Nice to know that DHS, FBI, and others have made Trump’s life in Florida as complicated as it was in NYC. Since 1986, it’s always been about dirty money. Whodathought $DJT (TMTG) was involved with Russian money? Anton Postolnikov is the nephew of Aleksandr Smirnov, the fake FBI informant (see GOP’s bogus Impeachment investigation)
Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.
The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.
But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.
www.theguardian.com/...
“Trump's Truth Social has only been kept afloat by loans from a trust run by a Russian from St Petersburg that owns a shady Caribbean bank that specializes in processing online payments for the porn industry.”
A later, even more thorough bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, spearheaded by its then chairman, the Republican Richard Burr, established facts that Mueller had not. Among them: Trump’s campaign chief Paul Manafort’s Kremlin-connected point man, with whom he shared sensitive campaign data, was in fact a Russian spy.
Several Trump operatives were tried and convicted for their conduct adjacent to the Russian interference and for trying to obstruct Mueller’s investigation.
The man who stymied Mueller most aggressively was Trump himself, who, by dint of being president, couldn’t be charged with (or, in Mueller’s thinking, even accused of) criminal obstruction. But the evidentiary record was clear. Trump tried to terminate the investigation, solicited document destruction, and dangled (and eventually supplied) pardons to witnesses and targets to secure their silence or lies.
In part as a result of this obstruction, Mueller did not believe he could sustain a criminal conspiracy case against Trump or members of his campaign, where he’d have to overcome an exceptionally high burden of proof. But the evidence of cooperation (or collusion, as it came to be called in the discourse) was voluminous. Not only did Mueller uncover contacts and inducements that were unknown to the public before his appointment, Trump himself openly solicited intervention (“Russia, if you’re listening”) and would go on to both defend soliciting foreign interference in U.S. elections and request and extort it from other governments ahead of the 2020 election.
www.offmessage.net/...
And then there’s the bullets for the gun:
Dylan Howard told me that David Pecker had spent thousands of dollars to buy the file from a private investigator. Pecker was always paranoid about leaks and had paid this investigator’s firm to do sweeps of A.M.I.’s office looking for listening devices. And now, the investigator had become a source. (In response to questions from The Times, the investigator said he could not remember many details of this episode.)
The dossier, Howard explained, had come to our source via the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna — Italian intelligence, where the source apparently had connections. This is why the emails, though originally written in English, were in Italian. The agency had received the emails from Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the source said, which had itself hacked Clinton’s servers and obtained the emails from a laptop Abedin shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Despite the many red flags and ethical questions that chain of custody raised, Howard believed in the dossier. And besides, Pecker had already decreed that this would be the cover story. The research team had found two New York University students to translate the documents. When they arrived, I was instructed to confiscate their cellphones.
www.nytimes.com/...
"A top psychologist says that Donald Trump will be “cognitively incapacitated” in less than four years. Americans deserve to know if a candidate’s likely to fall off the mental cliff."