The Moscow Project has connected for us disparate elements of the criminal operations of the Trump/GOP/Putin cabal:
Through his own admission, Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime attorney, played the role of Trump’s ‘fixer’ in the Stormy Daniels affair, paying Daniels hush money and covering it up in the waning days of the campaign.
The allegations against Cohen in the Stormy Daniels affair bear a striking similarity to reports from the Steele Dossier: namely, that Michael Cohen went to Prague as a representative of Trump’s campaign to meet with the Russians to cover up collusion between the two sides.
and in doing so, reveal plot lines so outlandish that they would be deemed too absurdly far-fetched for a Lifetime network movie.
Every criminal enterprise needs Bagmen:
NOUN (plural bagmen)
(Note how neatly the definitions each apply to the various nefarious machinations of the GOP in all of its guises.)
This has been Cohen’s role in the Trump criminal enterprise for decades:
The allegations in the dossier fit a pattern seen in the Stormy Daniels story. Cohen has a history of being Trump’s fixer, making hush-money payments and covering his tracks.
- Cohen reportedly uses “intimidation tactics [and] hush money” to protect Trump from various public scandals such as compromising pictures, allegations of sexual misconduct, and alleged affairs.
- In the case of Stormy Daniels, Cohen has admitted to paying $130,000 as part of an effort to keep her quiet during the 2016 election. He was accused by Daniels of intimidation and coercion.
- Cohen has denied that Daniels had an affair with Trump. He has also denied that the payments had anything to do with the election and denied threatening Daniels.
- Another former model who claims to have had an affair with Trump, Karen McDougal, said in a lawsuit that Cohen was involved in efforts to pay her off to ensure her silence.
- Cohen went to extreme lengths to hide his efforts in the Daniels case.
- He incorporated a shell company in Delaware called Essential Consultants LLC in order to pay Daniels the money.
- The settlement with Daniels obscured the parties’ identities, referring to her via the pseudonym “Peggy Peterson”.
- When Cohen finally admitted that he was involved, he stated that he paid Daniels with his own money, and that he was not reimbursed by the Trump organization or by Trump himself.
- Even though he used his Trump Organization email to arrange the money transfer, Cohen claimed Trump did not know about the payment.
Cohen, of course, is not the only well-compensated bagman in the Trump/GOP/Putin cabal. The name Paul Manafort may not have been publicly associated with Trump prior to 2016 (although, as we’ll see later in this ripping yarn, his association with Trump goes back at least three decades), but he has been operating as a bagman for the GOP in its alliance with the Kremlin.
The many threads of Manafort’s work as a bagman for numerous corrupt employers and clients are knitted together in narrative of the origins, and battles over, the Magnitsky Act:
It all dates back to the passage of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act on Dec. 14, 2012. This landmark piece of U.S. legislation, named for a tax lawyer in Moscow who uncovered massive corruption and allegedly died for that sin, sought to sanction and bar from entry into the United States dozens of Russian officials and mobsters implicated in a $230 million tax fraud and its murderous cover-up…
…efforts to have the law replicated in other democratic jurisdictions, including the European Parliament, have gained momentum, thanks largely to the relentless activism of one American financier.
William Browder is the CEO of the Hermitage Fund, a onetime Moscow-based investment firm whose offices were raided and whose subsidiaries were stolen and reregistered for use in dummying up tax liabilities in 2007.
Sergei Magnitsky was Browder’s tax lawyer, a Russian everyman who uncovered the fraud and took his findings to the authorities, expecting them to be relieved at the prospect of recovering money effectively stolen from the state.
Instead, Magnitsky was accused of being a tax fraudster himself. He was arrested by some of the same Interior Ministry officials he’d implicated in the Hermitage fraud, and there is strong evidence—corroborated by Russia’s Presidential Council on Human Rights, no less—to suggest that he was deprived of life-saving medical treatment for gallstones and acute pancreatitis while in pretrial detention.
There is further evidence that Magnitsky was handcuffed to a bed and beaten by truncheon-wielding guards who left him to die in an isolation cell in Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow.
In 2013, a Moscow court put Browder on trial in absentia alongside the dead Magnitsky in the first posthumous prosecution in the history of Russia.
Browder has since defeated efforts to use an Interpol Red Notice to have him extradited back to Russia to face trial for what he insists are bogus tax-evasion charges.
Since the passage of the Magnitsky Act, much of the looted $230 million has been found or frozen. Some was in Swiss and Latvian bank accounts; some was in offshore companies technically “owned” by Russian concert cellist Sergei Roldugin (who happens to be Putin’s best friend), and some was even in six-figure condos in Manhattan.
Of course, displeasing Putin will inevitably draw a response:
As the investigations and asset seizures have begun to bite, a lobbying effort has gotten under way to try once again to have the Magnitsky Act repealed.
As before, disadvantaged Russian children are being dangled as bait, with a wink-and-a-nudge promise to have the Russian law rescinded if the American law is taken off the books.
As one U.S. official put it privately, the current messaging is being “led by ogres out of central casting. They’re saying, ‘You repeal Magnitsky and we’ll let go of the kids.’ And it’s not even American kids. It’s their own. And they’re kids with Down syndrome and spina bifida.”
In February, an organization calling itself the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, an obvious echo of the full name of the Magnitsky Act, was registered in Delaware. Little trace of the activities or provenance of this organization exist online, apart from its “under construction” website, whose homepage is written in ungrammatical English.
HRAGIF claims to be “working on analyzing legal and legislative options to help overturn this adoption ban,” according to its site.
Adoptions you say?
Why, isn’t that what the not in any way connected with the Trump organization or campaign meeting in Trump Tower meeting was all about? Hmm…
Prevezon attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was in the U.S. to attend an appeals court argument in the Prevezon case on the same day she took part in the Trump Tower meeting with Trump's son Donald Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Trump said last year that the focus of the meeting was Russia adoptions...
But it seems HRAGIF was not really interested in helping orphaned Russian children:
Apparently, the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation is not what it claims to be on its website, which features images of hugging and smiling families.
A former Soviet intelligence officer involved with the foundation, Rinat Akhmetshin, accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with then-candidate Donald Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his campaign manager Paul Manafort, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
The meeting has been heavily scrutinized with the revelation that Veselnitskaya offered to provide Trump campaign officials with information damaging to Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton…
The foundation was financed by $500,000 in undisclosed donations primarily from rich Russians linked to a high-profile prosecutor as well as a Russian Railways deputy director Petr Katsvy. Though the Russian government prohibited American adoptions of Russian kids to counter the Magnitsky Act, the foundation’s real mission was to fight the sanctions, according to Bloomberg…
“This whole organization is a sham and a front to pursue the Russian government’s objectives,” Bill Browder, an American fund manager whose accountant was Magnitsky, told Bloomberg.
Which is to say, the Trump campaign had taken a very active interest in sanctions by the US against Russia.
That interest, and the subsequent efforts to have the sanctions removed, coalesce around Bagman #2 of our story— Paul Manafort, who perhaps we should call ‘Bagman to the Stars among corrupt and murderous dictators everywhere’:
Prior to joining the Trump campaign in March 2016, Paul Manafort worked extensively for more than a decade to advance Russian interests in Ukraine and the United States.
Manafort’s association with Ukrainian and Russian politics began in 2004, when he started working for the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych.
That year, Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, were involved in a disastrous and scandal-plagued election. According to public-opinion polls, Yanukovych, at the time Ukraine’s prime minister, trailed by double digits going into November 21, election day. After initial results showed Yanukovych with a three-point victory, international watchdogs identified numerous irregularities, raising allegations of ballot-box stuffing, intimidation at polling stations, and massive increases in voter rolls and turnout in eastern regions of the country that heavily favored Yanukovych. Additionally, Yanukovych’s opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, had been poisoned and nearly assassinated in September. In response, the Ukrainian people took to the streets, and their widespread protests became known as the Orange Revolution, the first of several pro-democracy “color” revolutions around the world. Amid these protests and in response to growing international pressure, Ukraine’s Supreme Court voided the election results and declared a re-vote, to take place on December 26.
Manafort’s work with Yanukovych began when the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov recruited Manafort to assist with the second election. At the time, Manafort was known not only for his work as an American political operative with ties to the Republican establishment but also for his willingness to represent unsavory characters around the world. Through the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, which he cofounded in 1980, Manafort had previously worked on behalf of dictators around the world, including notorious human rights abusers such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Jonas Savimbi of Angola; those contracts and others led to Manafort’s firm receiving the nickname “The Torturers’ Lobby.”
Of course, Manafort and his childhood friend Roger Stone have served as operatives and fixers for the GOP for decades:
Manafort knows how to bullwhip and wheedle delegates at a contested convention. He’s done it before, assisting Gerald Ford in stifling Ronald Reagan’s insurgency at the GOP’s summer classic of 1976. In the conventions that followed, the Republican Party often handed Manafort control of the program and instructed him to stage-manage the show. He produced the morning-in-America convention of 1984 and the Bob Dole nostalgia-thon of 1996…
Although his client list has included chunks of the Fortune 500, he has also built a booming business working with dictators. As Roger Stone has boasted about their now-disbanded firm: “Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find. … Dictators are in the eye of the beholder.” Manafort had a special gift for changing how dictators are beheld by American eyes. He would recast them as noble heroes—venerated by Washington think tanks, deluged with money from Congress.
We can perhaps begin to get a clearer picture of how the methods and clientele of these two bagmen— Cohen and Manafort— converge in the candidacy of Putin’s tool:
Manafort has been tangentially connected with Trump since the 1980s, although there is little reason to believe they had anything more than cursory interactions prior to the 2016 election. In the 1980s, the Trump Organization briefly contracted with Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly to lobby the government on gambling and real estate. According to a memo Manafort reportedly sent his and Trump’s mutual acquaintance Thomas Barrack while trying to join the Trump campaign, Manafort personally managed “the Mar a Lago FAA problem Trump had.” That business interaction appears to have been the source of Trump’s long and close relationship with Manafort’s partner Roger Stone, a notorious Republican operative often described as a “dirty trickster” who had been attempting to convince Trump to run for president since at least 2000 and served as an informal adviser early in his 2016 campaign. In 2006, 20 years after his initial interaction with Trump, Manafort purchased an apartment in Trump Tower…
Several of the most pivotal moments of convergence between the Trump campaign and Russian interests occurred during Manafort’s tenure as campaign chairman. On April 27, Trump and then-Senator Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., reportedly discussing “matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for U.S.-Russia relations in a Trump administration.” That evening, Trump gave a foreign-policy speech in which he called for “an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia.”
Perhaps the single most notable occurrence during Manafort’s tenure was the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower between representatives of the Trump campaign and several Russian individuals claiming to represent the Russian government and offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump. As reported by The New York Times in July 2017, Donald Jr. confirmed that Manafort would be in attendance on June 7; hours later, Trump announced at a press conference that he was “going to give a major speech on probably Monday … discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.” Donald Jr. looped Manafort into his email chain with the music producer Rob Goldstone on June 8.
The next day at Trump Tower, Donald Jr., Kushner, and Manafort met with Goldstone, the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian-American lobbyist and suspected Russian agent Rinat Akhmetshin, the suspected money launderer and real-estate executive Irakly Kaveladze, and their translator Anatoli Samochornov. At the meeting, the group first briefly discussed the information that Veselnitskaya claimed to have on Clinton. The attendees claim that they next discussed adoptions, which is believed to be a euphemistic reference to the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned several high-ranking Russian officials for human-rights abuses to which Russia responded by curtailing adoptions of Russian children by American citizens. According to CNN, Manafort’s notes from the meeting, obtained by the FBI in a pre-dawn raid of his home in July 2017, reinforce this notion, “portray[ing] a meeting largely focused on a Russian lawyer’s complaints about investment fund manager William Browder and his role in pushing sanctions legislation to punish Russia.”
Calling Trump’s personal Bagman #1:
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, defended the meeting between Trump Jr. and the Kremlin-connected lawyer as, “the purpose of the election is to win” which would seem to excuse almost any kind of behavior if it led to electoral victory. Yahoo News reported:
But Cohen adamantly rejected the idea there was anything improper about meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, given that Trump Jr. was told she might have information helpful to Trump’s campaign. “The purpose of the election is to win,” said Cohen, adding, “Why is this any different?” than the unverified “dossier” on Trump’s ties to Russia prepared by a former British spy working for a Washington research firm hired by his political opponents.
One last thread to connect Cohen to Manafort— Felix Sater:
On Monday, the Times released an email between Trump business associate Felix Sater and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen in which Sater bragged that he would get Trump elected with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom the U.S. has a frosty, adversarial relationship.
“Our boy can become president of the U.S.A. and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Cohen. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
And now the the ties that bind the Trump/GOP Bagmen, #’s 1 and 2, can be brought into focus:
Felix Sater is a Russian-born dealmaker who served as managing director for Bayrock Group, a real estate development firm with an office two floors down from The Trump Organization in Trump Tower. He is a convicted felon who has been accused of dealings with Russian and American organized crime.
In February of 2017, a week before Michael Flynn left his position as President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Sater was one of three people who presented Flynn with a plan to end sanctions against Russia. The other two people involved were Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney and Sater’s friend from Brooklyn, and Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker connected to Paul Manafort.
Fixing elections, funneling money, supporting criminals and criminal activity; that’s the job description of Bagmen. It’s the job description of Cohen and Manafort. And they both share the professional portfolio of the полезный идиот Putin installed in the oval office, which means they each, ultimately work for the boss of bosses of Moscow’s организованная преступность syndicate.