NBC News is reporting that the FBI is now investigating Jared Kushner.
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, who is President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is under scrutiny by the FBI as part of its probe into potential collusion between members of Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, NBC News reported late Thursday.
Federal investigators believe Kushner has “significant information” relevant to the investigation, NBC News reported, citing multiple unn amed U.S. officials.
The report noted that Kushner is not necessarily a subject of the investigation or likely to face charges, and that it is unclear whether investigators have requested records from Kushner, as they have from Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Kushner is considered “in a different category” from Manafort and Flynn, according to the report, although it is not clear what differentiates them.
And there are numerous things that Kushner could be investigated for.
First of all Kushner was present when Michael Flynn met with Ambassador Kislyak in Trump Tower during the time when reportedly Flynn was attempted to establish a back channel between Trump and Putin.
Michael Flynn and other advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the exchanges told Reuters…
Six of the previously undisclosed contacts described to Reuters were phone calls between Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and Trump advisers, including Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, three current and former officials said.
Conversations between Flynn and Kislyak accelerated after the Nov. 8 vote as the two discussed establishing a back channel for communication between Trump and `Russian President Vladimir Putin that could bypass the U.S. national security bureaucracy, which both sides considered hostile to improved relations, four current U.S. officials said.
Following this meeting in December a deputy of Kushner's again met with Kislyak and then Kushner, at Kislyak’s suggestion, met with Russian Banker Sergei Gorkov, who besides running a sanctioned state-owned Bank is also a graduate of the FSB Academy.
Kushner met with Kislyak he was a member of the Trump transition team and still a private citizen. After that meeting, which took place in early December, Kislyak requested a second, to which Kushner sent a deputy, to whom Kislyak conveyed he wanted Kushner and Gorkov to meet. Kushner and Gorkov met at a later date.
Gorkov is the head of the Moscow-based Vnesheconombank, a government owned development bank that is sanctioned by the United States for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Vnesheconombank describes itself as funding “major investment projects” — like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet project, the 2014 Sochi Olympics — and “provid[ing] support” for Russian enterprises.
There’s also the fact that Kushner, just like Sessions and Flynn, failed to include these meetings on his security forms.
When Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, sought the top-secret security clearance that would give him access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, he was required to disclose all encounters with foreign government officials over the last seven years.
But Mr. Kushner did not mention dozens of contacts with foreign leaders or officials in recent months. They include a December meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and one with the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconombank, arranged at Mr. Kislyak’s behest.
But wait it gets worse, one of the employees at Gorkov’s previous position at Sberbank was prosecuted as a spy.
It is also the bank at which Evgeny Buryakov worked under “non-official cover” as a banker while actually working for Russian intelligence (the U.S. attorney who announced he pled guilty back in March 2016 was Preet Bharara, whom the White House fired earlier this month).
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Previously, Gorkov was the deputy chairman of the executive board of Sberbank, Russia’s largest state bank, most recently in the news for hiring Trump’s longtime lawyer to defend it in court. Gorkov graduated from Russia’s Academy of the Federal Security Service — that is, of the FSB — in 1994, and is also a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Merit for Services to the Fatherland, second class.
So look, if Gorkov’s bank is sanctioned American’s can’t do business with them. If fact, what is there to talk about with a guy who used to run a bank that had a undercover Russia spy on it’s payroll and is a graduate of former the KGB’s spy academy? What exactly is on the agenda item list for that meeting?
And just what does being “Non-Officlal Cover” mean?
Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and John P. Carlin, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, announced that EVGENY BURYAKOV, a/k/a “Zhenya,” pled guilty today to conspiring to act in the United States as an agent of the Russian Federation, without providing prior notice to the Attorney General.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: “An unregistered intelligence agent, under cover of being a legitimate banker, gathers intelligence on the streets of New York City, trading coded messages with Russian spies who send the clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. This sounds like a plotline for a Cold War-era movie, but in reality, Evgeny Buryakov pled guilty today to a federal crime for his role in just such a scheme. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, Russian spies still seek to operate in our midst under the cover of secrecy. But in New York, thanks to the work of the FBI and the prosecutors in my office, attempts to conduct unlawful espionage will not be overlooked. They will be investigated and prosecuted.”
And one other thing, that banks attorney has links back to Donald Trump.
One of President Donald Trump’s personal attorneys was just named a lead attorney to defend Russia’s largest state-run bank against claims that it helped a granite-mining company raid and kill off its main competitor in the Russian market.
Marc E. Kasowitz is representing OJSC Sberbank of Russia, which is accused in US federal court of conspiring with granite company executives — including Russia’s former minister of economy and trade — in what the plaintiffs say amounts to a “textbook case of Russian corporate raiding.”
And guess who was just named by Trump as his outside counsel on the entire Russia investigation?
President Trump is turning to a longtime ally to represent him in the federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election: Marc Kasowitz, a prominent New York corporate attorney who’s acted as an off-and-on legal fixer of sorts for the president for almost two decades.
The appointment prompted former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, whom Trump described last week as a frontrunner to replace former FBI Director James Comey, to withdraw himself from consideration on Thursday. (Some news outlets reported earlier this week that the White House had already decided to pass over the former legislator and start the process anew.)
“With your selection of Marc Kasowitz to represent you in the various investigations that have begun, I do believe it would be best to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, given my role as a senior counsel in the law firm of which Marc is the senior partner,” Lieberman wrote in his letter.
So Trump’s current lawyer on the Russia investigation, who was just hired yesterday, used to be the attorney for a bank that was run by a graduate of the ex-KGG Academy, that housed a Russian spy, who was prosecuted for conspiracy by Preet Bharara who got fired by Donald Trump after being promised he’d be allowed to stay, and then Jared Kushner has a private meeting with FSB Academy Alumni Guy and magically forgets to mention this tiny little tidbit on his Security clearance forms.
This is a mobius strip of crap I say.
There is also the possibility that the FBI wants to look at Kushner because of the possibility that his advanced voter micro-targeting program with Cambridge Analytics and Brietbart that may have been co-opted or shared with Russian Trolls and bot to spread disinformation during the 2016 campaign, which is already being looked at by Congress.
Breitbart, which was formerly headed by current White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, is reportedly under investigation by the FBI for Russian bots allegedly pushing pro-Trump stories from the website. The website has also repeatedly tried to delegitimize stories of ties between Russia and President Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica is primarily owned by major Trump donor Robert Mercer. Breitbart and Mercer have a symbiotic relationship; he finances the website, and Breitbart regularly promotes the Mercer family’s interests. Bannon also reportedly had a financial stake in Cambridge Analytica, and Federal Election Commission reports have indicated that millions of dollars allegedly paid by a pro-Trump super PAC to the firm were mysteriously sent to a California address registered to Bannon. The Trump campaign also hired the firm and reportedly paid it millions of dollars at the urging of Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah Mercer
Time, in a May 18 report titled “Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America,” reported that “congressional investigations are probing not just Russia’s role” in the 2016 election, “but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign.” The investigators, according to Time, are focusing on “two Trump-linked organizations,” Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart. It added that investigators were specifically “looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts.”
This is just completely, totally fracked.