Once upon a time Republican House member Kevin McCarthy made a “Joke” about Russia.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.
Now it seems that there’s a lot more truth to the statement
than humor.
Members of the team of Russians who secured a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with
Donald Trump Jr. and
Jared Kushner also attempted to
stage a show trial of anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder on Capitol Hill.
The trial, which would have come in the form of a congressional hearing, was scheduled for mid-June 2016 by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a long-standing Russia ally who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe. During the hearing, Rohrabacher had planned to confront Browder with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that viciously attacks him—as well as at least two witnesses linked to the Russian authorities, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Yes, that’s right — one of the witnesses that Rohrabacher planned to question during this “show trial” was going to be Russian Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who also secretly met with Donald Trump Jr. during that very same month in order to dump dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for Trump coming on board with her anti-Magnitski Act crusade against Bill Browder.
Here’s how Bill Browder became Putin’s Enemy #1.
For a time Browder was one of the leading American investors in Russia but eventually Putin decided his assets belong to his oligarch cronies, so false charges were provided against Browder by Putin Pet General Prosecutor General Chaika and he was expelled. His attorney Sergei Magnitski discovered that his resources were being used to stage a $230 Million tax fraud scheme, but after he testified in order to reveal this scheme he himself was arrested on false charges then tortured and murdered in jail.
After several years of lobbying Browder managed to have an anti-corruption bill — called the Magnitski Act — passed and signed to sanction Russian companies that engage in money-laundering and human rights violations.
What we now realize is that this is all being pushed by Chaika, and he was more than wiling to use Rohrabacher to push back on Magnitski.
Rohrabacher’s office was given the film by the Prosecutor General’s office in Moscow, which is run by Yuri Chaika, a close associate of President Vladimir Putin who is accused of widespread corruption, and Viktor Grin, the deputy general prosecutor who has been sanctioned by the United States as part of the Magnitsky Act.
That same Prosecutor General’s office also was listed as being behind the “very high level and sensitive information” that was offered to Donald Trump Jr. in an email prior to his now infamous meeting with Russian officials at Trump Tower on June 9—just days before the congressional hearing. Veselnitskaya attended that meeting with Trump Jr. She also happens to have worked as a prosecutor in the Moscow region and is a close personal friend of Chaika.
The Daily Beast reviewed a copy of a document that was passed to Rohrabacher in Moscow in April 2016. The document, marked “confidential,” was given to Rohrabacher and Behrends. It lays out an alternate reality in which the U.S.—and the rest of the world—has been duped by a fake $230 million scandal that resulted in sanctions being imposed on 44 Russians linked to murder, corruption, or cover-ups.
in other words, it argues that there is no real need of the Magnitski Act because Russian oligarchs and mobsters aren’t really engaged in corruption and murder. Yeah, right.
Ultimately Rohrabacher’s attempt to get a hearing was blocked, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Keeping things in perspective this all originally heated up in 2013 when a Magnitski Act case was filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara against the Prevezon Group and Denys Katsyv whose attorney is former Russia prosecutor Natalia Veselnitskaya.
In fact, Veselnitskaya was already a key figure for the defense in one of the most notorious money-laundering scandals in recent memory, encompassing $230 million in public funds allegedly stolen from the Russians by a network of corrupt bureaucrats and routed into real estate sales, including some in Manhattan, through ironclad Swiss bank accounts. And she was accused of lobbying U.S. officials for a Russian NGO that sought to overturn the Russian ban on U.S. adoptions, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Justice Department and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
…
Katsyv had been Veselnitskaya’s highest-profile client by far, and his defense would be a world-historic success not just for the wealthy real estate investor, but for the Russian establishment under President Vladimir Putin.
We know that Goldstone had emailed Don Jr. saying that the information against Clinton had come from the “Crown Prosecutor” of Russia — being British he clearly was putting it in familiar terms — but the fact is he was referring to Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika. And as it happens Veselnitskaya remains in close contact with Russian Prosecutor General Chaika.
Veselnitskaya told The Journal she communicated with Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika and regularly passed along information about a US-born hedge-fund manager named William Browder, who was a critic of Russia and a supporter of US sanctions that riled the Kremlin.
"She's been in touch with Chaika daily coordinating the Russian state attack against me," Browder said in an interview with Business Insider on Friday. "They have initiated a massive list of criminal allegations against me including: murder, espionage, fraud, tax evasion, bankruptcy and slander."
Veselnitskaya said she worked to spread information about Browder in retaliation for his lobbying on behalf of the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which was passed to punish those suspected of being involved in the death of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme in 2008 that implicated high-level Kremlin officials and allies of President Vladimir Putin.
So we do now know that although she is now a defense attorney, Veselnitskaya was a “government lawyer” when she was a prosecutor and she made this trip to New York to talk to Donald Jr. carrying information and documents that were supplied by Chaika, a key member of the Russian government.
In addition to that Veselnitskaya also has links to Russian Intelligence.
The overlap between nodes of Veselnitskaya’s anti-Magnitsky activities and apparent Russian government-linked entities is “all classic organization structure for intelligence operations,” a former Central Intelligence Agency field officer told The Daily Beast when presented with the evidence that Browder had gathered.
“Good intelligence operations always will appear legitimate. They will be legitimate. But not only legitimate,” the former US intelligence veteran explained in an email. “I was a diplomat. I did real work. But I was also an intelligence officer acting operationally every day. It is the same for the structures [detailed in Browder’s research]: They are real. They intentionally mask FSB activity and involvement. They cover it and make it possible. The intelligence activity is the POINT of the structures.”
According to a Wednesday report from McClatchy, Veselnitskaya occasionally made her FSB links explicit. When a human rights group in Russia began investigating alleged corruption involving one of her clients, Veselnitskaya reportedly told the group’s leader that the FSB would come after the organization if it persisted.
And as you dig further it gets worse.
Vesilnitskaya represents HRAGI, which has reported lobbying Congress on issues pertaining to a ban on the adoption of Russian children by American families. In a very broad sense that is accurate—the ban was imposed by President Vladimir Putin as retaliation for the Magnitsky Act—but Browder says the group’s primary goals are to rescind sanctions and discredit those, like Browder, pressing for their preservation.
Among HRAGI’s lobbyists is Rinat Akhmetshin, who has described himself as a former Russian counterintelligence officer, but said he is no longer in the government’s employ. HRAGI removed Akhmetshin from its roster of lobbyists on May 8, five days before the Justice Department settled a long-running corruption case against a Russian company called Prevezon Holdings. Prevezon’s owner is an HRAGI lobbying client. Veselnitskaya is his lawyer.
After the firing of Preet Bharara the case against Prevezon was settled for pennies on the dollar. How strange it is that that happened.
Particularly since another thread of that same case involved a money laundering and gambling ring that was operating out of suite 63A of Trump Tower, just three floor beneath the penthouse.
Between 2011 and 2013 the Bureau had a warrant to spy on a high-level criminal Russian money-laundering ring, which operated in unit 63A of the iconic skyscraper — three floors below Mr Trump's penthouse.
The investigation led to the indictment of more than 30 people, including alleged mafia boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, according to ABC News.
…
The suspected mobster – who is accused of moving $50m (£40m) in illegal money to the US – remains at large, even after Interpol issued a red notice for his detention.
That case ended in prison sentences, but not for Tokhtakhounov who was out of the country and was actually seen later that year on the red carpet at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
On April 16, 2013, federal agents burst into a swanky apartment at Trump Tower in New York City as part of a larger raid that rounded up 29 suspected members of two global gambling rings with operations allegedly overseen by a supposed Russian mob boss named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The Russian was not nabbed by US law enforcement. Since being indicted in the United States a decade earlier for allegedly rigging an ice skating competition at the 2002 Olympics, he had been living in Russia, beyond the reach of Western authorities. And this new gambling indictment did not appear to inconvenience Tokhtakhounov. Seven months after the bust, he was a VIP attendee at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe 2013 contest held in Moscow. In fact, Tokhtakhounov hit the red carpet within minutes of Trump. An alleged crime lord who was a fugitive from American justice was apparently a celebrity guest at Trump’s event.
And as we now know Akhmetshin with his GRU background was also at the meeting with Don Jr. as was Ike Kaveladze who also has his own dark history with money laundering.
Kaveladze, a U.S. citizen who was born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, currently works for the Agalarovs as a vice president of their family company, Crocus International. But Kaveladze also has a checkered history.
An October 2000 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) accuses Kaveladze of being involved in a massive effort, over nearly 10 years, to launder $1.4 billion of Russian and Eastern European money through U.S. banks
In a a nine-month inquiry that subpoenaed bank records, the investigators found that an unknown number of Russians and other East Europeans moved more than $1.4 billion through accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco.
The accounts had been opened by Irakly Kaveladze, who immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1991, according to Citibank and Mr. Kaveladze. He set up more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers and then opened the bank accounts for them, without knowing who owned the corporations, according to the report by the General Accounting Office, which has not been made public.
Kaveladze denied any wrongdoing and described the GAO investigation as a “witch hunt.”
“Witch Hunt” yeah, we’ve heard that one before. Perhaps the next question we should then ask is….”Does he float?”
Of better yet “Which way does the money flow?” because ultimately money is what this is all about.