaging in deliberately misleading behavior and was forced to (only somewhat) recuse himself from the Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Russia investigation. The House Ethics investigation was eventually dropped because it could not gain access to the intelligence necessary to render proper judgment. The intelligence and court documents that the Nunes memo—which has earned a measure of bipartisan condemnation—discusses have not been made public, the assertions it makes have been contradicted by multiple sources, and Nunes has also admitted that he has not even read the relevant FISA court documents.

The Democrats on the Committee have disputed the memo and drawn attention to the fact that their memo, in a party-line vote, was not authorized to be released, only Nunes’s Republican-approved one having been voted to be released by the Committee in another party-line vote. So that it could be released publicly, it was then declassified by Trump himself, who is using the parts of the memo that are as of yet unverified to speciously claim vindication.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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*****

EXCLUSIVE analysis of information not yet reported in the necessary context shows that Trump the businessman, at best, was an unwitting tool used for Russian (mafia and government-tied) money laundering and that Trump the president is, at best, an unwitting tool for Vladimir Putin; at worst, Trump the businessman was a partner in Russian (organized and governmental) crime and Trump the president is the biggest scandal in American history. Even if Trump is an extraordinarily stupid leader with spectacularly terrible judgment and he is totally innocent of knowing what was really going on, it has been clear for some time that key associates of Trump are far less likely to be innocent when it comes to complicity and collusion and therefore treason, with the latest reports only confirming fire when the smoke was already suffocating. However the fire finally comes to light and whatever his personal involvement, since the best case scenario is that Trump is easily duped and manipulated, Trump is clearly unfit to be president.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 28, 2017 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981) March 28th, 2017 (Updated 4/3; Update of my pre-election piece.); War is Boring version in two parts

Built on part on these earlier pieces from July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

See major follow-up piece:July 27, 2017: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Tevfik Arif, & Felix Sater (of whom Trump testified under oath: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like”) © Mark Holden/WireImage

AMMAN — This information concerns business dealings over the last decade and then some of Donald Trump, who at the time was hurting for investors and investment as Wall Street had all but shut down its loaning operations to him; this information involved criminal dirty money laundering coming from Russia, Russian organized crime, and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time Putin, his government, his close associates, and future associates of Trump—most notably Paul Manafort, his future Campaign Chairman—were involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and criminal money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars that was part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine. Updates also discuss context involving lobbying efforts, financing for Trump’s projects, and new or related developments that, in terms of Russian intrigue, incriminate even further both associates of Donald Trump and his successful presidential campaign (and, therefore, perhaps even his very presidency).

At best, Trump himself may have had no knowledge of this money laundering and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with and how he did business and politics, pillars of his management style and of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.   

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings when it comes to laundering money or tilting a U.S. election with Russian help, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players in these crimes, combined with his positions and public statements as a presidential candidate that are the most pro-Russian of any major presidential candidate or sitting president, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely—not less—that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin. 

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactly what Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation; with so many questionable people, actions, and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions and no one else’s, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light. After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden is on a sitting President with so many questionable connections to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what, when put together and given proper context, what that information makes clear and what it suggests.

Executive Summary

In earlier work, I revealed significantly deeper relationships than previously understood from all other previous public reporting between associates of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and entities related to them on one hand and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Russian government, and entities related to them on the other hand, relationships concerning efforts to advance the Putin’s interests, Russian government interests, and Russian organized crime interests. 

Two figures in particular, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page, were involved in major geopolitical events and entities that convulsed Ukraine beginning in 2004 with the Orange Revolution and through a massive Eurasian gas and money laundering scheme designed to facilitate Russian dominance of Ukraine whose effects are still being directly felt up through today with the war in Ukraine. 

Manafort and Page were linked by lines of power and influence connecting them through a short chain of major players and entities, and their presence and roles in the region overlapped in key areas for several years as they worked for Putin’s key allies to enact a plan designed to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian state and to serve the purposes of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western, anti-American agenda. 

Page operated on one end as an advisor not only to the Russian energy giant Gazprom, whose pipes much of the gas involved in the scheme passed through on its way to Ukraine (a fact well-reported), but also to another major Russian company, a large domestic power company called RAO UES (which I was the first to report in the context of Putin’s gas scheme) that ended up using some of the Gazprom gas—after passing through Putin-allied middlemen—to power its Russian power plants in a circular scheme returning the fruits of the gas to their country of origin.

Manafort’s part—far more pivotal, central, and direct than Page’s—was working with pro-Russian, pro-Putin Ukrainian political elites (especially Ukrainian on-and-off-again President Viktor Yanukovych, which the Orange Revolution had exposed and deposed, and his Party of Regions, for whom Manafort was the top political advisor) and business elites (especially oligarch Dmitry Firtash) and with Russian political and business elites (especially oligarch Oleg Deripaska); Firtash was linked to Putin friend and Russian mafia godfather Semion Mogilevich, who worked together to launder billions to profit themselves, Yanukovych, and Yanukovych’s political allies so they, flush with cash, could be bribed to do Putin’s bidding, bribe others to do the same, outspend rivals, and thus, overall, dominate Ukraine’s political system.

Manafort himself worked with Firtash and Mogilevich to set up a massive money laundering scheme in 2008 involving a Manhattan development project that defrauded its partners of millions and for which all of them were later sued by the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose loss in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential race to Viktor Yanukovych and subsequent politically motivated imprisonment at the hands of his government were facilitated in part by the Manafort-led Manhattan scheme. Manafort also worked with Deripaska to help launder millions in order to hide/protect the personal fortunes of Yanukovych and his allies. For these efforts, Manafort was paid many millions. A partner of Manafort’s—Richard “Rick” Gates—was also involved with burnishing his efforts there and in efforts to lobby U.S. official to help Yanukovych’s comeback government and hurt the imprisoned Tymoshenko’s reputation.

Manafort, Gates, and Page ended up on Trump’s campaign, from which they are easily among the prime suspects responsible for Trump’s and his campaign’s unprecedented pro-Putin, pro-Russian positions that have made them the most pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate and campaign in American history.

Additionally, but hardly of least concern, Mogilevich is the link from the realm of the first scandal set to another roughly concurrent scandal set that ties directly to Trump at the time it unfolded (a fact not reported elsewhere before my earlier piece): a series of at least three real estate deals—one in Manhattan, one in Fort Lauderdale, and one in Phoenix—all spearheaded by a company called Bayrock and that all ended in scandal and disaster. One of the point-men for Trump on all of these deals was the son of Mikhael Sheferovsky—AKA Michael Sater—an alleged Mogilevich capo (an allegation not reported by any major news outlet before my previous piece); this son, one Felix Sater, has a mysterious but clearly Russian mafia-linked violent criminal past of his own that may have even involved working for Mogilevich. Sater and his Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif helped bring in significant financing and financiers who were either Russians/former Soviets with Putin and/or Soviet ties and/or people with shady and/or criminals pasts, often tied to money laundering, especially Tamir Sapir, Alexander Mashkevich and the now-notorious FL Group of Iceland.   

Through Mogilevich and cores of illicit Russian funding and financiers, then, three international illegal money laundering schemes—the Ukrainian Eurasian laundering plot, its related Manhattan money laundering deal, and the series of Bayrock deals with Trump that all either involved, likely involved, or were likely set up for money laundering—are all linked together at roughly the same time for the first time here.

But in this case the devil—and the Trumps—are in the details.

Setting the Stage in Ukraine: Page & Manafort Arrive

To begin to understand the big picture, one has to go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page moved to Moscow and set up Merrill Lynch’s branch there. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life. 

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician that first attracted global attention in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Victor Yanukovych as his prime minister late in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate in the 2004 election, even to the point of trying to rig and steal the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to the Ukrainian Supreme Court-ordered redo election that resulted in the defeat of Yanukovych and victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident (with poisoning hardly an unheard-of fate for opponents of the Kremlin and Putin). 

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruption by this time, but that did not stop Paul Manafort from running Yanukovych’s campaign late in 2004 for the redo election. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions, helping them helping them over the ensuing years to gain power at the expense of Ukraine’s pro-U.S., pro-Western, post-Orange Revolution government.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, as his client list includes dictators like the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (then Zaire’s) Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi; other clients include Jonas Savimbi (the leader of the Angolan human-rights-abusing rebel guerilla group UNITA), and the Kashmiri American Council (a front for the terrorist-dealing Pakistani government intelligence service ISI that had helped create the Taliban, among other nefarious activities).

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press (AP) just a few days ago revealed a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed (through a formal memo, no less) a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly help promote Putin, the Russian government, and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe, and former-Soviet republics and targeting government officials, political groups, the news media and journalists, and businesses by acting to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.”

The proposal was pitched to Oleg Deripaska in 2005, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good—if not always great—relationship with Putin and who, as I noted before, was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro in a campaign designed to get Montenegro to secede from its union with Serbia and allow greater Russian (and Deripaskan) influence with that result (Montenegro would secede anyway in 2006 but not under Russian auspices, and it is quite telling that only a few months ago a Russian plot to overthrow Montenegro’s government and assassinate its prime minister, who is now trying to join NATO, was exposed and foiled). 

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and Manfort used a Delaware shell company—LOAV Ltd.—of his to conduct official business and transactions.

AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story. 

Later, as I also wrote about before, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out c. 2014 that resulted in a Cayman Islands court battle over $19 million related to their efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established. The recent AP story broke just hours before CNN reported that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.,” and AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. 

If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part I: Manafort & Putin Allies Oversee Flooding of Ukraine with Dirty Gas Money to Establish Russian Dominance

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to some of Ukraine’s and Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, at least ones allied with Yanukovych and Putin. Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background. In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman, and Putin ally Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, according to court documents. Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to the essential head, or “boss of bosses”, of the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich, also a friend of Putin’s and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list from 2009-2015.

A Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo (RUE) was created in mid-2004 by the outgoing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Kuchma and the not-going-anywhere Putin to replace the company represented by Firtash that was handling Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports. The imports ostensibly came from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan but through shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant company then dominated, and soon to be majority-owned, by the Russian Government and close Putin allies; additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory. But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45% of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. A total of 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand: Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price; Firtash would then sell billions of dollars of the gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine; the profits would then be used to fund pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine with billions of dollars; and, finally, bankers that were close Putin allies would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so that Firtash could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence even further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate and as that candidate-turned-president’s relatively pro-Western government was trying to limit Russian influence in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in a January, 2006, shut-off of Russia’s gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory. 

Soon after the shutoff, a new arrangement was made: RUE would now be the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan) and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s export subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), it would sell to the Ukrainian market to all of its industrial customers through a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, the joint venture being called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo), and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES—Russia’s major and majority-state-owned power company—would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan into Ukraine that had been purchased by the joint-venture UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; the government of Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in exchange for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE (or another Firtash firm) apparently acting as the intermediary, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo; that gas would then be delivered to Ukrainian power plants, which would produce the electricity that would then be sold to RAO to sell in Russia. One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians—who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices and allowing entities with little (or no?) supervision in a process that presented opportunities for massive corruption—that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway. This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

A Page-Manafort Connection Through Gazprom, RAO UES, Firtash, & Mogilevich?

It is important here to note that Carter Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004-2007; the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an advisor on “key transactions” of theirs; it is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe and being sold to both, than the creation of RUE, than RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine; if Page is telling the truth about his role, it is virtually inconceivable—considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006—that he would not be aware of what was going on. 

After all, as someone with a PhD and an MBA and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to align itself with America and Europe and thus escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page and people who did know (of) him suggesting he was actually a nobody (though the veracity of their claims are unverifiable as well, some perhaps being of the sour-grapes variety, others perhaps not wanting information on him to get out and acting to throw the curious off his trail, others saying nothing to confirm that they had actually worked closely or directly alongside Page); maybe Page himself deliberately kept a low profile, staying under the radar purposefully. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is; even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time—even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal (he was apparently often tasked with meeting and greeting, setting up meetings and seeing them through, presenting opportunities for many informal conversations and meetings)—it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.

Finally (and I raised this possibility last July), if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that another American in Manafort was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being able to be said of Manafort, and that interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, contact that may have led to some sort of coordination.

This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The question of about a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part II: Manafort & Putin Allies Use Dirty Gas Money to Prep Yanukovych Comeback

Russian Government

As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the popularly unpopular 2006 deal itself. 

A former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, rose to become prime minister again in December 2007, and it was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall: this meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE. 

The first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash (and thus Mogilevich and the mafia) out of the loop, an admittedly more ambitious step, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. But in October of 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to another shutdown on the part of Russia of gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January. But on January 19th, a long-term, ten-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter; additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.

If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics…

Criminal Scheme #2: Manafort Key Agent in Laundering Dirty Gas Money to U.S. During Crackdown

Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko kill RUE, his agents—including Firtash, Mogilevich, and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)—were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts; some of these involved setting up a fake U.S. investment fund that was initially capitalized with $100 million; Firtash (acting on behalf of himself and Mogilevich) paid Manafort and his people—including Rick Gates, (who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006)—$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of said fund was to act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash/Mogilevich gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.

Among the various fraudulent deals they went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million towards the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later laundered through the project, but rather than truly move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased: the deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister (remember this model, it will return…).

Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich, and their backers, unlike money, natural gas is not something that can be laundered: in early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz—a seizure allowed under the agreement she made with Putin—of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time; Timoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics for Putin’s plans. 

Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm…

Other planted crops were already bearing fruit: unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be Prime Minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections, Manafort had groomed Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a party that campaigned using modern, highly effective techniques and tactics; in both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties. Of course, Manafort and The Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage: the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam. All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party and in making them together a smoother political machine with more power and influence.

The distance would close, and that strike would happen, in 2010.

Uniting Criminal Schemes #1 and #2: the Downfall of Tymoshenko & Setting the Stage for War

Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race (with a lot of money from Firtash, who had made over $3 billion from these crooked gas deals), defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned(including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011. 

Manafort and Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. Incidentally, in these efforts—paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov: Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, one of Yanukovych’s main patrons, and a client of Manafort’s since Manafort’s earliest days in Ukraine and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney—they utilized the services of two Washington, DC, lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures (the day after this information was made public in mid-August, 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the Campaign Chairman of the Trump campaign during a week in which his role had already been eclipsed by the addition of Kellyanne Conway and extreme-right-wing Breitbart News’s Stephen Bannon to run the Trump campaign; as for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign was refusing to clarify the matter). 

Lobbying efforts throughout this period for this circle were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts for years having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.

Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole—for whom Manafort had been a strategist—was paid over half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia. 

Yuri Boyko, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who is a close Yanukovych ally, former minister of several energy related sections of Ukraine’s government, and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme, paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans. 

Barbour Griffith & Rogers, co-founded by the former Republican Governor of Mississippi and major GOP insider/activist Haley Barbour, was paid over $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas scheme. 

Though he had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Mogilevich strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of Republican William Sessions, who was the FBI director from 1987-1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges; those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingstone, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russians and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen; GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company called Highrock Holding(s) used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for his money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme; Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example of Firtash’s European outreach, Firtash’ relationship with several Conservative MPs in the UK may prompt an official investigation.

For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall, Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s government as a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden, as once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas, now only too happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash; it was clear in this matter that the Yanukovych government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people; without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June of 2010. 

Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged by Gazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom (the corruption is so blatant that the companies apparently do not care that their names announce it to the whole world); Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower; Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings (especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries) and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout Europe; when reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.” From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.

But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE (but RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints); the suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud, and money laundering enterprises in the U.S. designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment. After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015; while not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met; still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

*****

Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich, and their teams, but, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR: the people had other ideas. 

Many Ukrainians—especially younger ones—realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, towards Europe and the U.S. and less corruption. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the EU.

But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired EU trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer. In particular, protests erupted in a main square (the Maidan Square) in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, protests that did not go away and came to be known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on February 20th, 2014; in response to the government’s use of violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed, and by the end of February 22nd, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office, security forces had melted away in Kiev, protesters had taken over the capital, Tymoshenko was freed from prison (in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities), and Yanukovych has fled the city; soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin; today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally. 

Putin had overplayed his hand: his royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him; that joker lined up with four 2s consisting of many of the Ukrainian people to make five of a kind, the people beating Putin’s flush. But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years, into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas, Yanukovych, Mogilevich, Firtash, and Manafort: faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him and his intentions once again in place after a decade of effort designed to restore and maintain Russian hegemony over Ukraine, Putin went to Plan B: the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.

Which is exactly where the situation is today (and, of course, gas is in the middle of the conflict).

Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme; he was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court (the ruling is almost unappealable), though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, as well as the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, his relationship with the Russian mafia, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years. And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mafia will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much, especially as they have demonstrated a willingness to act through any means necessary to silence individuals who put them at risk.

In the end, Manafort made millions and Gates profited too to the tune of who knows how much off the activities mentioned here (e.g., hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the Party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007-2012 alone; Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him the fate of that $19 million is still unknown; all this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal), profiting to an obscene degree all while helping to weaken and corrupt Ukraine’s democracy, assisting massively crooked international energy deals, undermining U.S. interests, helping Putin and his allies profit enormously, and helping Russia dominate Ukraine. The culmination of their work for over a decade can be seen in the first war on European soil in two decades. And it was this resume which earned them spots on Trump’s campaign as he sought to become the leader of the free world and succeeded. For some time it even seemed Manafort had more influence on Trump than anyone whose last name was not Trump.

Manafort and Gates have plenty of other questionable dealings, including one particularly scandalous piece of drama with a Russian oligarch featured in the Panama papers revelations and close to Putin. There are at least two U.S. government inquiries into Manafort and one into Page, and Trump associate and Republican political operative Roger Stone is being investigated by the FBI for his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who have questionable ties to Russia and who the whole world knows is receiving information stolen by Russian government hacks related to Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic party. There are also other Trump campaign staff and/or associates with questionable ties to Russia: Michael Caputo and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and one American ex-spy alleges a plot by the Kremlin to co-opt Trump against the backdrop of all this.

Less is known about Gates and his role, but after he was brought onto the Trump Campaign by Manafort), he was important enough to be trusted with the vetting of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech—Donald Trump’s wife’s introduction to the nation as a whole—a task at which he famously failed, and failed miserably. It was not clear what the status of Gates was once Manafort resigned, but recent reporting has shown that kept a low profile after and acted a link between the campaign and the RNC; once Trump won, he was apparently planned Trump’s inauguration, and since then he was shipped off to a pro-Trump and strangely quiet-ish nonprofit called America First Priorities (which also landed Trump All Star Katrina Pierson), where he has stayed until this the new reporting on Manafort, after which it seems he was deemed too much of a liability and was nudged out just days ago.

As for Page, it still isn’t even clear who brought him into the Trump Campaign (Julia Ioffe’s account of Page, the most exhaustive yet, illustrates how multiple answers have been given and none have been confirmed, but people sure seem angry about being asked about him); what is known (and it isn’t much) is that he was one of only five foreign policy advisors Trump could actually name in a Washington Post interview from a year ago, suggesting his influence on Trump could be far from insignificant. As his relationships with important Russians are being looked into by the U.S. government, to simply dismiss him as being a charade would be premature, indeed—especially in light of information on Page apparently meeting with Russian officials coming out of the as of yet only partly-substantiated dossier from an ex-MI6 intelligence officer—despite questions of how serious his role was at Merrill and how deep his ties to Gazprom and RAO UES actually were. What is certain is that questions about his role remain, questions which need to be answered, especially in light of his incredibly anti-American, pro-Russian views that could just as easily be coming from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or a “pundit” on RT and his continued investment in Gazprom. 

Direct Trump Involvement

Trump might have enough to worry about were it just for what has been described above; still, while both of the previous schemes are relevant to Trump insofar as three future Trump Campaign staff—Page, Gates, one of the most important and powerful people in his entire presidential run: Manafort—were involved in various ways in the just-outlined past criminal schemes and/or in the future acted to further the interests of Putin and his Russian government, now we get into territory where Trump himself was directly involved, and in not just one, but roughly a half-dozen situations linked to Russian organized crime.

A piece of context that is important to note for all of the following cases is that the setting for the following suspicious deals was a Donald Trump and a Trump Organization that was reeling financially.

By the mid-2000s Trump was having a hard time finding investors: he had just declared bankruptcy in 2004 for one of his major casino businesses to the tune of $1.8 billion in debt (and would declare another business bankruptcy in 2009, his fifth and sixth overall business bankruptcies, respectively) and all major Wall Street lenders—whose relationships with Trump had been souring for years—stopped offering Trump loans, in part because of his frustrating and suspicious business practices.

That is, all but one: Deutsche Bank, yet even that relationship “frayed” starting in 2008 because of Trump’s untrustworthiness as a business partner (Deutsche itself would later become involved in major money laundering scandals involving Russia, but more on that later).

So Trump was clearly hurting for investment after that 2004 bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [i.e., the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when Trump was aggressively courting Russian business (it should now be obvious why Trump has not released his taxes and why that information could, and likely will be, so crucial to the investigations into his Russia ties and to the public’s evaluation of Trump).

In fact, a report from Reuters from less than two weeks ago noted how in just seven Trump luxury towers in southern Florida, 63 Russian passport/address-holders have bought $98.4 million in property; they include “politically connected businessmen and other elites,” though “none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle;” one buyer, Alexander Yuzvik, was senior at Spetstroi, a Russian state-owned company that has done construction for Russian military and intelligence, including the G.R.U. and the F.S.B. intelligence agencies that were heavily involved the 2016 American election hackings, with Yuzvik only stepping down in March 2016, after the hacking operations had begun, though as of now, no evidence has surfaced linking him to these operations.

The above figures may even be a conservative estimate: at least 703 out of 2,044 of the units in the seven towers were owned by limited liability corporations (LLCs), often designed to mask their owners’ identities; many owners’ nationalities could not be identified; and Russian-Americans without a Russian passport/address were not included.

*****

At the same time the aforementioned Eurasian gas and Manafort-led New York real estate dual schemes were taking place, and while Donald Trump was losing investors in the U.S., Trump was cultivating Russian/former-Soviet business relationships. One of his point men in these efforts was Felix Sater, the son of an alleged mob captain of Mogilevich’s Russian mafia operation; the offices of Bayrock, Sater’s real estate company where he was Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within, were even in Trump Tower itself.

Sater, a man with a violent, criminal, mafia-rife past of his own, had himself previously been caught up in an elaborate 1990s $41 million stock fraud scheme on Wall Street that had used the Russian mob to launder money at a time, it should be noted, when Mogilevich was active in large-scale stock fraud and laundering in North America. Sater ended up assisting U.S. authorities for years, even, apparently, on CIA-related national security issues involving missile terrorism-related purchases in either Afghanistan or Russia, and the details on all this remain something of mystery: his operations with the government remain secret and the juiciest details of the Wall Street case were sealed and remain so despite repeated efforts to unseal them (they were sealed at the time, interestingly enough, by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, who just stepped down as U.S. Attorney General the day Trump was inaugurated president). 

As a result, there is also virtually no information on the specifics of the Russian mafia’s activities in Sater’s Wall Street scam, but there is a reasonably good chance or even higher that Mogilevich was running the Russian mob’s involvement in it, or was at least involved, since he was actively pursuing similar schemes in the U.S. at the time, possibly had a connection to his alleged old capo in Sater, and since Mogilevich was already such a major figure in the Russian mob at this point, keeping in mind that hierarchy matters quite a bit in organized crime; in fact, it is far less likely that the Russian mafia would be involved without Mogilevich when considering the points just mentioned. 

Now, that last point should not be taken lightly, considering that, just a few years later, Mogilevich was a primary actor in laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Firtash, Manafort, Yanukovych, and Putin; is it more or less likely that he would turn to an old connection—one with experience laundering money who had come to have the favor of the U.S. government, no less—to help with the laundering? Even without the Wall Street capers, Sater would have been an attractive candidate based on (possible) family ties alone, as would his nominal entry into real estate, as the real estate market in the U.S.has been an ideal avenue for money laundering for some time and is a top concern of U.S. officials, in part due to lax state, local, and federal laws.

Sater began working with Trump in in the early 2000s, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka and Donald Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through…

Criminal Scheme #3: The Trump/Sater/Bayrock Deals

But a number of deals in the United States between Trump and Bayrock produced a far more interesting—and incriminating—history. 

Perhap’s Sater’s most famous partnership with Trump was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, and two other partners from former Soviet states: one was Bayrock chairman Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan who’s rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable; the other was Tamir Sapir from Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well been (once) part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose source of his wealth had long been subject to rumor-fueled suspicion, who introduced Trump to Bayrock, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family (incidentally or not, at the time of the SoHo deal, it seems Sapir was not exactly mentally fit).

It turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater-and-Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million specifically approved by Trump for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland, FL Group, linked to the Panama Papers revelations and one apparently known as a hub for the money of Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from Alexander Mashkevich (or Machkevich), a Kazakhstani billionaire with a history of money laundering.

Considering Sater had helped pave the way for this investment and recalling his possible Mogilevich connections, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that there is a high probability that some of the money coming in from Russians was in one way or another tied directly or indirectly to the giant Eurasian gas scheme worth billions, as this period was especially a time when Russians tied to Putin and operating through Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich were aggressively trying to funnel money away from prying eyes of the likes of Tymoshenko. Besides the Russian financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited. Furthermore, the SoHo deal was structured to cheat the U.S. government out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans (not incidentally tax-free) to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time. 

In the end, the deal went terribly for Trump, who was sued for fraud—his children Eric and Ivanka had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers—and in a 2011 settlement, he refunded 90% of the deposits on the building’s condos. 

One must wonder why likely Russian investors were so eager to invest $50 million in this deal, and if it was an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Park Avenue deal involving Manafort & Co, and that model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again, Repeated in deals with Trump and with Sater serving again as a point-man.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, another of the Trump/Bayrock projects was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and led to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; Sater and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and several others—including the SoHo deal—in a deal with the aforementioned Icelandic firm, FL Group. Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing Trump and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and Trump refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

Another Bayrock partnership with Trump in Fort Lauderdale (not part of the FL Group ventures) was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by Arif in 2003, and from that point, Sater and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; as in the SoHo deal, they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October 2007.

Another deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. Trump began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then Trump himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with Trump, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point Trump himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project for himself. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to FL group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to FL’s “investment” involved a Waterpointe property in Queens (apart from approving FL’s money, Trump was otherwise not involved as far as we know). Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a 2013 NY State Supreme Court lawsuit rising from a process that began in 2008, former and then-business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michal Ejekam—sued Sater and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a vehicle for criminal activities; in it, Donald and Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing Sater’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from 1998 scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of the other above schemes of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to the Trumps, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning the removal was no comment on their guilt/responsibility/innocence and that they could be sued again on the same grounds later. 

*****

Taken together, these examples amount to catastrophic losses and colossal mismanagement on the part of Sater and Bayrock and, at the very least, gross negligence and incompetence on the part of Trump; at most, he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye, or, even worse, he might have been in on it, though no evidence exists that proves this).

Actually, the performance of Bayrock was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they did not care at all about performance. And that seems to be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition, but that would benefit Sater, Trump, and others high-up in the deals, but rarely if ever the investing partners outside this upper echelon; it seems these other duped partners and especially Trump would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes that were so poorly managed that the only logical conclusion is that Sater and his friends at Bayrock did not care about the future success of the projects nearly as much as they cared about laundering money and skimming from the top. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking there was something more going on there than met the eye. We may never know all the details or whose money was laundered and for what reasons—and if I had a magic wand I’d love to see if any the Manafort/Yanukovych/Firtash/Mogilevich Eurasian gas scheme money made its way into any of these Trump ventures—but it seems clear a lot of dirty Russian money was involved.

When considering Sater, it is important to remember that he has been busted multiple times by law enforcement and yet has not served jail time in America (with the exception of one year for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass and severing a nerve in the man’s face, or, as Trump put it under oath, Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) and enjoys the favor of the U.S. government, suggesting he is anything but a generally and especially stupid person; also remember that Sater has a long history of money laundering. 

So, in fact, once you look at the Bayrock deals and Sater assuming Bayrock’s primary reason to exist is for RICO money laundering, these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid all of a sudden make a lot of sense, and, in series of lawsuits beginning primarily on behalf of two of Sater’s Bayrock partners—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who weren’t in on the fun—for money they say is owed to them, Bayrock is precisely described as a RICO criminal organization, of which money laundering is one of its primary activities (in the main complaint, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times in the document).

Sater Saga

After Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to Sater still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to Sater, with Trump lying repeatedly about his relationship with Sater and Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 list its three Trump-named projects discussed above before all others and lists The Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), Donald Trump as its first “reference,” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

The Huffington Post also recently discovered just a few days ago that Sater owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; Sater used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Tital is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president. .

Sater even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House is even using Sater as a back-channel diplomatic go-between for Trump’s person lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a heavily-pro-Russian/pro-Putin Ukrainian legislator, Andrii Artemenko, who are discussing a Ukraine “peace plan” being pushed by close Putin aides; Artemenko also claims he has information damaging to Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s anti-Russian president facing off against Putin and his proxies in the Ukrainian Civil War. In an only partially-verified-by-U.S.-officials 35-page dossier on Trump and his people compiled by a respected ex-MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, Cohen is said to have secretly met with Russian government officials during the late stages of the presidential campaign, though it is not clear if this—or what—specific information has been corroborated by U.S. officials, with journalists having been unable to thus far verify the information on Cohen, who denies playing this role.

The reason a lot of what is known about Sater and his past misdealings is publicly available, besides a then-revelatory late-2007 New York Times article, is because of the intrepid efforts of two of the lawyers who often represented plaintiffs against Sater in court: Richard Lerner and Frederick Oberlander.

Going back to that 2013 lawsuit, because Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky was included in these accusations for allegedly illegally aiding and covering up for Sater, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara (more on him on in a bit) ended up being involved tangentially in defending him in his capacity as a U.S. Attorney, playing a role in trying to moving the suit from the state court system to SDNY jurisdiction, but it was ultimately moved because of Sater and his ties to the government, not Kaminsky. Once in the hands of the federal court, Kaminsky was removed without prejudice from the proceedings.

Which brings us to one of the untold stories of this election, and one which may never be told in full: how Sater’s cooperation with the government gave him government protection from being held liable in many cases for his misdeeds while also helping to suppress information about him and these misdeeds, and how, had his past and crimes been front and center over the past decade, this knowledge could have done much to derail and discredit Donald Trump, his brand and family at a time when he was building a national following with his hit show The Apprentice, which he even used to promote his fraudulent, money-laundered SoHo deal. 

That the public, including Trump’s and Bayrock’s clients and customers, were kept in the dark about Sater—a fact which undoubtedly helped all of these related deals and others advance, which was not lost on partners of Sater’s, and which is at the heart of much of the legal action against Sater—and were kept in dark because Sater cooperated with the U.S. government, adds quite a what-if twist to the tale of Trump and his dramatic rise over the last decade to become the most powerful man in the world: what if the government hadn’t protected Sater, and all that evidence was out in the open while Trump and Bayrock were courting buyers and were fighting court battles? What would that have done to Trump’s reputation if he became most known for defrauding customers and money laundering with a Russian mafia-deluged violent felon, to his hit show The Apprentice (one can just imagine NBC saying “You’re fired!” to Trump), and to his political aspirations? 

In a much less chaotic, less exciting world than the insanity that confronts us today, one can be sure such a salacious story involving a playboy New York tycoon would have been front, center, and dominant in national and international media coverage; lawsuits, trials, and investments may also have gone differently for Trump if such information was common knowledge, too; he may have just faded away in disgrace, or least into a sideshow, if not landing in jail.

Yes, if not for the favors the U.S. government did in protecting and, thus, abetting, Sater, it is far more likely that Trump would have collapsed in scandal than risen to be our current president. This abetting may very well be unwitting, but the two aforementioned lawyers—Lerner and Oberlander—believe differently, that the government cooperation with Sater yielded disappointing results, that Sater fooled and tricked the government into helping him in exchange for dubious assistance of questionable value and that this arrangement may have been such an embarrassment for the government that they covered up this and his past to save face and protect the careers of those involved. No court rulings have affirmed these assertions, yet it is notable that in the U.S. Supreme Court proceedings involved in arguing over Sater’s information being withheld from the public, the Court tacitly admitted that at least some of the points made by Lerner and Oberlander were valid when they ordered many of the documents surrounding Sater be made public, the only reason that much of information about him is now publicly available.

Epilogue of Intrigue

As for Arif and Mashkevich, two other major players in the whole Trump/Bayrock/FL Group saga, Arif was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with apparently underage girls on board a Yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.

Going back to Trump’s sole major Wall Street lender, Deutsche Bank, since 2012, it has loaned trump over $300 million, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President Trump in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that might have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, but DoJ was not part of this and is still investigating, raising the question of the independence and impartiality of Trump’s own new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, himself under fire for possible improper interactions with Russian officials and forced to pledge to recuse himself from any investigations of into the 2016 election and Russian interference in it. Deutsche itself is under pressure to allow an independent investigation into Trump’s accounts with the Bank (his family also has accounts with Deutsche), even after its own investigation apparently found no link to Trump’s accounts and Russia. 

It was just revealed that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money to the tune of $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, with the overall laundering scheme—known as the Global/(Great) Russian Laundromat—involving dozens of Western banks and a sum ranging from $20-$80 billion through the years 2010-2014; the hundreds involved in the scheme include Russia’s notorious oligarchs and Russia’s F.S.B., the main successor to the famed Soviet K.G.B. intelligence agency, with Putin having longstanding intimate ties to both and with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

As if there weren’t enough bad connections to Trump Tower, Mogilevich-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Trump himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 

An indictment naming Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, mentioned earlier, and the same Preet Bharara fired controversially by Trump just last month after Trump had promised Bharara he would not fire him, and it should be noted that several of the past and ongoing cases involving Trump and/or his associates occurred in the jurisdiction of SDNY and that a number of potential future cases would also occur there if they moved forward and would have been handled by Bharara if he had not been fired. It was Bharara’s indictment that led to a 2013 raid on Vadim Trincher’s Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

We also have the curious case of the Trump’s fabulously ostentatious mansion—the “Maison de l’Amitie”—in Palm Beach, Florida, that he bought back in 2004 for $41 million. A representative of Trump claimed Trump put $25 million of his own money into renovating the house, but this is doubtful; plans obtained who improvements were relatively minor, and, Typical of Trump, he seemed to be lying through his teeth: when taking a local reporter on a tour, he claimed he installed gold fixtures in bathroom, but when the report scratched a faucet, gold paint came off to reveal not-gold underneath. Trump set his asking price at $125 million when he listed early in 2006, but had trouble finding a buyer; then, in March 2008, he brought his price down to $100 million, but it still wasn’t until that July that he got Russian oligarch billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev to buy the mansion for $95 million after some haggling in a deal said to be the largest U.S. residential real estate deal ever. If you’re thinking that Trump might have swindled Rybolovlev, that’s very possible: he has a habit of falling for tricksters, especially when it comes to art deals; the house was appraised at less than only $59.8 million in 2013, and though it rose to $81.8 million in the summer of 2016, that was still about 15% less than what he had paid. Just months after he bought the house, he ended up in a messy divorce drama with his wife, who was after the house; there are plans to demolish the house, and Rybolovlev has not even physically entered the house, which may be demolished.

But unlike other major Russian oligarchs doing business with Trump or his allies, either directly or indirectly, Rybolovlev is no apparent friend or ally of Putin or the Russian mafia, which seems to put this story in the category of mere trivial.

But then, multiple reports that Rybolovlev’s private jet had repeatedly been tracked to cities where and when candidate and later president Trump was: Las Vegas in October, just five days before Election Day in North Carolina, and in Miami in February, creating a sense of intrigue. One might be tempted to say this is meaningless, yet on top of this, his accounts of the mansion deal have changed, making people wonder if he has something to hide.

At the very least, this Palm Beach mansion saga is a good reminder that Trump is a swindler and a liar, and if you’re still not convinced, google Trump University, Trump Steaks…

And oh, we just found out that during the campaign, Republicans paid a private intelligence firm that works closely with an ex-K.G.B. officer to dig up dirt in Clinton.

Putting the Pieces Together: Not a Pretty Picture

Sorry, Trump fans, but it’s time a reality check: it’s more likely that you will soon be struck by lighting than that all of these threads together and tied together by a Russian mafia godfather end up as innocent, harmless coincidences when it comes possible connections between Team Trump and Team Putin.

It is also crucial to note that the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political elites of neighboring and other countries along with hacking and (mis/dis)information operations—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do much the same thing throughout Europe, and it was clear he successfully threw his weight around last year during our election to help Trump win in what I called the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, part of his overall war on Western Democracy and promotion of what I call democratic fascism.

The question is now about whether or not there was treason going on during that (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. If (and we don’t know yet) Putin was able co-opt agents people Manafort, Gates, Page, and/or others, this would simply be current Russian standard operating procedure for how it spreads its power throughout the world in the era of Putin; such hybrid warfare and “Cold War”-type or non-hot warfare being directed at America should not only not surprise Americans, it should be expected. And it seems that, along with Manafort and Page, the record-fast-recently-resigned-due-to-Russian-related-stuff Trump National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and longtime Manafort and Trump confidante Roger Stone are all under an official FBI “counterintelligence”—to use FBI Director James Comey’s exact word—investigation, and Manafort, Page, and Stone all just volunteered to testify before Congress.

Should those hearings be public, that would be epic.

Conclusion originally a Part II published here

Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Ivanka Trump on stage for a rehearsal at the Republican National Convention- NBC

Conclusion: Trump Has Terrible Judgment or Is a (Treasonous) Criminal or Both

I will never forgive the news media or the American people for not caring enough about the aforementioned information when it mattered most and had the chance to change the outcome of this election, since any one of these main three threads alone carried more weight than Clinton’s and yet got only a fraction of the coverage that red-herring of a “scandal” got. Nor will I forgive Comey for his political tone-deafness, the politically-suicidal liberals who empowered Trump by myopically and narcissistically not voting for Clinton, or the Republican Party for so willingly spreading its buttocks for Putin; anyone who doubts me on that last point can watch the disgraceful behavior of Republicans on the supposedly relatively non-partisan House Intelligence Committee, especially its Chairman Devin Nunes and shallow grandstander Trey Gowdy, the latter of whom led the partisan witch-hunt that was the last “Benghazi”—really Clinton e-mail—investigation. Yes, I have no faith in Trump—Team Trump has lied at least 20 times about its ties to Russia as of early March and only continues to do so in the most outlandish and unprecedented and Orwellian of ways, making the possible reality of a serious cover-up more and more likely—but seeing Nunes as the Intelligence Committee Chairman act in such an unprecedented way—blatantly covering for the president—made me tear up and almost cry because his behavior is such a dramatic sign of how our government is failing us and how the last bastion protecting this country from what I call democratic fascism—that bastion now being that the party in power won’t twist every organ of government it can to benefit itself politically no matter the cost—may be crumbling. As historian Douglas Brinkley (who implored the public after Trump won to “give…[Trump]…a chance”) said of all of this: “There’s a smell of treason in the air.”

Trump repeatedly claimed during his campaign he would surround himself with “the best people;” I’m sure he believed himself, and that is the problem. What has been outlined here is probably one of the strongest cases (if not the strongest) against Trump’s judgment as leader, whether in business or in politics; if you surround yourself on a regular basis with mobsters and criminals and those who favor the worldview (or purse) of America’s greatest enemy over America itself, there is no more discussion to be had: Donald Trump is too stupid and too incompetent a leader to be president as he simply cannot be trusted to make decisions about whom to give power to (for every supposed hit there are far more misses and we can’t delegate the fate of our nation a game of chance; sorry, but I’m nearly convinced that Trump picked Gen. Mattis to run the Pentagon simply because he like Mattis’ nickname of “Mad Dog”); Trump’s selection of Paul Manafort alone would be disqualifying enough, and that’s just the beginning.

And that is the best case scenario that he was too stupid to see that his people were playing him for a fool or were abusing their power in a way that could destroy his potential presidency and do the nation irreparable harm. But if Trump himself in any way knew about any possible collusion with Russia, that takes us from disqualifying incompetence into the realm of treason. Even if that is not the case, the newest revelations are making it more and more likely that some sort of treason from within his camp will be uncovered—Comey recently noted that this counterintelligence investigation began in July, some ten months ago, and if it was clear there was no collusion it would probably have ended long ago—and it is increasingly likely that this issue will cripple Trump’s presidency in ways not seen since the later nineteenth-century, when Reconstruction’s war between President Andrew Johnson and Congressional Republicans, as well as the scandals of the Gilded Age, dramatically weakened the presidency.

Russia is as defiant as ever, just in recent months and weeks assassinating—or trying to assassinate-—opponents, arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters and Russian’s main opposition leader (Alexey Navalny, again) during Russia’s largest protests in five years, trying to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments (Montenegro), hacking foreign politicians in ways designed to sway elections (from Hillary Clinton to France’s Emmanuel Macron and beyond), fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, slaughtering civilians in Aleppo, and assaulting the world of norms the West has known since the end of WWII.

And Donald Trump is in the White House and wants to be Putin’s friend.

*****

Sometimes, if there’s enough smoke, it’s undeniable that there is a fire even if the flames are obscured or not visible from afar. Back in July, when I began my in-depth exploration around the same time the FBI did, I wrote that

… it’s possible there is  some sort of coordinated effort going on between Trump or people in his campaign and Putin or people associated with him. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we also have two groups of actors here  acting mostly independently yet with common purpose. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of Trump’s associates, especially Manafort, are part of some sort of deal (tacit or otherwise) to promote Putin’s agenda within Trump’s campaign between several staffers or just himself on one side and Putin’s agents on the other, given Manafort’s and several staffers’ histories. And it’s certainly believable—in fact,  almost certain—that Putin would like to see Clinton defeated and Trump in the White House, since it would be  hard to envision a leader that would or could play more into Putin’s hands than Trump. 

This may yet backfire on and Trump and Putin, since the  Russian interference is so obvious…

Sometimes I hate being right.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

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