Now that the weekend, full of the sublime and the ridiculous, is behind us, I’m really hoping for 24x7 Mueller Time coverage.
In APNews this morning, there was this lovely article:
Mueller probe witness secretly backed UAE agenda in Congress
A top fundraiser for President Donald Trump received millions of dollars from a political adviser to the United Arab Emirates last April, just weeks before he began handing out a series of large political donations to U.S. lawmakers considering legislation targeting Qatar, the UAE’s chief rival in the Persian Gulf, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Of course the article very carefully hedged its language for legal reasons, but it is looking delicious, especially considering that George Nader has full immunity and has flipped for Mueller.
The timeline of the influx of cash wired by Nader, an adviser to Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the de facto leader of the UAE, may provide grist for U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team as it probes the activities of Trump and his associates during the 2016 campaign and beyond. However, it is not clear that Mueller has expanded his investigation in that direction.
Mueller’s investigators are looking into two meetings close to Trump’s inauguration attended by Nader and bin Zayed. The pair joined a meeting at New York’s Trump Tower in December 2016 that included presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist at the time. A month later, Nader and bin Zayed were a world away on the Seychelles island chain in the Indian Ocean, meeting with Erik Prince, the founder of the security company Blackwater, and the Kremlin-connected head of a large Russian sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.
Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s team after investigators stopped him at Dulles International Airport, according to a person familiar with his case.
“However, it is not clear that Mueller has expanded his investigation in that direction.”….LOL Git’em, Mueller!!!
Also want to rehash the news about the Baku Hotel in Azerbaijan, that got buried under the news cycle. Looking bad for both Ivanka and Donald.
Last March the New Yorker had an extensive article on Donald and Ivanka Trump’s involvement in the Baku Hotel:
Donald Trump’s Worst Deal The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
A former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism says that, when he learned of the Trump hotel project, he asked himself, “Why would someone put a luxury hotel there? Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”
The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs.
Ivanka Trump was the most senior Trump Organization official on the Baku project. In October, 2014, she visited the city to tour the site and offer advice. An executive at Mace, the London-based construction firm that oversaw the tower’s conversion to a hotel, met with Ivanka in Baku and New York. He told me, “She had very strong feelings, not just about the design but about the back of the hotel—landscaping, everything.” The Azerbaijani lawyer said, “Ivanka personally approved everything.”
The sustained back-and-forth between the Trump Organization and the Mammadovs has legal significance. If parties involved in the Trump Tower Baku project participated in any illegal financial conduct, and if the Trump Organization exerted a degree of control over the project, the company could be vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
Rosenstein’s press conference on Friday focused on Iran, in particular indicting nine hackers who are members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard:
Rosenstein Has Smoking Gun, Points At Iran
Monday, Mar 26, 2018 · 4:20:08 PM +00:00 · cordgrass
highlighting this comment from below from northleft:
What continually surprises me is the relatively small network of stupid international grifters around Trump and the rest of these guys.
Turns out that global crime rings are just like 19th century street gangs, except with ski weekends in Gstaad.