Originally Posted by
bsm2
Editorial: The Trump-Russia connection gets harder to ignore
Since before his inauguration, President Donald Trump has been relentlessly tweeting, often in capital letters, that there was NO COLLUSION between his campaign and Russian agents. True, no outright fire has yet been disclosed, but there’s an awful lot of smoke. Last week it got thicker.
On Tuesday it was disclosed that a firm tied to Viktor Vekselberg, whose fortune of $13 billion makes him one of the richest men in Russia, paid some $500,000 in 2017 to Essential Consultants LLC, a shell company formed by Trump’s New York lawyer, Michael Cohen. Because Essential Consultants was the vehicle Trump used to pay hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 election, there’s now linkage between Russian influence and a scandal that once threatened to wreck Trump’s candidacy.
These ingredients have come back to threaten Trump’s presidency as details of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation indicate overlapping signs of collusion, potentially illegal campaign finance deals and backdoor influence peddling. American voters have been hoodwinked by a man who promised to drain the Washington swamp but instead wound up filling it to the brim.
In addition to the Cohen scandal, there’s more smoke emanating from a recent Washington Post story about a $400 million buying spree by the Trump Organization between 2006 and 2014. Trump defied his own practice of leveraging purchases with lots of debt, paying cash for high-end real estate with money his sons, in the years before Trump’s presidential bid, seemingly acknowledged came from Russia.
“Russia has never tried to use leverage over me,” Trump tweeted days before his inauguration. “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING.”
Perhaps in present tense that was true. But Trump did lots of real estate deals with Russians before running for president. Had he made his tax returns public, voters would have known where his money came from — and properly informed voters might have changed the election’s outcome.
Privately held corporations like the Trump Organization do business through a web of limited liability corporations. Their public disclosure rules are minimal. But Special Counsel Robert Mueller can obtain tax records. If the investment source of Trump’s $400 million spending spree was Russian, it will be explosive.
Defying his own boast of being the “King of Debt,” Trump began the spree in 2006. He bought golf courses and expensive real estate in Scotland, Ireland, Beverly Hills and on the East Coast. His property upgrades alone cost $164 million.
A Trump casino-hotel bankruptcy in Atlantic City endangered his domestic credit. He went abroad to borrow $295 million from Deutsche Bank for projects in Miami and Washington. He sued another division of the same bank to refinance a $40 million personal debt he owed in Chicago, arguing that the real estate crash was, in effect, an “act of God.”
U.S. and United Kingdom financial regulators have fined Deutsche Bank $630 million for laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Mueller has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank’s records of its dealings with Trump associates.
In 2008, Donald Jr. told a real estate conference in New York, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. … We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Five years later, his younger brother, Eric, reportedly responded when a golf journalist asked how the Trumps were financing golf courses when the industry was stagnating, “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Eric Trump now claims that his father had “incredible cash flow and built incredible wealth. He didn’t need to think about borrowing for every transaction. We invested in ourselves.”
The president and his sons change their stories to suit circumstances. That was the case when the president last month denied making hush money payments to the porn star. He said it had been Michael Cohen’s doing.
In a Fox News interview this month, his new attorney, Rudy Giuliani, blurted a different account. Afterward, Trump said he’d been paying Cohen a $35,000 a month retainer, and the hush money might have been paid from that.
It turns out he wasn’t the only one paying retainers to Cohen. The 51-year-old lawyer, a former executive vice president of The Trump Organization, leveraged his influence with the president in 2017 to obtain $1.2 million from the drug company Novartis and $600,000 from AT&T.
Pharmaceutical companies have extensive dealings with the federal government. AT&T wanted Justice Department approval for its $85 billion merger with Time Warner as well as a change to the FCC’s “net neutrality” rules. The company said it was paying Cohen, who has zero experience in telecom law, for his “insights.”
Influence peddling is not necessarily against the law; indeed, it’s a way of life in the Washington swamp. But it is illegal for foreign citizens and companies to try to influence U.S. elections, making the Vekselberg connection particularly problematic.
Cohen has long had family and business ties to shady Russian businessmen, including some with alleged ties to organized crime. This same man served as Trump’s fixer, the man who paid off his girlfriends. It could be the stuff of a cheesy political thriller. Instead, it is the scandalous reality engulfing the president of the United States.
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