Definitely was not blackmail. That is definitely how Team Trump wants to spin it though. Would have thought that you were too smart to fall for that one bootlegger10.
It's obvious that Trump owns this mess....cheating on his wife...paying off the porn star...etc.
But someone that takes $ and signs a deal and then still goes public with the info? That's messed up. Breaking a contract or using slimy legalize to get out of it is awful....and straight out of trumps own playbook. So he got what's coming to him, and still Stormy is pretty awful for doing that. Though I'm glad she did
Her point is that there was no contract. tRump didn't sign it and several people in his group say that he didn't know about it. You can't enter into a contract without knowing about it....or signing it
Post edited by Gern Blansten on
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Every second spent worrying about big bad Stormy Daniels on big bad SNL is a win for Donald Trump.
How is it a win for trump?
Because it's a narrative painting him as a victim. The faux outrage we've seen over Daniels on SNL centers on her being a blackmailer and NBC being wrong for putting her on TV. That's a win for Trump.
Every second spent worrying about big bad Stormy Daniels on big bad SNL is a win for Donald Trump.
How is it a win for trump?
Because it's a narrative painting him as a victim. The faux outrage we've seen over Daniels on SNL centers on her being a blackmailer and NBC being wrong for putting her on TV. That's a win for Trump.
Absolutely. It's idiotic.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
Team Mueller is not distracted. Team Mueller is quietly going about following the money, from Russia with Love and a PTape, all the way to impeachment.
Definitely was not blackmail. That is definitely how Team Trump wants to spin it though. Would have thought that you were too smart to fall for that one bootlegger10.
It's obvious that Trump owns this mess....cheating on his wife...paying off the porn star...etc.
But someone that takes $ and signs a deal and then still goes public with the info? That's messed up. Breaking a contract or using slimy legalize to get out of it is awful....and straight out of trumps own playbook. So he got what's coming to him, and still Stormy is pretty awful for doing that. Though I'm glad she did
Her point is that there was no contract. tRump didn't sign it and several people in his group say that he didn't know about it. You can't enter into a contract without knowing about it....or signing it
Hence the crazy legalize I mentioned. In court, probably right. Still shady to take $ and then say no contract.
But again, trump's been using lawyers, contracts, and legalize to benefit him his entire life...so at least she is doing this to a guy like that.
Team Mueller is not distracted. Team Mueller is quietly going about following the money, from Russia with Love and a PTape, all the way to impeachment.
1) How much $ 2) Where in Russia? 3) Why "with love" how does that fit? 4) How long in duration is said Ptape? 5) Isn't it actually Pee Tape or Urine Tape? I mean PTape could stand for Professional Tape or Poop tape. 6) Mueller can impeach the president?
Every second spent worrying about big bad Stormy Daniels on big bad SNL is a win for Donald Trump.
How is it a win for trump?
Because it's a narrative painting him as a victim. The faux outrage we've seen over Daniels on SNL centers on her being a blackmailer and NBC being wrong for putting her on TV. That's a win for Trump.
It’s not a win, it’s just nurturing the denial and misinformation his supporters need. It’s a dysfunctional feedback loop trump needs, and vice versa. trump’s the abusive head of the household. Any info pointing this out will be reframed in order to maintain the relationship.
Team Mueller is not distracted. Team Mueller is quietly going about following the money, from Russia with Love and a PTape, all the way to impeachment.
1) How much $ 2) Where in Russia? 3) Why "with love" how does that fit? 4) How long in duration is said Ptape? 5) Isn't it actually Pee Tape or Urine Tape? I mean PTape could stand for Professional Tape or Poop tape. 6) Mueller can impeach the president?
1. On Friday, Mr. Prigozhin was one of 13 Russians indicted by a federal grand jury for interfering in the American election.
According to the indictment, Mr. Prigozhin, 56, controlled the entity that financed the troll factory, known as the Internet Research Agency, which waged “information warfare against the United States” by creating fictitious social-media personas, spreading falsehoods and promoting messages supportive of Donald J. Trump and critical of Hillary Clinton. He has denied involvement.
The special counsel Robert Mueller's team is questioning Russian oligarchs as it investigates whether Russian money was illegally funneled into Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign or inauguration, CNN reported.
Mueller is also investigating whether wealthy Russians used Americans or American companies as conduits to funnel money to the US in support of Trump.
At least one US organization has drawn scrutiny over whether a wealthy Russian banker used it to channel money to the Trump campaign.
At least six Russians allied with President Vladimir Putin attended Trump's inauguration — one of whom had two US associates who donated over $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee.
Earlier this year, it emerged that the FBI was investigating whether Alexander Torshin, a prominent Russian banker and politician with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, used the National Rifle Association to illegally send money to the Trump campaign.The NRA said it spent a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, most of which came from a sector of the organization that isn't required to disclose its donors. About $30 million of that was spent on backing Trump or opposing the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.The NRA has emphasized — and news reports have confirmed — that Torshin, not the organization, is under investigation by the FBI.Torshin attended the NRA's convention every year from 2012 to 2016 — occasionally with Maria Butina, his longtime assistant who's also a gun-rights advocate — and has met every NRA president since 2012, according to NPR.
Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, the two Russian lobbyists who met with top Trump campaign officials in June 2016 offering dirt on Clinton, were there.
A wealthy Russian pharmaceutical executive named Alexey Repik and his wife were also there, as was the energy tycoon Viktor Vekselberg.
Vekselberg is said to be closely aligned with Putin, with whom he frequently meets to discuss business.
Citing federal filings, The Washington Post reported that two of Vekselberg's US associates donated a combined $1.25 million to Trump's inaugural committee.
2. Moscow, St. Petersburg
3. Seems to be a whole lot of Russian love for Team Trump Treason, not only for illegally funneling campaign cash to his coffers but also in the form of material support, which is an in kind contribution of value, also illegal. And lets not forget the rubles spent on condos and Team Trump Treason properties.
4. 69:27 if you count the 9 minutes it took Team Trump Treason to disrobe.
5. You got me there.
6. No, but he can file charges and lay out the evidence for the House to deem that he should be impeached and the Senate should hold a trial. Were you alive during the Clinton years? See Clinton, William Jefferson; Lewinsky, Monica; White Water; Starr, Kenneth, Special Counsel.
So what happened that suddenly made Trump’s businesses turn around almost overnight? Well, in 1987, Trump visited Russia when it was still the USSR, offering to build new hotels in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. He was rebuffed, as Gorbachev wasn’t ready to start allowing private ownership.
At the same time, Trump partnered with a real estate developer called Bayrock, founded by Soviet-born Tevfik Ariv who set up office in Trump Tower. In 1999, Russian-born former gangster implicated in a Wall Street pump-and-dump scheme and money laundering, Felix Sater, joined Bayrock and would become a top Trump adviser. Sater claimed they would talk often, with him pitching ideas on a regular basis. By 2005, the duo is trying yet again to build a hotel in Moscow to no avail.
The same year, the FBI started wiretapping offices in Trump Tower, investigating a Russian money laundering group run out of apartment 63A, implicating 30 people and involving assets owned by Trump in New York and Florida.
And Sater was far from the only person with shady connections doing business with Trump. In 2008, oligarch and fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a Trump property for double what it was worth, which can be a classic money laundering technique meant to bake payments or bribes into what looks like a real estate deal. It seems hard to believe that Rybolovlev would think that a $41 million property more than doubled in value in less than a year.
Trump’s $125 million asking price for the so-called House of Friendshipshould’ve scared off any potential buyers, never mind get an offer at $95 million for a house in which the owner would never set foot and tear it down while doing absolutely nothing with it for eight years. Would he not get suspicious about the Russian billionaire wildly overspending on real estate?
As his Trump Towers Baku project shows, he seems to make it a point not to know where his partners’ and investors get their money, happy to look the other way while charging licensing and consulting fees, even though he’s legally on the hook for doing this due diligence.
When confronted, his company merely says that it’s not involved in any deals beyond licensing a brand name and image. In fact, his blinders about the identity of those backing Trump Towers Baku is a repeat of a 2010 deal in which a state-run Russian bank, which serves as a slush fund for Putin’s projects and is directly overseen by him was indirectly involved in a textbook case of money laundering.
The bank bought an $850 million stake in a Ukrainian steel mill through a mystery middleman, then sold it to Russian-Canadian investor Alexander Shaider. This investor who would then fund Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto, and pay the consulting and licensing fees to label it a Trump property and bring it under The Donald’s umbrella in the public eye. In fact, this is how Trump’s name ended up on so many buildings. It’s licensed while its true owners are out of sight, and out of mind.
If you’re keeping count, this is the third deal in which Trump seemed oblivious about who funded a lavish property on which he would stamp his name, and, as they say, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern.
And further complicating his shot at plausible deniability when it comes to the bank behind the Toronto deal, Vnesheconombank, is that soon after Trump won the election, Jared Kushner was meeting a representative from this bank at the requests of Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and Michael Flynn.
Keep in mind that Kislyak is the same Russian ambassador who routinely met with numerous members of Trump’s campaign throughout 2016, discussing sanctions, Syria, and Crimea. If Trump really didn’t know what was going on, why is his son-in-law meeting with a bank that has spent years trying to avoid sanctions for laundering money for Putin’s inner circle and controlled by the Russian President himself? If we believe he was that oblivious, Trump’s ignorance of his own business operations would beggar belief.
But what we’re seeing is a pattern of Trump in the midst of wealthy foreigners engaged in money laundering schemes that center around real estate, and not bothering to vet any of them before doing business.Furthermore, there’s also the fact that he proudly claims to be the owner of more than 500 companies with very complex finances, which is a massive red flag in this context.
Creating and maintaining hundreds of LLCs to ostensibly do the same thing, like build hotels, condos, and homes, adds millions in bureaucratic overhead from payroll to tax filings. It wouldn’t be an issue if Trump ran a dozen corporations specializing in each vertical of his business, so having multiple companies under one umbrella is not at all unusual. Having so many doing the same things, however, is typically the same kind of warning sign for money laundering as being constantly told to recruit new salespeople is to pyramid schemes.
If you think that it would be a major oversight to allow people to create plausible deniability just by setting up enough legal entities with limited liability between themselves and their partners, you would be correct. It’s actually illegal under the FCPA, or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which requires basic due diligence prior to making any deals with foreign citizens or in other nations. Domestically, RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) goes after opaque arrangements that hide crimes like tax evasion and money laundering to create plausible deniability.
In this light Trump’s sprawling empire with deep ties to corrupt Russians looks less like a thriving real estate business, but something a bit more nefarious. Deniability was so built into the way he operated that his lawyers didn’t want him signing his own financial disclosures. The Donald’s Sergeant Schultz cavalier approach to business and political conflicts of interest mirror Russian oligarchs. In 2015, as Trump began to eat up air time on American political talk shows in the same way that a starving man eats his first meal in days, Putin may have sensed an opportunity…
Is that enough love from Russia for you? Because there is more. A lot more.
Every second spent worrying about big bad Stormy Daniels on big bad SNL is a win for Donald Trump.
How is it a win for trump?
Because it's a narrative painting him as a victim. The faux outrage we've seen over Daniels on SNL centers on her being a blackmailer and NBC being wrong for putting her on TV. That's a win for Trump.
Absolutely. It's idiotic.
I can equally dislike both Trump and Daniels and also know that there is a higher standard for the pile of shit since he is now a president. None of this is shocking and he is definitely not a victim. The title alone didn't elevate his level of class. It's just another position of power he achieved for being slimy and cutting back room deals. None of this means that I, or anyone else, can't also call out Daniels as being a willing accomplice to the initial deed which if truly consensual in every way wouldn't require payments to not talk about it. Either talk because you want to or shut up and take your money that you agreed was enough at that time. Is it blackmail, no. Is it shady immoral human behavior where both parties know exactly what is being agreed to, yes. She took the money and now wants to make more money, just like slimeball Trump has done to people for years, so we'll call it a minor piece of Karma being served his way.
It makes sense for news and TV shows to interview and run her claims and stories because that's their job. I don't believe she is getting on anyone's good side or being given a pass in those cases. The SNL instance is different. That's fine if others are ok with it. I just found it disappointing.
The only way you can spin Daniels as a victim in all of this is if you expand this out to the larger societal problem of men of power using their money and privilege to continually use women as sexual objects for their pleasure (porn, strippers, escorts, etc.), but it doesn't seem like as a society we have decided where we stand on those frequently exploited professions, so why start now.
Definitely was not blackmail. That is definitely how Team Trump wants to spin it though. Would have thought that you were too smart to fall for that one bootlegger10.
It's obvious that Trump owns this mess....cheating on his wife...paying off the porn star...etc.
But someone that takes $ and signs a deal and then still goes public with the info? That's messed up. Breaking a contract or using slimy legalize to get out of it is awful....and straight out of trumps own playbook. So he got what's coming to him, and still Stormy is pretty awful for doing that. Though I'm glad she did
Her point is that there was no contract. tRump didn't sign it and several people in his group say that he didn't know about it. You can't enter into a contract without knowing about it....or signing it
Hence the crazy legalize I mentioned. In court, probably right. Still shady to take $ and then say no contract.
But again, trump's been using lawyers, contracts, and legalize to benefit him his entire life...so at least she is doing this to a guy like that.
One thing to keep in mind, and granted I'm not sure when Stormy learned this, but her original attorney that negotiated the agreement colluded (literally) with Cohen on the deal. And that's different than negotiating on his client's behalf. Working with opposing counsel without your client's knowledge, not in the client's best interest, is an ethical violation. While I'm not on board with violating an NDA, if it was done in bad faith, then I have no issue at all with her action.
SNL had a producer start up an affair with host Ben Affleck following a broadcast while he was still married to Jennifer Garner. I'm not sure what standard some of you thought SNL failed to live up to but no matter what it's a standard they've failed to live up to before.
SNL had a producer start up an affair with host Ben Affleck following a broadcast while he was still married to Jennifer Garner. I'm not sure what standard some of you thought SNL failed to live up to but no matter what it's a standard they've failed to live up to before.
Past behavior doesn't excuse current. Can we get past this stupid, "Well, they did it so...." Should I bring up Bill Clinton now to?
its comedy... there is no standard to uphold... that's what is great about comedy, it points out our absurdity
Maybe next they can get Bill Cosby on the phone to play a part in a skit where he and OJ joke about the how easy it easy to take advantage of women. Bill could even give OJ pointers on how slipping stuff in to their drink works like a charm so you don't have to kill any witnesses.
its comedy... there is no standard to uphold... that's what is great about comedy, it points out our absurdity
Exactly. I can't believe that this argument about what SNL ought to have done is being waged at all. It's crazy.
Right, let's just say fuck it. And the irony of all this is that you reap what you sow. Trump was legitimized for years for playing a reality TV star and became president. Our country is so fucking stupid. We can do better, but it's all about the green disease.
SNL had a producer start up an affair with host Ben Affleck following a broadcast while he was still married to Jennifer Garner. I'm not sure what standard some of you thought SNL failed to live up to but no matter what it's a standard they've failed to live up to before.
Past behavior doesn't excuse current. Can we get past this stupid, "Well, they did it so...." Should I bring up Bill Clinton now to?
This is a weak argument. The THEY in both cases is SNL. The difference is picking and choosing what to get offended about.
You know, when he pulls out of that "worst deal in history" (aka the Iran Nuclear Deal) TOMORROW they can get nukes ASAFP.
If this deal is SO BAD, why isn't there an ALTERNATIVE DEAL that his crack team has been working on?
Oh yeah...There's NO PLAN. What a fucking moron.
Undo Obama stuff.
There is a plan,a great plan in fact. Many plans. A much better plan. Much much better. Probably the greastest plan ever. Its a bad deal. We got a bad deal. Its a bad deal, okay? This plan will be so much better than the other plan. This plan is so great it will go down as, probably, the greatest of the great plans of all time ever. When I say plan, I mean deal. Its a bad deal. We got a bad deal. Were gonna have to have a better deal and a better plan. Much better for America. We got a bad deal here folks. Bad deal, bad plan. We are going to get such a better deal. Believe me folks, its much better. Did I mention smarter plan? We going to have a smart plan that is a good deal and a great plan. Smarter deal. Smarter plan. Much, much smarter. Youre going to be schoked at how much smarter this plan will be. Believe me folks. Believe me. Much smarter plan and better for America. Believe me, youre gonna love it.
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http://www.newsweek.com/stormy-daniels-lawyer-michael-avenatti-says-attorney-who-negotiated-her-nda-872780
And....trump sure isn't claiming there was any blackmail.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/3/17314458/donald-trump-tweets-stormy-daniels-michael-cohen-stephanie-clifford-nda
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2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Chicago; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
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Brilliantati©
But again, trump's been using lawyers, contracts, and legalize to benefit him his entire life...so at least she is doing this to a guy like that.
2) Where in Russia?
3) Why "with love" how does that fit?
4) How long in duration is said Ptape?
5) Isn't it actually Pee Tape or Urine Tape? I mean PTape could stand for Professional Tape or Poop tape.
6) Mueller can impeach the president?
According to the indictment, Mr. Prigozhin, 56, controlled the entity that financed the troll factory, known as the Internet Research Agency, which waged “information warfare against the United States” by creating fictitious social-media personas, spreading falsehoods and promoting messages supportive of Donald J. Trump and critical of Hillary Clinton. He has denied involvement.
Butina was one of at least six Putin-allied Russians who attended Trump's inauguration in January 2017.
Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, the two Russian lobbyists who met with top Trump campaign officials in June 2016 offering dirt on Clinton, were there.
A wealthy Russian pharmaceutical executive named Alexey Repik and his wife were also there, as was the energy tycoon Viktor Vekselberg.
Vekselberg is said to be closely aligned with Putin, with whom he frequently meets to discuss business.
Citing federal filings, The Washington Post reported that two of Vekselberg's US associates donated a combined $1.25 million to Trump's inaugural committee.
2. Moscow, St. Petersburg
3. Seems to be a whole lot of Russian love for Team Trump Treason, not only for illegally funneling campaign cash to his coffers but also in the form of material support, which is an in kind contribution of value, also illegal. And lets not forget the rubles spent on condos and Team Trump Treason properties.
4. 69:27 if you count the 9 minutes it took Team Trump Treason to disrobe.
5. You got me there.
6. No, but he can file charges and lay out the evidence for the House to deem that he should be impeached and the Senate should hold a trial. Were you alive during the Clinton years? See Clinton, William Jefferson; Lewinsky, Monica; White Water; Starr, Kenneth, Special Counsel.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
So what happened that suddenly made Trump’s businesses turn around almost overnight? Well, in 1987, Trump visited Russia when it was still the USSR, offering to build new hotels in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad. He was rebuffed, as Gorbachev wasn’t ready to start allowing private ownership.
He returned in 1996, trying to build yet another hotel in partnership with a tobacco company. That deal also went nowhere, but Trump was able to successfully apply for Trump Russia trademarks. Ultimately, he never built anything there, but by the early 2000s, his units were suddenly a hit with wealthy Russians. His properties in Florida and NYC are especially popular, with Russian real estate agent Ilya Reznik telling the press that Coastal Miami is often pitched as Little Moscow.
At the same time, Trump partnered with a real estate developer called Bayrock, founded by Soviet-born Tevfik Ariv who set up office in Trump Tower. In 1999, Russian-born former gangster implicated in a Wall Street pump-and-dump scheme and money laundering, Felix Sater, joined Bayrock and would become a top Trump adviser. Sater claimed they would talk often, with him pitching ideas on a regular basis. By 2005, the duo is trying yet again to build a hotel in Moscow to no avail.
In 2006, Sater is taking Trump’s kids on tours of the Russian capital as Trump is busy registering his trademarks for use in future Russian properties that would never come to fruition. Trump’s name only shows up on one Russian product in 2007, a premium vodka.
That same year, Sater and Trump start building Trump SoHo along with three Russian oligarchs under investigation for money laundering. The project would ultimately start a criminal investigation in 2011, which Trump and his partners settled by refunding over $3 million in down payments on the condos.
Continued..............
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Donald Trump And Money Laundering
Meanwhile, Trump was exploring a foray into reality TV about a St. Petersburg-based MMA fighter and his son, Donald Trump Jr., told the media that “Russians make up a disproportionate amount of Trump assets,” a claim his brother Eric would take even further in 2014 when he said that Trump has “all the money [he] needs from Russia” and cited golf-loving oligarchs investing over $100 million in the family business. Eric would later deny he ever said any such thing, playing into his father’s campaign against “the lying media and its fake news” when this story was dug up earlier this year by journalists.
The same year, the FBI started wiretapping offices in Trump Tower, investigating a Russian money laundering group run out of apartment 63A, implicating 30 people and involving assets owned by Trump in New York and Florida.
Around the same time, a lawsuit against Sater and Bayrock is gaining steam, accusing the two key Trump partners in evading taxes on $250 million through various real estate projects the trio would work on. Officially, Sater is no longer an advisor to Trump and says the two just sporadically kept in touch, although in 2016 he would max out contributions to Trump’s presidential campaign and praise him in American and Russian media.
And Sater was far from the only person with shady connections doing business with Trump. In 2008, oligarch and fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a Trump property for double what it was worth, which can be a classic money laundering technique meant to bake payments or bribes into what looks like a real estate deal. It seems hard to believe that Rybolovlev would think that a $41 million property more than doubled in value in less than a year.
Continued...................
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Trump’s $125 million asking price for the so-called House of Friendshipshould’ve scared off any potential buyers, never mind get an offer at $95 million for a house in which the owner would never set foot and tear it down while doing absolutely nothing with it for eight years. Would he not get suspicious about the Russian billionaire wildly overspending on real estate?
As his Trump Towers Baku project shows, he seems to make it a point not to know where his partners’ and investors get their money, happy to look the other way while charging licensing and consulting fees, even though he’s legally on the hook for doing this due diligence.
When confronted, his company merely says that it’s not involved in any deals beyond licensing a brand name and image. In fact, his blinders about the identity of those backing Trump Towers Baku is a repeat of a 2010 deal in which a state-run Russian bank, which serves as a slush fund for Putin’s projects and is directly overseen by him was indirectly involved in a textbook case of money laundering.
The bank bought an $850 million stake in a Ukrainian steel mill through a mystery middleman, then sold it to Russian-Canadian investor Alexander Shaider. This investor who would then fund Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto, and pay the consulting and licensing fees to label it a Trump property and bring it under The Donald’s umbrella in the public eye. In fact, this is how Trump’s name ended up on so many buildings. It’s licensed while its true owners are out of sight, and out of mind.
If you’re keeping count, this is the third deal in which Trump seemed oblivious about who funded a lavish property on which he would stamp his name, and, as they say, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern.
And further complicating his shot at plausible deniability when it comes to the bank behind the Toronto deal, Vnesheconombank, is that soon after Trump won the election, Jared Kushner was meeting a representative from this bank at the requests of Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and Michael Flynn.
Keep in mind that Kislyak is the same Russian ambassador who routinely met with numerous members of Trump’s campaign throughout 2016, discussing sanctions, Syria, and Crimea. If Trump really didn’t know what was going on, why is his son-in-law meeting with a bank that has spent years trying to avoid sanctions for laundering money for Putin’s inner circle and controlled by the Russian President himself? If we believe he was that oblivious, Trump’s ignorance of his own business operations would beggar belief.
Finally, he also failed to vet his partner in Trump Scion hotel opening soon in Dallas, who has deep ties in money laundering from Kazakhstan and Russia, and opened two offshores in Cyprus in 2008, which, again, is the favorite destination for Russian oligarchs’ exported cash. (The Scion deal ultimately fell apart due to public opposition to the project.)
Continued........................
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In fact Trump named Wilbur Ross, the former vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, as his commerce secretary. That bank was involved in deals involving Putin’s inner circle in 2015, and incidentally, Rybolovlev had a 9.9% stake in the bank until 2013, after which he divested for undisclosed reasons. It’s very possible that Ross actually has no role in any of this as former employees say he actually drove Russian oligarchs from the bank over his tenure, and the offshores were only used for a failed bid to build a casino.
But what we’re seeing is a pattern of Trump in the midst of wealthy foreigners engaged in money laundering schemes that center around real estate, and not bothering to vet any of them before doing business.Furthermore, there’s also the fact that he proudly claims to be the owner of more than 500 companies with very complex finances, which is a massive red flag in this context.
Creating and maintaining hundreds of LLCs to ostensibly do the same thing, like build hotels, condos, and homes, adds millions in bureaucratic overhead from payroll to tax filings. It wouldn’t be an issue if Trump ran a dozen corporations specializing in each vertical of his business, so having multiple companies under one umbrella is not at all unusual. Having so many doing the same things, however, is typically the same kind of warning sign for money laundering as being constantly told to recruit new salespeople is to pyramid schemes.
If you think that it would be a major oversight to allow people to create plausible deniability just by setting up enough legal entities with limited liability between themselves and their partners, you would be correct. It’s actually illegal under the FCPA, or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which requires basic due diligence prior to making any deals with foreign citizens or in other nations. Domestically, RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) goes after opaque arrangements that hide crimes like tax evasion and money laundering to create plausible deniability.
In this light Trump’s sprawling empire with deep ties to corrupt Russians looks less like a thriving real estate business, but something a bit more nefarious. Deniability was so built into the way he operated that his lawyers didn’t want him signing his own financial disclosures. The Donald’s Sergeant Schultz cavalier approach to business and political conflicts of interest mirror Russian oligarchs. In 2015, as Trump began to eat up air time on American political talk shows in the same way that a starving man eats his first meal in days, Putin may have sensed an opportunity…
Is that enough love from Russia for you? Because there is more. A lot more.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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It makes sense for news and TV shows to interview and run her claims and stories because that's their job. I don't believe she is getting on anyone's good side or being given a pass in those cases. The SNL instance is different. That's fine if others are ok with it. I just found it disappointing.
The only way you can spin Daniels as a victim in all of this is if you expand this out to the larger societal problem of men of power using their money and privilege to continually use women as sexual objects for their pleasure (porn, strippers, escorts, etc.), but it doesn't seem like as a society we have decided where we stand on those frequently exploited professions, so why start now.
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
If this deal is SO BAD, why isn't there an ALTERNATIVE DEAL that his crack team has been working on?
Oh yeah...There's NO PLAN. What a fucking moron.
Wow!
Undo Obama stuff.
There is a plan,a great plan in fact. Many plans. A much better plan. Much much better. Probably the greastest plan ever. Its a bad deal. We got a bad deal. Its a bad deal, okay? This plan will be so much better than the other plan. This plan is so great it will go down as, probably, the greatest of the great plans of all time ever. When I say plan, I mean deal. Its a bad deal. We got a bad deal. Were gonna have to have a better deal and a better plan. Much better for America. We got a bad deal here folks. Bad deal, bad plan. We are going to get such a better deal. Believe me folks, its much better. Did I mention smarter plan? We going to have a smart plan that is a good deal and a great plan. Smarter deal. Smarter plan. Much, much smarter. Youre going to be schoked at how much smarter this plan will be. Believe me folks. Believe me. Much smarter plan and better for America. Believe me, youre gonna love it.
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