.. In Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted he wanted Trump to win — something Trump continues to deny to this day.
.. there were 82 known “contacts between the Trump team and Russia-linked operatives.”
.. the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and Kremlin emissaries promising dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s “support for Mr. Trump.” “If it’s what you say, I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. gushed. When this was revealed last summer, President Trump personally orchestrated an attempted coverup by claiming the meeting was about adoptions.
This was shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey to stop the investigation of “this Russia thing,” as he put it in an interview with “NBC Nightly News” — showing just how much he fears this inquiry.
.. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, was in touch in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business associate with “ties to Russian intelligence.” Campaign chairman
Paul Manafort, who has a long history of representing Russian interests and was running the campaign for no pay, also reportedly met with Kilimnik in 2016.
Manafort was also in contact with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (whom he owed at least $10 million) , offering him “private briefings” that would no doubt have been instantly conveyed to Putin.
.. Russians first tried to hack into Clinton’s email on July 27, 2016, hours after Trump asked them to do just that (“Russia, if you’re listening”).
.. Both Stone and Donald Trump Jr. were also in contact with WikiLeaks, the Russians’ conduit for releasing stolen emails. Surely it is no mere coincidence that Stone predicted on Aug. 21, 2016 — nearly seven weeks before Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails were released — that “it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
.. the indictment also reveals that the Russians stole not just emails but also the data analytics Democrats used to run their campaign. This happened in September 2016. A few weeks later, the Trump campaign shifted its “datadriven” strategy to focus on the states that would provide the margin of victory, raising the question of whether it benefited from stolen Democratic data.
.. The application, approved by four Republican judges, notes that “the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [Trump’s] campaign.” It also says that Putin aide Igor Diveykin “had met secretly with Page and that their agenda for the meeting included Diveykin raising
a dossier or ‘kompromat’ that the Kremlin possessed on Candidate #2 [Clinton] and the possibility of it being released to Candidate #1’s campaign.”
.. Helsinki, where Trump refused to criticize Putin and insisted on meeting with him alone for two hours. Why doesn’t Trump want his own aides in the room when he talks with Putin? What does he have to hide?
.. Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. , among others, suspects that Putin has “something” on Trump — perhaps evidence of financial wrongdoing. But, by now, any such “kompromat” could well include the help that Russia provided in 2016. Trump certainly gives the impression that he knows how much he owes Russia and how important it is to repay that debt lest Putin release the evidence that might bring him down. And the
Putin Republicans give the impression that they couldn’t care less if the president plotted to win power with help from a hostile foreign state.
Manafort associate had Russian intelligence ties during 2016 campaign, prosecutors say
They said that when van der Zwaan was interviewed by the FBI in November, he told investigators that Gates had informed him that Person A was a former officer of the Russian military intelligence service, known as the GRU.
Kilimnik ran Manafort’s office in Kiev during the 10 years he did consulting work there, The Post reported in 2017.
During his August 2016 meeting with Kilimnik, Manafort has said he and his longtime Kiev office manager discussed, among other topics, the ongoing campaign, including the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. Stolen DNC emails had been released by WikiLeaks the previous month, and the hack was widely suspected to be the work of Russia.
.. During Kilimnik’s time working for Manafort in Kiev, he had served as a liaison for Manafort to the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, with whom Manafort had done business. Emails previously described to The Post show that Manafort asked Kilimnik during the campaign to offer Deripaska “private briefings” about Trump’s effort.
The Trump-Russia Story Gets Even Weirder
Kremlin-friendly cults and hatemongers were put on prime time to keep the nation entranced, distracted, as ever more foreign hirelings would arrive to help the Kremlin and spread its vision to the world.”
.. Nothing exemplifies this more than the strange saga of Anastasia Vashukevich. She is a Belarusian woman, a self-described “sex expert,” who is now in a Thai jail and who claims, in a desperate Instagram video, to be the “the missing link in the connection between Russia and the U.S. elections.”
.. a “mildly insane” squad of activist sex workers who specialize in weird pranks, like picketing the American Embassy naked in support of Harvey Weinstein. And one of them, Vashukevich, had lots of photographs of herself and the politically powerful Deripaska on her Instagram account.
.. Rick Gates, couldn’t account for nearly $19 million that they were supposed to invest for a business controlled by Deripaska
.. Navalny told The A.P. he didn’t know what to think. “Shows like ‘Homeland’ begin to look entirely realistic when you look at what is happening in Russia now,”
Mueller Is Gaining Steam. Should Trump Worry?
Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax and a friend of Mr. Trump. “The bad news is that the special counsel has a scorched-earth prosecution aimed at crushing the president’s associates.”
“I don’t think the president is worried about the investigation himself,” he added, “but it clearly bothers him that people are being prosecuted simply because they worked for his campaign.”
.. The fact that Mr. Gates was allowed to plead guilty to just two relatively lower-level charges indicated to legal experts that he must have something of value for Mr. Mueller.
.. Mr. Manafort also reportedly offered during the campaign to give “private briefings” to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch allied with President Vladimir V. Putin who claimed Mr. Manafort owed him $19 million.
.. Prosecutors are interested in learning how a Republican convention platform plank on Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was watered down.
.. Mr. Clinton’s team drew the scrutiny of six independent counsels other than Kenneth W. Starr.
.. it remains unclear why he volunteered to work for Mr. Trump’s campaign without pay at a time when he was experiencing significant financial pressure.
.. they argue, the original order appointing Mr. Mueller was itself invalid and should be revoked.
.. “It doesn’t make sense to unfold piecemeal an indictment of Russian entities and Russians if you have any hope of building a collusion case. It makes no logical sense,” he said. “To me, at least, what he’s done does underscore that there’s no collusion there. That leaves him with the obstruction of justice narrative which I think is constitutionally flawed and isn’t going to go anywhere.”