Yesterday, Politico reported that Mueller’s mystery subpoena was issued to a “foreign government-owned company.”
The three-page opinion released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is the latest twist in an opaque dispute that POLITICO and other media outlets have tied to Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The ruling offers the intriguing detail that the entity fighting the Mueller subpoena is a foreign government-owned company, not a specific individual, as many experts had speculated.
But the ruling also still leaves many important aspects of the fight shielded from public view, including the kind of work done by the company, the name of the country that owns the firm and just what information is being sought. The order also offers no direct confirmation that the matter involves Mueller’s team.
That scratches a few entities like Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Cyprus, both of which are publicly traded. It does, though, leave one intriguing financial entity as a possibility: Vnesheconombank, the 100% government-owned development bank of the Russian Federation. The bank has been in financial trouble:
VEB has suffered massive losses in 2014-2015, leading to a 330 billion rubles government bailout in 2015,[15] followed by 150 billion rubles in 2016 and a similar amount planned for 2017.[16][17] VEB was the main lender for the 2014 Winter Olympics, and many of the loans originating from the games missed original returns forecasts, or had to be restructured.[18]
In March 2016, the bank was promised a $2.2 billion bailout from the Russian government.
In addition, it’s been hindered by — you guessed it — US sanctions:
In July 2014, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed economic sanctions that prohibited U.S. persons from providing doing business with VEB after the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine.[14] Between 2014 and 2017, the Russian Ministry of Finance spent $10 billion on the bank.[7]
Now, Chris Cuomo has brandished a Trump-signed letter of intent to build the Moscow Trump Tower. It isn’t crazy to think that a condition imposed by Putin — who had to sign off on the final deal — would be that VEB be the lender for the project. If that’s true, then Trump had a financial interest both in being deferential to Putin and in getting rid of the sanctions.
Once Trump was caught between the twin pincers of Putin and the money, it’s a straight downhill shot for all of the rest of the farce: Trump wins nomination; Putin’s new condition is that Clinton be kneecapped, and Putin will help in that effort; the race tightens; Putin recognizes the blackmail opportunity if Trump wins and goes all out. Once Trump wins, the blackmail scenario is complete, and it’s time to lock it up: meetings in the Seychelles, meetings with Michael Flynn, all with the same message — now that you’ve won, pay up, or I expose you.
Speculation of course. But it all hangs together, n'est-ce pas?