Going somewhat under the radar in recent months has been two of guilty pleas already obtained by Special Counsel. One for Paul Manafort’s business partner Rick Gates and the other for this seemingly random lawyer associate of his from London, Alex Van Der Zwaan. Both have pleaded guilty to lying to Federal Investigator with the additional juicy tidbit that Gates also pleaded guilty to being involved in a “conspiracy to defraud America” with his various business dealings as a foreign agent on behalf of former Ukrainian President Yanakovych and his good friend, Vladamir Putin.
In fact it was fairly recently report that Gates plea and his promise to cooperate with Mueller has made quite a few people in the White House, very very nervous.
Just a couple days ago Politico reported that Trump’s attorneys — well, what’s left of them — are very concerned about what Rick Gates has been telling Mueller since he pleaded guilty.
“They’ve been very concerned about it,” said a defense attorney working on the Russia case. “It’s something they’re worried about.” “He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign.
“He saw everything” — and that makes them worried? What, pray tell, could there have been to see?
And now we have this bit tucked inside the sentencing document for Van Der Zwaan.
www.rawstory.com/...
The 30-page sentencing memorandum filed by the special counsel alleges that Gates was communicating with “Person A,” who is described as “a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU”—the foreign military intelligence agency of the Russia federation. According to the document, Gates was aware of “Person A’s” connection to Russian intelligence services.
Van der Zwaan—the son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Khan, who is suing BuzzFeed News over its publication of the Trump-Russia dossier—pleaded guilty in February to lying to the special counsel. According to the sentencing motion filed Tuesday, van der Zwaan’s lies “were material” to the special counsel’s investigation, and directly involved communications with Gates and “Person A,” a former GRU officer.
“That Gates and Person A were directly communicating in September and October 2016 was pertinent to the investigation,” the special counsel argued in its sentencing memo. ”Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agents assisting the Special Counsel’s Office assess that Person A has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”
Well, isn’t that special?
There are several interesting facts revealed here. The first is Gates was in contact with a former GRU officer and the second is that Van der Zwaan knew that and felt it necessary to lie about it to the FBI.
When Mueller originally indicted Van Der Zwaan on February 20h this is how I originally described the case. www.dailykos.com/...
Mueller indicts lawyer Alex van Der Zwaan for lying about his contacts with Rick Gates. In a report last year, The Kyiv Post described Zwaan as “the Russian-speaking son-in-law of Russian oligarch German Khan.” Khan was included in a State Department list of oligarchs that have close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Manafort while working for Yanakovych had commissioned Zwaan’s law firm to produce a report justifying the prosecution of former Ukraine Prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
So here we see that Zwaan and hsi lawfirm were part of efforts by Yanakovych to prosecute his predecessor and political rival with a — pardon the phrase — Trumped up phony report of corruption on their part.
Why that’s just so Donald J, of them. You might even say they were pulling a Nunes.
The second interesting thing is that Van Der Zwaan and his guilty plea now have a direct connection to the Steele dossier through his father in law Russian oligarch German Khan who is mentioned for his connections to Russian conglomerate Alfa Group and Alfa Bank.
This is how Alfa — which was misspelled Alpha by Steele — is referenced in the dossier.
www.documentcloud.org/...
- Key intermediary in relationship identified as Oleg GOVORUN, currently Head Ofa Presidential Administration department but throughout the 1990s, the Alpha executive who delivered illicit cashd irectly to PUTIN
PUTIN personally unbothered about Alpha?s current lack Of investment in Russia but under pressure from colleagues over this and able to exploit it’s lever over Alpha interlocutors
Detail1.
Speaking to a trusted compatriot in mid-September 2016, a top level Russian government Official commented on the history and current state Of relations between President PUTIN and the Alpha Group Of businesses led by oligarchs Mikhail RIDMAN, Petr AVEN and German KHAN.
The Russian government figure reported that although they had had their ups and downs, the leading figures in Alpha currently were on very good terms with PUTIN. Significant favours continued to be done in both directions, primarily political ones for PUTIN and business/legal ones for Alpha.
Also, RIDMAN and AVEN continued to give informal advice tO PUTIN on foreign policy, and especially about the US where he distrusted advice being given to him by officials.
2. Although RIDMAN recently had met directly with PUTIN in Russia, much Of the dialogue and business between them was mediated through a senior Presidential Administration Official, Oleg GOVORUN, who currently headed the department therein responsible for Social CO-operation Withthe CIS. GOVORUN was trusted by PUTIN and recently had accompanied him to Uzbekistan to pay respects at the tomb of former president KARIMOV. However according to the top level Russian government official, during the 1990’s GOVORUN had been Head Of Government Relations at Alpha Group and in reality, the ?driver? and ?bag carrier?
Apparently this reference that Ridman, Aven and Khan the heads of Alfa Group were buddy buddy with Putin and tend to share political and business favors with him — really really pissed somebody off because they sued Buzzfeed for publishing that.
www.politico.com/...
The owners of a Russian bank are suing BuzzFeed for publishing a dossier containing unproven claims that the businessmen were involved in bribing Russian President Vladimir Putin years ago and took part in an alleged Russian government scheme to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan of Alfa Bank filed the defamation lawsuit Friday in state court in Manhattan, seeking unspecified damages from BuzzFeed as well as editor-in-chief Ben Smith, reporter Ken Bensinger and editors Miriam Elder and Mark Schoofs.
The suit seized on Smith admitting that at the time BuzzFeed published the dossier in January he knew aspects of the dossier were wrong and that other aspects of it were unproven. That admission indicates BuzzFeed had knowledge sufficient to meet the legal standard for libel, the court complaint says.
Ben Smith was right to admit some aspects of the dossier were wrong, for starters he misspelled Alfa Group. He also mispelled Fridman's last name a “Ridman”, so yeah some things are wrong — but are they the important things? I mean, maybe he really meant ALPHA GROUP with a completely different buy name Ridman? Ok, fine probably not, but the idea that powerful Russian business conglomerate just might have links to and potentially do favors for Putin really doesn’t seem like all that amazing a stretch, or that they should be upset enough to sue about.
Why exactly were they so annoyed about ti that they decide to sue?
I wonder if it might have because they possibly have something to hide about themselves, Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, like perhaps a link of some kind. Or perhaps a server or two.
www.cnn.com/...
(CNN) Federal investigators and computer scientists continue to examine whether there was a computer server connection between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, sources close to the investigation tell CNN.
...
One U.S. official said investigators find the server relationship "odd" and are not ignoring it. But the official said there is still more work for the FBI to do. Investigators have not yet determined whether a connection would be significant.
Internet data shows that last summer, a computer server owned by Russia-based Alfa Bank repeatedly looked up the contact information for a computer server being used by the Trump Organization -- far more than other companies did, representing 80% of all lookups to the Trump server.
It's unclear if the Trump Organization server itself did anything in return. No one has produced evidence that the servers actually communicated.
So here we have Alfa Bank, the guys who’ve been reported to do favors for Putin but really don’t want anyone saying that out loud, and one of their servers is having a weird love affair with one of Trump’s servers almost as it there was an attempt to setup an electronic back channel between them, meanwhile the lawyer son-in-law of one of the banks owners is lying to the FBI about Trump’s deputy campaign chairman having repeated contacts with a former Russian spy.
Hm...
My best guess is that spy is most likely Manafort associate Konstantine Kilimnik who with his own former GRU background fits the description perfectly and had been on his payroll handling efforts for him in the Ukraine and also facilitating communications between Manafort and his long-time Russian financial benefactor Oleg Deripaska who had paid him $10 Million per year to “promote Putin’s agenda” around the world.
From most of the reporting I’ve seen to date it was thought that when Manafort left the Trump campaign in August of 2016 after the revelation that he may have been paid $12 Millions in cash under the through a slush fund operated by Yanakovich, at which point his communications with Kilimnik — which allegedly included Manafort attempting to provide Deripaska with a “private briefing” on the inner status of the Trump campaign — had ended at that time.
Now it seems that Gates may have begun taking up that mantle during September and October just as things in the Trump campaign grew significantly hot with the release of the Access Hollywood Tape, the Podesta Emails and ultimately the Abedine emails letter.
All during that time RIck Gates was in communications with Russian intelligence.
Or maybe it’s not Kilimnik, it could be an entirely different person with who is a former member of Russian Military Intelligence — like say Guccifer2.0 — which would be even worse.
A GRU agent is believed to be responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee emails that were published by WikiLeaks. According to a recent Daily Beast report, Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for supply WikiLeaks with the emails, “was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU)… an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.” In its declassified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Director of National Intelligence assessed “with high confidence” that the GRU “used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.” Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone exchanged Twitter direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 during the 2016 campaign.
During the same months Gates with allegedly in touch with the former GRU officer, Trump was exploiting the stolen emails on the campaign trail. The future president mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the month of October 2016 alone — but then preposterously claimed after the election that WikiLeaks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”
Since the allegation that the Russian with links to the GRU is a “business associate” of Manafort and Gates that continues to lean toward Kilimnik rather than Guccifer 2.0.
Regardless of which Russian Spy we’re talking about this was considered sensitive enough that a lawyer — let me repeat A LAWYER — who should have known better and who has ties to Putin via the Steel dossier decided to lie about it to the FBI.
Kinda makes you wonder just what it was that Gates and the Russian intel guy were talking about, doesn’t it? Now maybe I see why Trump’s lawyers just might be a little “worried.”
What was that thing that Trump is always saying “No Collusion?”
This on top of everything else we’ve already heard about all this seems pretty collusion-like to me.
Unless of course the son-in-law of the guy bribing Putin and doing favors for him just happened to decide to destroy his legal career and lie Federal investigators about Gates and (probably) Kilimnik when they just sharing Borsht Recipies.