Enjoy President Trump, Courtesy of The Kremlin

[Tero]

Trump’s Russian Laundromat
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/ ... -syndicate

[Tero]

Russia? What Russia?
Reuters:
On Whether His Legal Team Is Defending Him Well
“The problem is, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. This isn’t a question of defense. I didn’t do anything. I had no relationship to Russia. So I said, what can the legal team do?"

On His Frustration With the Russia Story
"The only frustration is that this Russia story is a hoax made up by the Democrats as an excuse for losing an election that they should have won because it’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the Electoral College.” is that this Russia story is a hoax made up by the Democrats as an excuse for losing an election that they should have won because it’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the Electoral College.”

[pErvinalia]

It's almost as if him and 42 are getting talking points from the same place...

*cough* FOX NEWS *cough*

[Forty Two]

Trump’s Russian Laundromat
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/ ... -syndicate

This just gets more ridiculous with each passing hit piece article.

"Failed" real estate developer? The article says at the outset that in the early 80s, Trump was "coming into his own" as a "serious player" in the New York City real estate market, because he had just built the world famous Trump Tower, and sold out every unit, including units to people like Johnny Carson, Sophia Loren and other wealthy celebrities. It was a massive success.

What's the scandal? A wealthy Russian businessman bought five units for $6,000,000, and the article declares that the Russian businessman "appeared" not to have any legitimate source for those funds. Really? How do they know that? The guy's books are not public. A buyer did not have to explain where he got his money from. It's not the seller's business where the buyer is getting their financing or capital, unless they have some reason to think there was something criminal going on.

The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine.

I mean, look at that horse hockey. Yes, Trump runs private companies. And, organized crime is "by design" shadowy. LOL. We must, therefore, look into the suspicious activities of Trump's business dealings with any Russian companies, even though it was common for private companies to engage in business with Russian companies and there was nothing wrong, or illegal about doing business with Russians. Now, the "growing chorus" in Congress is that we need to explore the last 40 years of Russian company investments into Trump businesses. Something must be in there somewhere that shows.... what? That Trump is a Russian agent? In league with the commies?

For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.

So, the article clearly states that despite three decades of state and federal investigations, and "some of America's best investigative journalists" [lol] -- to date -- there is not a shred of evidence that Trump was aware of any suspicious entanglements, or that there were suspicious entanglements to be aware of....

But, Trump is a Russian dirty money laundromat. That's the takeaway.

We just KNOW it, right? He MUST be dirty. There MUST be something here. He's TRUMP. He's the orange scumbag. He's evil. We hate him. So, if he does business with Russians, it must be something dirty.

The article then talks about two Russian mob figures who have no connection to Trump, other than perhaps having bought condos from Trump properties -- they're Russian - they bought a Trump property. Therefore, Trump was their patsy for laundering money because Trump was an easy "mark." LOL.

This article is an absurdity. It goes through paragraph after paragraph about "Ivankov" - we're supposed to think Ivankov is a big Russian crime figure who was involved with Trump in some way. But, the article slips the line in that "there is no evidence that Trump knew Ivankov personally." So.... Ivankov ... a really bad guy...bought a condo from Trump properties. Tune in at 11 for all the gory details, I guess.

Then the article runs through the details of Trump's failures. He's one of the richest people in the world, but in the 1990s, he had debt and litigation problems and was "scrambling to survive" so he's a big fat failure. He's a failure, saved by Russian mobsters and oligarchs, so he owes them big-time, and now he's President. LOL. You can't have big buyers from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, because, you know, buyers from those countries are mobsters and criminals. No legitimate business from eastern Europe. LOL. If a millionaire is Russian, he's a suspected mobster, so you can't sell him condos.

Total failure, the article says, who only needed to slap his name on a building and buyers came running and bought out all the units.

[Forty Two]

Russia? What Russia?
Reuters:
On Whether His Legal Team Is Defending Him Well
“The problem is, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. This isn’t a question of defense. I didn’t do anything. I had no relationship to Russia. So I said, what can the legal team do?"

On His Frustration With the Russia Story
"The only frustration is that this Russia story is a hoax made up by the Democrats as an excuse for losing an election that they should have won because it’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the Electoral College.” is that this Russia story is a hoax made up by the Democrats as an excuse for losing an election that they should have won because it’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the Electoral College.”

Yes, indeed - what Russia?

With all your postings on it, Tero - you've not identified something he's done that needs defending. He had business dealings with Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, in addition to Brits, Germans, Frenchmen, Chinese, South Koreans, Vietnamese, Australians, Brazilians, Mexicans.... etc. They bought units in his condos. He built and developed properties overseas.

So?

[Forty Two]

Trump deserves all the shit he gets. For smearing Obama re his place of birth.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's good to see.

All good as long as it's the other guy's ox being gored.

[Tero]

Obama may have let Russian lawyer in for her criminal activities with Trump's inner circle:
Veselnitskaya was working as an attorney for a Cyprus-based real estate holdings company called Prevezon, run by Denis Katsyv, son of Pyotr Katsyv, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest advisers, and was given “unlimited resources” by the Kremlin-connected group to run a campaign to get the Magnitsky Act repealed, Fox News reported Wednesday. The Magnitsky Act enacts sanctions on certain Russian officials as a punishment for human rights violations.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/07 ... eting.html

[Brian Peacock]

She was also tied to the defendants in the $230m Magnitsky fraud case brought by the Southern District of New York -- you know, the one where the main prosecution witness 'jumped' out of a 5th story window the day before testifying -- and which was quickly and quietly settled out of court, without admissions, for $6m weeks after DA Preet Bharara was summarily sacked.

[Brian Peacock]

Ex-Soviet counter-intelligence officer says he attended Trump Jr meeting

Donald Trump’s denial of collusion with Russia suffered yet another blow on Friday when it emerged this his son failed to disclose the presence of a former Soviet military officer at a now notorious meeting.

Rinat Akhmetshin – who claims he served in a counterintelligence unit but never formally trained as a spy – told the Associated Press that he attended the meeting with Donald Trump Jr, which billed as part of a Russian government effort to boost Trump’s election campaign.

Now a pro-Moscow lobbyist, Akhmetshin dismisses reports that he has ties to Russian intelligence agencies as a “smear campaign”. Earlier this year he was described by the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee as an expert in “subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda”.

In an interview with the AP, Akhmetshin said he accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to Trump Tower in New York where they met an interpreter who also participated in the meeting in June 2016. He told the news agency he had learned about the meeting only that day when Veselnitskaya asked him to attend, and turned up in jeans and a T-shirt.

The AP reported: “During the meeting, Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump associates and suggested that making the information public could help the Trump campaign, he said.

‘This could be a good issue to expose how the DNC is accepting bad money,’ Akhmetshin recalled her saying.”...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... akhmetshin

[mistermack]

Trump deserves all the shit he gets. For smearing Obama re his place of birth.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's good to see.

All good as long as it's the other guy's ox being gored.

Trump got himself elected using innuendo and smear. If he had acted in good faith, I would not like to see this campaign going on.
As it is, it's very uplifting to see him in the mire.

Like when hyenas kill other hyenas.

As far as success in business goes, he got their by not paying his debts, and inheriting big bucks.
If you do that in America, you can't go wrong, so long as you pay unscrupulous lawyers to keep it within US law.
Laws that are there to protect the rich.

If I took peoples' money and went bankrupt, I wouldn't consider myself a success.
Taking peoples property seems to be a crime for the poor, but ok if you're rich.

So ok, they made him President. It says a lot about how stupid the average American voter actually is.

[Brian Peacock]

Scandal of Donald Trump Jr's alleged Russian collusion will force his father to resign, Columbia law professor predicts

Donald Trump will probably resign over a constitutional crisis caused by his son-in-law and son, a leading professor of law at Columbia University predicts.

Philip Bobbitt describes the President’s resignation as a consequence of his family members being prosecuted as “the likeliest possibility.”

Emails released by Donald Trump Jr show that he met with a Kremlin-based lawyer last summer, along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, the Republican campaign’s then chairman.

Trump Jr's response to being offered compromising information about Hillary Clinton ahead of the November election was to write “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”.

“Whatever [Trump’s] policy goals, it has long been clear that creating a dynasty — having destroyed the two reigning political dynasties in the last campaign — is his greatest objective,” Professor Bobbitt writes in the Evening Standard.

“Resignation, as remote as it seems right now, might well be a choice the President would make to save his children from prison, and himself from future prosecution.”

He says resignation would be the best way out of the “mess” created by allegations of collusion with Russia over interference in the US Presidential election...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 42496.html

[Animavore]

The guy presumes Trump loves his children like humans do.

[pErvinalia]

Good point.

[Scot Dutchy]

Trump only loves one person.

[JimC]

He will throw them to the wolves...