Month: July 2017

Follow the money laundering, Part 2
by Tom Sullivan

Back in four-spark-plugs-and-a-distributor days, I had both the time and (marginal) talent for fixing my own cars. But I noticed I had a propensity to diagnose simple problems as more complicated and expensive ones. That vibration I feared was an early sign of transmission trouble would end up being from a bad motor mount. That persistent burning smell was not my wiring harness threatening to catch fire, just a plastic grocery bag melted onto the catalytic converter. Occam’s razor is your friend.

So it may be with our assumptions about the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. On that, Sean Illing at Vox interviewed Seva Gunitsky, a political science professor at the University of Toronto and author of “Aftershocks.” Gunitsky has followed Trump’s connections to Russia. They go back decades. To understand Trump and Russia, simply follow the money. And/or the money laundering.

The Vox interview took place prior to the news yesterday that the eighth man in the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. is Irakly Kaveladze, described as an accused Russian money launderer connected to Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov.

What is at stake for Trump could be money Russians have poured into his properties and casinos, “hundreds of millions of dollars. Possibly even enough to keep Trump out of another bankruptcy.” The Magnitsky Act speculation is leading nowhere, Gunitsky says. Putin’s involvement might be overstated. We should be looking instead at the Prevezon case:

So Prevezon is a holding company with links to Russian elites that has been accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through New York City real estate. It’s also part of Hermitage Capital, an investment fund that was being investigated by Magnitsky (the Russian lawyer who was killed in a Moscow prison in 2009) more than 10 years ago.

Prevezon was part of this giant tax fraud scheme that Magnitsky uncovered in 2008, which led to his death and which led indirectly to the Magnitsky Act of 2012. The U.S. Attorney’s Office was also preparing a massive case against Prevezon last year. Until it was abruptly dropped.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney in the June 9 meeting, was Prevezon’s lawyer, Gunitsky continues. It may be that she was there to ask for help with that in exchange for campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Several months after Trump takes office, the Prevezon case is dismissed. So what happened? The U.S. attorney was carefully preparing a case against Prevezon Holdings. They were all set to go forward, and then suddenly the case was settled. Prevezon’s own lawyers were kind of shocked. We know they paid something like $6 million, which is a fraction of what the lawsuit was about. So they were extremely happy about it.

Congressional Democrats have openly expressed concerns about what happened here. They want to know why it was settled so quickly. Was pressure being applied from above? In any case, we can see the possible motivations of the people approaching Trump for favors. When I say the collusion starts with financial interests, this is what I mean.

Illing links to last week’s Foreign Policy examination of how the settlement came soon after the Trump Justice Department fired Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who brought the case. And two days before it was to go to trial:

The civil forfeiture case was filed in 2013 by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — who was fired by Trump in March. The case alleged that 11 companies were involved in a tax fraud in Russia and then laundered a portion of the $230 million they got into Manhattan real estate.

The deep financial ties had been there for decades. It is not that Putin does not have parallel political interests. It is just that when Trump made waves politically, Gunitsky explaines, Putin and the Kremlin saw a target of opportunity aligned with the interests of the oligarchs, of which Putin is the principal one. Besides, “in Russia the distinction between political power and economic power is very fuzzy.”

Trump’s consistent pro-Russian posture, he explains, is simpler than collusion (or treachery). It stems from Trump’s consistent fixation on making money and the size of his stash.

Besides himself, money is the one thing Trump believes in.

The money link

by digby

Like every other political writer, I’ve made the observation that the most likely reason for Trump’s oddly out-of-character approach to Russia is the fact that he’s likely in hock up to his ears to Russian mobsters and oligarchs. That’s not to say he doesn’t love him a handsome strongman too. And it’s also completely plausible that the Russian government has put the squeeze on him in any number of ways as well as helped him to win the election with his full knowledge. I’m prepared to believe any of that as the evidence emerges. Right now we have a whole lot of evidence of something but the dots aren’t yet completely connected.

The money connection is the most likely to bear fruit and this interview with a Russia expert at Vox is also worth reading. His view is that while there’s ample evidence that there was a political motive behind the Russian interference in the election, and they aren’t mutually exclusive, the relationship between Trump and the oligarchs is what made it possible rather than some ideological kinship.

Again, we don’t know really. But there is something there and it’s corrupt no matter which angle you take.

Update: Nothing to see here folks.

An accused Russian money launderer representing a Kremlin-friendly oligarch has been reportedly identified as the eighth person at a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. last June.

Irakly Kaveladze was a guest of Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya when she visited Trump and other campaign members in Trump Tower last year, Trump’s lawyer told CNN. The meeting was proposed by billionaire Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. The billionaire is friendly with President Donald Trump, having hosted his Miss Universe 2013 pageant in Moscow and discussed real-estate deals with Trump.

The June 9, 2016 meeting was originally characterized by Trump Jr. as “primarily…about the adoption of Russian children.” It was then revealed to have aso been about Agalarov providing “damaging information” on Hillary Clinton from the Kremlin. Joining Trump in the meeting were his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The eight visitors included Rob Goldstone, the manager of Agalarov’s pop-star son who reached out to Trump; Veselnitskaya, the lawyer with ties to Russian officials who lobbied the U.S. on behalf of Kremlin interests; her translator, Anatoli Samochornov; Veselnitskaya’s D.C.-based lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, who was once accused of an international hacking conspiracy; and Kaveladze.

Kaveladze is an executive of Crocus Group, Agalarov’s Russian-based development company. Kaveladze’s LinkedIn page says he began working for Crocus Group in 2004, but a Russian webpage for the Economic Chronicle says he started in 1992 as Crocus’ U.S. associate. Kaveladze immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 1991.

Federal investigators say Kaveladze immediately began laundering money for Russians..

read on …

Update: The case the Vox interviewee refers to in the Southern District of New York ( not the district attorney as he says) was probably settled legitimately by the US Attorney that succeeded Preet Bharara, at least according to this. Apparently, all these Russians in Trump’s orbit have suspicious financial dealings but not to the point the government believes it can get a conviction.

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Mitch has a pout and whine

by digby

Over in bizarroworld, Mitch agrees with Don that the mean Democrats ruined everything:

Boo-fucking-hoo.

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Gobsmacking bombshell of the day (so far)

by digby

I just … wow:

President Trump held a second, informal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, according to Ian Bremmer, the president of the international consulting firm Eurasia Group.

The meeting took place during the G-20 heads of state dinner, according to Bremmer, hours after Trump’s formal bilateral sit-down with Putin.

In that conversation, Trump spoke with the Russian leader for roughly an hour, joined only by Putin’s translator. The meeting had previously gone without mention by the White House.

Trump’s interactions with Putin are the subject of particularly intense scrutiny in the U.S., because of the ongoing special counsel and congressional investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

That Trump was not joined in the conversation by his own translator is a breach of national security protocol, Bremmer noted, though one that the president likely would not know about.

White House official confirms to @kwelkernbc Trump and Putin spoke privately on the margins of a G-20 dinner. Was previously undisclosed. https://t.co/hqULLe2KYS

— Dafna Linzer (@DafnaLinzer) July 18, 2017

Trump Administration had no intention of disclosing second hour long meeting w Putin. https://t.co/clLKa6PwQK

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 18, 2017

I’m just:

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A very tarnished silver lining

by digby

Sad!

Congressional expert, Stan Collender:

The GOP’s numerical majority is not an ideological majority, and the collapse of the health care debate shows definitively that Senate (and probably House) Republicans are anything but ideologically aligned on major issues.

We were all told and believed something different, of course.

In their euphoria after the 2016 elections, the Trump administration and the congressional Republican leadership made it clear that everything from ACA repeal to tax reform to infrastructure would be a slam dunk because the GOP majorities in the House and Senate would move quickly to get everything done. The subtext was that they were together, unified and determined.

We now know that’s just not true: Congressional Republicans are so divided that the White House’s and leadership’s original promise of quick, definitive action was the height of political hubris. The GOP’s divisions on at least the major issues are much larger than the size of their majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Trump administration’s arrogance is somewhat understandable given its political inexperience and unsophistication, but it’s absolutely unforgivable from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

McConnell is an experienced legislator who is generally considered to be an excellent strategist. He should have known from the start that his 52 Republican senators would not be willing to sacrifice their parochial interests for a political win. He wouldn’t have a majority for anything on health care if it was a GOP-only effort.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is now showing McConnell-like political arrogance on the budget, tax reform and the debt ceiling increase that will be needed this fall. Ryan’s 24-seat GOP majority will be as inadequate on those issues as McConnell’s 2-seat majority was on ACA repeal and replace, and McConnell’s 2-seat margin is almost certain to fail him again and again on these same fights.

Trump has already shown that his political arrogance is part of his DNA rather than just naivete. In a tweet this morning, the president showed what by now is his usual level of braggadocio.

We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard. We will return!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

If Ryan and McConnell do the same, the entire Republican legislative agenda that up-to-now has been so arrogantly projected to to be a sure thing will fail.

God, let’s hope so.

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He’s basically decided to metaphorically “take out the families” and “bomb the shit out of” Americans.

by digby

The dealmaker in chief said this today:

I’ve been saying for a long time, ‘let Obamacare fail’ and then everybody’s going to have to come together and fix it and come up with a new plan and a plan that really good for the people with much lower premiums,much lower cost and much better protection. I’ve been saying for a long time, ‘let Obamacare fail’ it will be a lot easier.

That’s what he calls leadership. He also said:

Taking no responsibility, Trump: “We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you Republicans are not going to own it.”

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) July 18, 2017

This would be per usual. Trump has never “owned” anything in his life. Every move he makes is designed to ensure that someone else is blamed for his own failures. Which are legion.

He is a cynical, cynical creep. Recall this from January when he first proposed this “let Obamacare explode” plan and said that he’d decided against it because of the human suffering.

Apparently, he’s now decided that the people who suffer are collateral damage.

He’s basically decided to metaphorically “take out the families” and “bomb the shit out of” Americans.

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Oooooh. A new foreigner to hate!

by digby

“Gypsies” are settled in a small Pennsylvania town… and locals complain of them going to toilet in the street and beheading chickens. pic.twitter.com/YFpe1mbW1d

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 18, 2017

This is direct from the European alt-right. The Roma are one of their favorite punching bags.

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Don’t relax. They’ll never stop trying to repeal it.

by digby

I wrote about the health care debacle for Salon today:

It appears that the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is dead, at least for now. Donald Trump’s unrealistic, grandiose promise will go unfulfilled.

That didn’t work out. After weeks of prevarication and misdirection on the part of people like Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who went on TV last weekend and blatantly lied about the effects of the Senate health care bill, on Monday night two GOP senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, pulled the plug by saying they could not vote for it. Added to the previously announced no votes of Sens. Susan Collins and Rand Paul, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is now at least two short. He has admitted that this bill will not pass.

We’ve been here before, of course. The first House bill was pulled and they came back and passed an even worse version. This may not end the way everyone seems to assume it will either.

Both Trump and McConnell acknowledged that the Senate’s BCRA is dead and signaled their support for a “full repeal plus two-year delay until they figure out what the hell is going on” plan. It is not impossible that they could put something else together.

After all, the reasons three of the four senators gave for their unwillingness to pass the bill is that it just wasn’t harsh enough. Repeal and replace with nothing would undoubtedly make them quite happy. That would leave the handful of Republican moderates in the Senate having to do something only Collins has so far been willing to do: take a stand for decency. Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Rob Portman of Ohio, John Hoeven of North Dakota and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have all said that they won’t vote to deny people health insurance. But there’s always a chance they can be appeased with the two-year delay and a fatuous promise to fix everything before then. Nobody should relax until it’s clear that this is all well and truly dead.

This repeal-and-delay plan was originally proposed back at the beginning of the year but faced a huge uproar, mostly from the health care industry, which cannot run its businesses with this kind of uncertainty about the financing, rules and regulations under which they must operate. A handful of senators balked at the time, including Bob Corker of Tennessee and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who said, “I don’t think we can repeal Obamacare and say we’re going to get the answer two years from now.” Both Paul and Collins were against it too, as were many of the Republican governors who also have to plan their budgets.

But what really scared them off at that time was public opinion. Only 20 percent of Americans were in favor of repeal-and-delay five months ago. It’s hard to imagine that after they’ve seen what kind of horrendous plans the Republicans tried to ram through the Congress they’ll be more favorably disposed today. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans prefer Democrats to handle health care by 55 to 36 percent.

The Republican leadership exemplified by House Speaker Paul Ryan thought they had come up with a clever way to have their cake and eat it too. If they could repeal the Affordable Care Act and then take their big victory lap, that might satisfy their base that they were getting things done — after which they could pretend they were creating some kind of “new” health care system that would kick in gradually. The simple fact was that they had no idea how to cover the people who are currently covered under the ACA and they knew it. Their best hope was to ease people back into their previous anxiety and despair and blame Obamacare for it.

Donald Trump has said many times that he believes the best political move would be to keep Obamacare in place and help it fail, so he and his party could blame the Democrats. If Republicans can drag this out a couple of years and guilt Democratic lawmakers into signing on to some inadequate Band-aids in order to spare a few lives, that would really be sweet.

It will also be sweet for the Democrats when they run ads against every House Republican who voted for that AHCA atrocity under the assurance that they would “fix it in the Senate.” If the Democrats do manage to eke out a new House majority it will be the health care albatross that brings down the GOP. They can name him Donald.

But whether Republicans manage to push through repeal-and-delay or just drop it altogether, liberals and progressives need to reckon with the fact that this is not the end. There will never be an end.

Republicans have been trying to destroy the American safety net for decades. They’ve been hostile to Medicare and Medicaid since the day they were passed. They’ve been running against Social Security for 82 years. (They just tried to privatize it in 2005!) They will never stop attacking the ACA either.

This isn’t just about profits or ” free markets.” Consider that this Senate bill was opposed by all the so-called stakeholders: the insurance companies, the hospitals, doctors and even big business. It still has 48 out of 52 votes in the Senate. Conservatives simply do not believe that people have a right to health care. They see it as a commodity like any other, something which you should not have if you cannot pay for it.

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They had seven years. Now they want two more.
by Tom Sullivan

Late Monday, Republican senators Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas announced jointly they would not support a motion to proceed on the unpopular Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), a.k.a. Trumpcare. They joined Sens. Paul (R-KY) and Susan Collins (R-ME) who previously announced their opposition.

My colleague @JerryMoran and I will not support the MTP to this version of BCRA #HealthcareBill— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) July 18, 2017

By jumping together, Lee and Moran shielded themselves from the worst of the potential backlash from leadership for being the “third” vote to trigger the bill’s failure. But with Arizona Sen. John McCain sidelined by surgery for at least a week, the bill was already sucking wind. Moran called for a “fresh start.”

Moran heard little support for the bill among rural Kansans over the July 4th break, and worried that the steep cuts to Medicaid could harm rural hospitals. Lee tweeted that Americans deserved “a real repeal bill.”

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was already teetering on the edge of pulling the plug himself. Johnson already announced this as his last term and, after the National Republican Senate Committee pulled the plug on his campaign early in October, he has little incentive for being a good soldier. He won without their help, drawing 70,000 more votes than Trump; he owes Trump no allegiance for winning on coattails.

Nevertheless, landing page headlines for the online editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post disagree on whether this means Trumpcare is finished. NYT: New Defections Signal End for Health Bill. WaPo: Opposition from two more GOP senators spells potential end for health-care overhaul.

The potential is for this fight to continue. Director George Romero of zombie fame died over the weekend. More than Bram Stoker, soap operas, and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, Romero popularized the idea that dead is not necessarily dead. After the defections, President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately arose to call for a clean repeal vote:

“Regretfully, it’s now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful,” McConnell said in a statement. “So, in the coming days, the Senate will vote to take up the House bill with the first amendment in order being what a majority of the Senate has already supported in 2015 and that was vetoed by then-President Obama: a repeal of Obamacare with a two-year delay to provide for a stable transition period to a patient-centered health care system that gives Americans access to quality, affordable care.”

The GOP had seven years to come up with an Obamacare replacement. Now they want two more. Give us two more years and we’ll come back with “something terrific” and “wonderful” as Trump promised. Two more years of uncertainty for insurance companies and governors trying to plan and budget for the future. Two more years of Americans wondering when the improvements on Obamacare and cost-lowering they were promised will arrive. Two more years wondering when the rug might get yanked out from under them.

McConnell had told colleagues privately not to worry about the Medicaid cuts in the bill. Johnson considered this a breach of trust:

McConnell is telling them ” ‘Don’t worry about it. Those are too far in the future. Those will never happen,’ ” Johnson told reporters about McConnell’s pitch. “All I can say is I confirmed that talking to other senators.”

Now he expects his caucus to vote for two more years of “Trust us”? Does that mean two more years of Democrats waiting for Republicans ultimately to fail?

Cliff Schecter tweeted:

Democrats–step forward right now w public option 2 increase competition/lower premiums & lower Medicare age to 55. Make em fight that.— Cliff Schecter (@cliffschecter) July 18, 2017

You can’t fight something with nothing even if what the Republicans have is nothing.