Flynn

[David Morris]

A Big Shoe Just Dropped
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-big-shoe-just-dropped

The new story explains that a group of Trump operatives, including top
lawyer Michael Cohen and fired former campaign manager Paul Manafort, along
with a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andrii V. Artemenko and
Felix Sater are pushing President Trump on a 'peace plan' for Russia and
Ukraine.

[...]

Having spent some time studying the matter, the biggest red flags about
Donald Trump's ties to Russia and businessmen around Vladimir Putin have
always been tied to the Trump SoHo building project in Lower Manhattan,
from the first decade of this century. I base my knowledge of this on this
rather cursory but still quite good April 2016 article from the Times and
my own limited snooping around the Outer Boroughs Russian and Ukrainian
emigre press. (I summarized the most salient details of the earlier Times
article in Item #3 of this post.) This was a key project, perhaps the key
project in the post-bankruptcy era in which Trump appeared heavily reliant
on Russian funds to finance his projects. Sater was at the center of that
project. The details only came to light after the project got bogged down
in a complicated series of lawsuits.

After the lawyers got involved, Trump said he barely knew who Sater was.
But there is voluminous evidence that Sater, a Russian emigrant, was key to
channeling Russian capital to Trump for years. Sater is also a multiple
felon and at least a one-time FBI informant. Bayrock Capital, where he
worked was located in Trump Tower and he himself worked as a special
advisor to Trump. Again, read the Times article to get a flavor of his ties
to Trump, the Trump SoHo project and Russia. For my money there's no better
place to start to understand the Trump/Russia issue.

On its own, Trump's relationship with Sater might be written off (albeit
not terribly plausibly) as simply a sleazy relationship Trump entered into
to get access to capital he needed to finance his projects. Whatever
shadowy ties Sater might have and whatever his criminal background, Trump
has long since washed his hands of him. (Again, we're talking about most
generous reads here.)

But now we learn that Sater is still very much in the Trump orbit and
acting as a go-between linking Trump and a pro-Putin Ukrainian
parliamentarian pitching 'peace plans' for settling the dispute between
Russia and Ukraine. (Artemenko is part of the political faction which
Manafort helped build up in the aftermath of the ouster of his Ukrainian
benefactor, deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.) Indeed, far, far more
important, Cohen - who is very close to Trump and known for dealing with
delicate matters - is in contact with Sater and hand delivering political
and policy plans from him to the President.







On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 8:15 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/donald-
> trump-ukraine-russia.html
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 6:27 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/michael-flynn-general-chaos
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170220/b76a7095/attachment.html>