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Trump Investigations: A Rundown Of All The Lawsuits And Cases Involving The Former President

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Last update: Jul 21, 2022, 11:30 A.M. ET

Donald Trump is involved in so many lawsuits and investigations-including allegations of election interference, business fraud, violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, mishandling presidential documents, inciting a mob, defrauding his niece and personal defamation-that it can be difficult to keep them all straight. Forbes is making that easier, with this one-of-a-kind tracker following Trump's troubles.

In each matter, the defendants or subject of the investigation is contesting the claims made against them. Trump's representatives did not respond to requests for comment, except for his attorney in the lawsuit against Twitter. And thanks to the Trump's Legal Problems blog and Just Security for pointing us in the right direction for a few cases.

We'll continue updating the tracker as the lawsuits and investigations progress (and new ones arise). Think we're missing something? Please email zeverson@forbes.com or reach out securely and anonymously via OnionShare on the Tor browser.

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Tracking Trump: A Rundown Of All The Lawsuits And Investigations Involving The Former President

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Last update: Jul 21, 2022, 11:30 A.M. ET Donald Trump is involved in so many lawsuits and investigations-including allegations of election interference, business fraud, violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, mishandling presidential documents, inciting a mob, defrauding his niece and personal defamation-that it can be difficult to keep them all straight.

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Heather A. Conley is senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic and director of the Europe Program at CSIS. Prior to joining CSIS as a senior fellow and director for Europe in 2009, Conley served four years as executive director of the Office of the Chairman of the Board at the Americ…

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Bibliography

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Podcast History of Mobsters & Spies

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The first-ever series that defines and exposes the true nature of the underworld: a second economy of dirty money, born from the intersection of organized crime and intelligence operations. They are twin heads of this realm, and they have never been separated. This is the world of MOBSTERS & SPIES. Show more

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The first-ever series that defines and exposes the true nature of the underworld: a second economy of dirty money, born from the intersection of organized crime and intelligence operations. They are twin heads of this realm, and they have never been separated. This is the world of MOBSTERS & SPIES.

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Book Review

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A protester dons a mask depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin during a demonstration outside Donald Trump's Washington hotel in October. In his book, Craig Unger makes a detailed case that Trump is a Kremlin asset. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)

One of the standard warnings attached to U.S. intelligence reports is that the source of a report intends "to influence as well as inform." The caveat does not mean that the source's reporting is wrong or should be discounted, but that the source also has an agenda. Craig Unger's new book, " American Kompromat," should be read with a similar understanding, for it opens with the presumption that former president Donald Trump is, as former CIA director Michael Hayden described him, "a clear and present danger." Unger starts from the premise that Trump is a Kremlin asset and proceeds to advance the argument with great detail.

Best of The Post: Our TV critic's top 10 shows from 2021 so far

Unger is a veteran investigative journalist and writer, and "American Kompromat" is a follow-up to his 2018 book, " House of Trump, House of Putin," in which he made the case for Russian collusion. "American Kompromat" can be read alongside others that examine Trump's weak spot for Russia - including Greg Miller's " The Apprentice," Michael Isikoff and David Corn's " Russian Roulette," Luke Harding's " Shadow State," Tim Weiner's " The Folly and the Glory," and Seth Abramson's " Proof of Collusion " - as well as books by insiders such as Peter Strzok, former FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; Josh Campbell, a former FBI special agent and special assistant to then-Director James Comey; and Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI.

As the Trump administration came to a spectacular end, Unger must have felt the need to update his book continually. Day by day, Trump took actions that added to Unger's thesis. In the closing weeks of his term, Trump sought to divert attention from a damaging Russian cyberhack, refused to concede Russian President Vladimir Putin's poisoning of his leading political challenger and brazenly pardoned cronies who refused to testify in Robert Mueller's Russia probe. (Not to mention allegedly inciting the mob that violently overtook the Capitol.)

Unger outlines Trump's decades-long relationships with Russian criminals and his willingness to abet the laundering of dirty money flowing from Moscow, and explains why Russian intelligence would find him an easy mark. The web of Trump's damning connections and his actions as president suggest some sort of affinity for Putin.

According to Unger, there are indications that Trump was used as a conduit for Soviet covert messaging campaigns in the late 1980s. He made numerous visits to Russia where he was certainly watched, feted and cultivated. At the time, he publicly expressed thoughts that were far outside of mainstream Western opinion. For example, he complained that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was destroying the Soviet Union - suggesting perhaps relations with KGB elements that shared such a view. Unger cites former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, who served in Washington at the time, saying of Trump: "The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter."

By compiling decades of Trump's seedy ties, disturbing and consistent patterns of behavior, and unexplained contacts with Russian officials and criminals, Unger makes a strong case that Trump is probably a compromised trusted contact of Kremlin interests.

That said, it is not an argument meant to stand up to the scrutiny of a criminal court (that would require evidence hidden in Russian intelligence files). Instead, it is a counterintelligence case, a circumstantial compilation of patterns, relationships and logical inferences. Even though counterintelligence probes often do not lead to arrests, the stakes of such investigations may be of far more serious consequence. We have learned over the past several years that many of the most important firewalls in our democracy are not necessarily written in the legal code. It may not be a crime for a presidential candidate to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power and lie about it, but it is potentially a far more serious challenge to our system.

In short, Unger alleges that Trump's long-standing ties to Russian organized crime, his lifestyle and his business practices made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by the country that is unarguably the best in the world at those dark arts. His campaign team - with its own unusual shady ties to Russia - was willing to work with a hostile foreign power and eager to accept material stolen from Americans. None went to the authorities to report the illicit contacts, and many of them were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly, every single one of them lied and covered up their actions. Trump then attacked the very institutions that could hold him to account and sought to obstruct investigations, eventually pardoning anyone who could provide evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump's most fervent supporters have been unable to provide an innocent explanation for why a domestic political campaign would need such deep engagement with a hostile foreign power.

Unger's narrative of collusion relies on piling up any and all damning information he can muster. However, in some cases, the very volume of information undercuts the strength of his argument. Trump's presidency was such a ruinous fiasco, it is tempting to keep adding inexplicable actions to the pile. However, the tangential material often confuses more than clarifies. Chapters on William Barr, the Catholic Opus Dei sect, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein are interesting but do little to illuminate Trump's perfidy. For example, Unger ties Barr to FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, suggesting that Hanssen was promoted while Barr was the attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Anyone with experience in government would be hard-pressed to explain how a mid-level FBI promotion of someone not yet suspected of a crime would be of interest to the attorney general.

Further, Unger relies on relatively few sources, and none with direct access to Trump or present-day Russia. Shvets and Oleg Kalugin, his sources on Russian intelligence methodology, were celebrated KGB officers but left Russia in the late 1980s and have no direct knowledge of Trump's contacts with Russian officials. They provide interesting context and color, but Unger would have benefited from a wider variety of sources.

Trump's election exposed a previously undetected flaw in our system of protecting national security secrets. A duly elected president cannot be denied a security clearance, yet the Republican Party nominated a candidate whose greed, lack of morals and relationship with criminal elements should have disqualified him for the lowest-level clearance, much less the highest office in the land. What Unger's books have shown us is that the evidence was there for anyone willing to look. "American Kompromat" uncovers no secrets, nor does it reveal much that is new, but it reminds us that there is still much left to learn. We know that Trump was compromised, but we're not sure exactly how.

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Review | Piling up incriminating information about Trump's Russian connections

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One of the standard warnings attached to U.S. intelligence reports is that the source of a report intends "to influence as well as inform." The caveat does not mean that the source's reporting is wrong or should be discounted, but that the source also has an agenda.

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Book Review

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Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to "the Cambridge five", the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president's relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

"This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump," Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians' radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia's intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called "spotter agent" who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: "For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

"This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time."

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: "There's nothing wrong with America's Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can't cure."

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan's cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people "on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves".

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB's first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful "active measure" executed by a new KGB asset.

"It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven't heard anything like that or anything similar - until Trump became the president of this country - because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president."

Trump's election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.

Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: "For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow."

He added: "This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off."

Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: "He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we're going to develop this guy and 40 years later he'll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people."

"Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election."

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'The perfect target': Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years - ex-KGB spy

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Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

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Editor's note May 8, 2018: This column originally published December 15, 2017. New allegations about $500k in payments from a Russian oligarch made to Trump attorney Michael Cohen have placed it back in the news.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.

Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.

An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.
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So is this legal?

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democratic leader on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News in September: "Unless the contributions were directed by a foreigner, they would be legal, but could still be of interest to investigators examining allegations of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. Obviously, if there were those that had associations with the Kremlin that were contributing, that would be of keen concern."

Under federal law, foreigner nationals are barred from contributing directly or indirectly to political campaigns in local, state and federal elections.

Should Blavatnik's contributions concern Mueller's team of investigators? Take a look at his long-time business associates in Russia.

The Oligarchs

Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner.

Further, nearly 4 percent of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.

Earlier this year, The Associated Press reported that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. According to The Washington Post, in the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate."

Viktor Vekselberg is one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. (They met while attending university in Russia.)

In 1990, Blavatnik and Vekselberg co-founded the Renova Group for large-scale investments in energy, infrastructure, aluminum and other metals. One of their earliest investments was in Tyumen Oil Co. (TNK), founded in 1995. TNK is best known for its contentious partnership with British Petroleum after the two entities formed a joint venture in 2003. That rocky relationship ended 10 years later when they sold out to the state-controlled energy giant, Rosneft, under pressure from the Russian government.

As for BP, that pressure took the form of growing harassment and intimidation from Russian authorities who at one point, according to Forbes, refused to renew visas for BP employees, forcing BP's joint venture chief Robert Dudley (who is now chief executive of BP) to flee Russia and manage TNK-BP from a foreign outpost in a secret location.

Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle. They are among several Americans who also merit Mueller's scrutiny.
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The Americans

Andrew Intrater, according to Mother Jones, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in New York. (FEC records list his employer as Renova US Management LLC.)

Intrater had no significant history of political contributions prior to the 2016 elections. But in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees," according to a brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Alexander Shustorovich, chief executive of IMG Artists, attempted to give the Republican Party $250,000 in 2000 to support the George W. Bush presidential campaign, but his money was rejected because of his ties to the Russian government, according to Quartz. So why didn't the Trump team reject Shustorovich's $1 million check to Trump's Inaugural Committee?

Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. Redacted CIA documents released in 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act said "TNK president Kukes said that he bribed local officials." The CIA confirmed the authenticity of the reports to The Guardian newspaper but would not comment further. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund. He had no significant donor history before last year's election.
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There is no doubt that Kukes has close ties to the Putin government. When he left his job as CEO of TNK in June 2003, he joined the board of Yukos Oil, which at the time was the largest oil company in Russia owned by the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Four months after Kukes joined the board, authorities arrested Khodorkovsky at gunpoint on his private plane in Siberia on trumped up charges of tax evasion and tapped Kukes to be CEO. This decision could only have been made at the highest levels in the Kremlin. The arrest of Khodorkovsky rattled the nerves of international investors and was the first tangible sign that Putin was not going to be the kind of leader that global executives and Western governments had expected him to be when he first took office in 2000.

Khodorkovksy was given a 13-year sentence in a Siberian prison and served 10 years before being released by Putin in December 2013, a month before the start of the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, as a sign of goodwill. As for the fate of Khodorkovksy's company, its largest oil subsidiary was sold in a sealed bid auction to Baikal Financial Group, a shell company with an unpublished list of officers. Baikal was registered at an address that turned out to be a mobile phone store in Tver, Russia. Three days after the auction, all of Baikal's assets were acquired for an undisclosed sum by Rosneft, the Russian oil giant that went on to buy TNK-BP in 2013.

In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, Shustorovich and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. With the exception of Shustorovich, the common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg. Experts who follow the activities of Russian oligarchs told ABC News that they believe the contributions from Blavatnik, Intrater and Kukes warrant intense scrutiny because they have worked closely with Vekselberg.

Even if the donations by the four men associated with Russia ultimately pass muster with Mueller, one still has to wonder: Why did GOP PACs and other Trump-controlled funds take their money? Why didn't the PACs say, "Thanks, but no thanks," like the Republicans said to Shustorovich in 2000? Yes, it was legal to accept their donations, but it was incredibly poor judgment.

McConnell surely knew as a participant in high level intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, McConnell's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after former FBI Director James Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election.

And consider Steve Mnuchin, Trump's campaign finance chairman. Could he have known that the Trump Victory Fund, jointly managed by the Republican National Committe and Trump's campaign, took contributions from Intrater and Kukes? Mnuchin owned Hollywood financing company RatPac-Dune with Blavatnik until he sold his stake to accept Trump's appointment as the Treasury secretary.

Which PAC officials are making the decisions to accept these donations?

The Supreme Court

The contributions are legal because the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling, Citizens United, and several subsequent decisions, allowed American corporations and citizens to give unlimited amounts of money to PACs and non-profit 501c4 organizations, regardless of how they make their money, where they make their money, or with whom they make their money. The only caveat is that PACs and non-profits cannot coordinate their activities with the political candidates they support.

The man who led the winning fight for Citizens United was David Bossie, president of the conservative non-profit since 2001. In 1996, Bossie was hired by Republican Rep. Dan Burton to lead an investigation into President Bill Clinton's campaign fundraising. Burton fired him 18 months later for manipulating recordings of conversations among law officials and Webb Hubbell, a Clinton confidant who resigned as associate attorney general and pleaded guilty to tax fraud during the Whitewater investigation. CNN reported at the time that Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House, called Bossie's tampering with the Hubbell recordings an embarrassment to the Republicans.

Bossie served as Trump's deputy campaign chairman.

The Super PAC, Make America Number 1, is primarily funded by Trump's largest donor, Robert Mercer. His Renaissance Technologies hedge fund donated $15.5 million to the PAC.

Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, assumed control of Make America Number 1 in September 2016 and is now tainted by her role in the communications between Wikileaks and Cambridge Analytica, the firm that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hired for $5.9 million to handle the digital portion of the Trump campaign.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer are major investors in Cambridge Analytica. According to The Wall Street Journal, Rebekah Mercer asked Cambridge chief executive Alexander Nix if the firm could compile stolen emails related to Hillary Clinton so that they could be more easily searched. (This suggestion came from someone she met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz, according to The Hill. Cambridge Analytica had worked on digital marketing for Cruz before he dropped out of the Republican primary.)

Nix confirmed that he had asked Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to forward the Clinton-related emails. Assange said he declined the request.

Rebekah Mercer also heads the non-profit Making America Great, formed in March 2017. The non-profit ran a seven-figure ad campaign highlighting Trump's achievements. Bossie is the group's chief strategist.

Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contributed $150,000 to Mercer's Make America Number 1 PAC and another $100,000 to the Trump Victory Fund. Prince has recently testified to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his trip to the remote Seychelles for a secret meeting in December 2016 with a close ally of Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The purpose of the meeting was allegedly to setup a back channel of communication between then president-elect Donald Trump and the Russians, though Prince has denied this allegation. Before the 2015-16 elections, Prince's political contributions totaled a mere $31,800 as far back as 2007, according to FEC records.

The hybrid super-PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, was formed in 2013 under the name Stop Hillary PAC. It is managed by Dan Backer, the lead attorney who won the McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission case in 2014. The Supreme Court decision eliminated the cap on how much wealthy individuals can donate to federal candidates, parties and PACs in a single, two-year election cycle.

Like Bossie, Dan Backer helped to open the floodgates to millions of dollars of influence brought to bear on incumbents and their political challengers who are now pressured to kowtow to their donors with the biggest bank accounts, even if their billions are earned in Russian rubles.

Backer was born in Russia and emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1978.

The changes to our campaign finance laws created an avenue for Russia to try to influence our elections. There are holes in our firewall and they aren't on the internet.
Touch chart to see info: Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @ruthcmay Graphics by Michael Hogue/Staff Artist
Got an opinion about this issue? Send a letter to the editor, and you just might get published.

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How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns

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Editor's note May 8, 2018: This column originally published December 15, 2017. New allegations about $500k in payments from a Russian oligarch made to Trump attorney Michael Cohen have placed it back in the news.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was controlled by five major mob outfits-the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese families-that not only ran the region's various illegal rackets, but also effectively operated the billion-dollar construction industry that was transforming the metropolitan landscape. Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia is the true story of the law enforcement and prosecutorial efforts to take down those kingpins, which played out in a manner eerily reminiscent . And unsurprisingly, at least for those who lived in or around the five boroughs during that era, it's a tale of crime and vice that invariably involves Donald Trump.

The current commander-in-chief factors into the final episode of director Sam Hobkinson's three-part Netflix miniseries (debuting July 22), since his Fifth Avenue Trump Tower was one of countless projects the mafia had a hand in completing. "So I told him that there's jobs in here that did count, like Trump. Nineteen million," says a gangster on a federal wiretap recording, thereby directly linking the future president to the shady mobsters who governed New York's concrete and cement unions (and businesses). These crooks regulated which of eight chosen firms would get contracts and, in the process, kickback points from the gigs to their criminal superiors. As Fear City makes clear in just a few short minutes, anyone like Trump, who was knee-deep in the real estate scene, was invariably a bedfellow (either directly or indirectly) with the mafia.

Considering Trump's apparent underworld ties, the biggest question that arises during Hobkinson's series (from the producers of Don't F**K With Cats) is why Rudy Giuliani chose, in 2018, to become his lawyer. Fear City lays out how Giuliani initially made his national name by bringing down NYC's godfathers while working as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. On camera, Giuliani confesses that, as an Italian-American, he loathed the mob. Along with his press-friendly ambitions for higher office, which he'd subsequently attain when he became the city's mayor, it was this hatred for organized crime that drove him to pursue his legendary case. The hypocritical disconnect between Giuliani's still-palpable disgust for the mafia, and his more recent closeness with the mob-connected Trump, is so readily apparent in the last episode that one wishes director Hobkinson had taken at least a slight narrative detour to more fully investigate (or least have Giuliani directly address) it.

Nonetheless, if Trump doesn't get the full working-over that Fear City suggests he deserves, the show otherwise delivers a compelling account of the government's mission to take down New York's notorious criminal clans. Key to that endeavor was wiretapping, although as numerous FBI agents explain, obtaining warrants for those maneuvers wasn't easy. To convince a judge that covert recordings were vital, one had to first prove that the targets in question were engaged in illegal activity. That step-by-step process is explained in excellent first-hand detail: at the outset, obtaining intel from informants; then, collecting surveillance photographs and footage; and ultimately, hiring a "black bag man" (in this case, FBI special operations squad member Joe Cantamessa) to infiltrate a residence or restaurant, or gain access to a vehicle, in order to surreptitiously plant the listening device.

The most suspenseful moments in Fear City are the dramatically restaged anecdotes about Cantamessa and his crew sneaking into mob locales to install bugs, including in the luxurious Staten Island mansion of "boss of bosses" Paul Castellano, whose TV signal they muddied so they could then pose as repairmen and mount a device on the back of his set (all while a henchman held a flashlight, no less!). In those instances, director Hobkinson conveys the urgent danger faced by the FBI, and the daunting logistical and legal hurdles they had to overcome in order to gather evidence necessary for an arrest. Central to their undertaking was Cornell Law School Professor G. Robert Blakey's 1970 RICO statute, which allowed officials to overcome their chief problem in going after the mob-namely, that bosses were insulated from the crimes their underling "soldiers" committed-by treating an entire family as a consolidated organization, and thus responsible for everything perpetrated by its members.

RICO made bosses vulnerable, and the defining turning point in the case against NYC's syndicates was the discovery (via wiretap) of "the Commission," a cabal comprised of the five families' leaders that effectively exposed the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese clans as one monumental criminal corporation-and therefore prosecutable at the same time. With recollections from the many agents who played a part in building this jigsaw puzzle-like case, as well as from Giuliani and the three young SDNY lawyers (Michael Chertoff, John Savarese and Gil Childers) who handled the trial itself, Fear City is a primer on the structure of the mob and the rigorous investigative and prosecutorial methods used to combat it.

Fear City's wiretap audio clips aren't as outrageous as one might wish; most of the comments are of a routine profane-and-threatening variety, and come via speakers who all sound like Joe Pesci's Goodfellas thug Tommy DeVito. And the series' dramatic recreations-and decision to film many of its interview subjects in cars parked in alleys and under bridges-sometimes strain to lend the action an authentic wiseguy feel. Compensating for those missteps, however, are stylish then-and-now split-screen sequences, great surveillance material (from the streets, and crime scenes) that evokes the atmosphere of this gangland environment and its devious inhabitants, and talking heads who know their stuff, whether it's federal sleuths or Michael Franzese and Johnny Alite, two former mobsters who talk candidly, and shamelessly, about their disgraceful profession.

Where Fear City truly shines is in its finer details, be it the revelation that Lucchese boss Tony "Ducks" Corallo got his nickname from his skill at evading subpoenas and arresting officers, or the way in which the FBI tailed bugged vehicles not only with a monitoring van, but with four separate cars equipped with repeaters that boosted the wiretap's transmission signal. The result is a real-life cat-and-mouse saga of duplicity, treachery and murder that put an end to the golden age of the New York City mafia-save, that is, for the ensuing reign of John Gotti, whose tale would serve as the perfect topic for a Fear City sequel.

In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was controlled by five major mob outfits-the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese families-that not only ran the region's various illegal rackets, but also effectively operated the billion-dollar construction industry that was transforming the metropolitan landscape. Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia is the true story of the law enforcement and prosecutorial efforts to take down those kingpins, which played out in a manner eerily reminiscent . And unsurprisingly, at least for those who lived in or around the five boroughs during that era, it's a tale of crime and vice that invariably involves Donald Trump.

The current commander-in-chief factors into the final episode of director Sam Hobkinson's three-part Netflix miniseries (debuting July 22), since his Fifth Avenue Trump Tower was one of countless projects the mafia had a hand in completing. "So I told him that there's jobs in here that did count, like Trump. Nineteen million," says a gangster on a federal wiretap recording, thereby directly linking the future president to the shady mobsters who governed New York's concrete and cement unions (and businesses). These crooks regulated which of eight chosen firms would get contracts and, in the process, kickback points from the gigs to their criminal superiors. As Fear City makes clear in just a few short minutes, anyone like Trump, who was knee-deep in the real estate scene, was invariably a bedfellow (either directly or indirectly) with the mafia.

Considering Trump's apparent underworld ties, the biggest question that arises during Hobkinson's series (from the producers of Don't F**K With Cats) is why Rudy Giuliani chose, in 2018, to become his lawyer. Fear City lays out how Giuliani initially made his national name by bringing down NYC's godfathers while working as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. On camera, Giuliani confesses that, as an Italian-American, he loathed the mob. Along with his press-friendly ambitions for higher office, which he'd subsequently attain when he became the city's mayor, it was this hatred for organized crime that drove him to pursue his legendary case. The hypocritical disconnect between Giuliani's still-palpable disgust for the mafia, and his more recent closeness with the mob-connected Trump, is so readily apparent in the last episode that one wishes director Hobkinson had taken at least a slight narrative detour to more fully investigate (or least have Giuliani directly address) it.

Nonetheless, if Trump doesn't get the full working-over that Fear City suggests he deserves, the show otherwise delivers a compelling account of the government's mission to take down New York's notorious criminal clans. Key to that endeavor was wiretapping, although as numerous FBI agents explain, obtaining warrants for those maneuvers wasn't easy. To convince a judge that covert recordings were vital, one had to first prove that the targets in question were engaged in illegal activity. That step-by-step process is explained in excellent first-hand detail: at the outset, obtaining intel from informants; then, collecting surveillance photographs and footage; and ultimately, hiring a "black bag man" (in this case, FBI special operations squad member Joe Cantamessa) to infiltrate a residence or restaurant, or gain access to a vehicle, in order to surreptitiously plant the listening device.

The most suspenseful moments in Fear City are the dramatically restaged anecdotes about Cantamessa and his crew sneaking into mob locales to install bugs, including in the luxurious Staten Island mansion of "boss of bosses" Paul Castellano, whose TV signal they muddied so they could then pose as repairmen and mount a device on the back of his set (all while a henchman held a flashlight, no less!). In those instances, director Hobkinson conveys the urgent danger faced by the FBI, and the daunting logistical and legal hurdles they had to overcome in order to gather evidence necessary for an arrest. Central to their undertaking was Cornell Law School Professor G. Robert Blakey's 1970 RICO statute, which allowed officials to overcome their chief problem in going after the mob-namely, that bosses were insulated from the crimes their underling "soldiers" committed-by treating an entire family as a consolidated organization, and thus responsible for everything perpetrated by its members.

RICO made bosses vulnerable, and the defining turning point in the case against NYC's syndicates was the discovery (via wiretap) of "the Commission," a cabal comprised of the five families' leaders that effectively exposed the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese clans as one monumental criminal corporation-and therefore prosecutable at the same time. With recollections from the many agents who played a part in building this jigsaw puzzle-like case, as well as from Giuliani and the three young SDNY lawyers (Michael Chertoff, John Savarese and Gil Childers) who handled the trial itself, Fear City is a primer on the structure of the mob and the rigorous investigative and prosecutorial methods used to combat it.

Fear City's wiretap audio clips aren't as outrageous as one might wish; most of the comments are of a routine profane-and-threatening variety, and come via speakers who all sound like Joe Pesci's Goodfellas thug Tommy DeVito. And the series' dramatic recreations-and decision to film many of its interview subjects in cars parked in alleys and under bridges-sometimes strain to lend the action an authentic wiseguy feel. Compensating for those missteps, however, are stylish then-and-now split-screen sequences, great surveillance material (from the streets, and crime scenes) that evokes the atmosphere of this gangland environment and its devious inhabitants, and talking heads who know their stuff, whether it's federal sleuths or Michael Franzese and Johnny Alite, two former mobsters who talk candidly, and shamelessly, about their disgraceful profession.

Where Fear City truly shines is in its finer details, be it the revelation that Lucchese boss Tony "Ducks" Corallo got his nickname from his skill at evading subpoenas and arresting officers, or the way in which the FBI tailed bugged vehicles not only with a monitoring van, but with four separate cars equipped with repeaters that boosted the wiretap's transmission signal. The result is a real-life cat-and-mouse saga of duplicity, treachery and murder that put an end to the golden age of the New York City mafia-save, that is, for the ensuing reign of John Gotti, whose tale would serve as the perfect topic for a Fear City sequel.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was controlled by five major mob outfits-the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese families-that not only ran the region's various illegal rackets, but also effectively operated the billion-dollar construction industry that was transforming the metropolitan landscape. Fear City: New York vs.

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by David Shimer

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"of racketeering activity"

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family and company to proceed - cnnpolitics

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Judge allows fraud suit against Trump, family and company to proceed

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A federal judge on Monday allowed a federal lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump, his three eldest children and his company of collaborating with a fraudulent marketing scheme to prey on investors to proceed, denying the Trumps' request for a stay.

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The Trump administration has brought its brand of corruption and self-dealing to every agency in the federal government, and it's hard for anyone to keep on top of it all. We've mapped it out for you. Click on any agency building below, and unlock an extensive dossier of the activities happening inside.

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Mapping Corruption: The Interactive Exhibit

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The Trump administration has brought its brand of corruption and self-dealing to every agency in the federal government, and it's hard for anyone to keep on top of it all. We've mapped it out for you. Click on any agency building below, and unlock an extensive dossier of the activities happening inside.

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This is Propaganda Machine the website for Dr Briant's ongoing research on SCL, Cambridge Analytica and the rapidly developing and opaque global influence industry. Home of the Cambridge Analytica Map.

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ON 19 OCTOBER 2016, in the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton opined that Vladimir Putin would "rather have a puppet as president of the United States," meaning Donald John Trump, than a formidable adversary like her. As Trump short-circuited like a Star Wars droid on the fritz ("No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet!"), she continued:

It's pretty clear you won't admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.

So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We've never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

As usual, HRC was right. But even the most cynical viewer could scarce have imagined, in the fall of 2016, just how on the nose she was.

Trump's activities since taking office-the gutting of the State Department, the jackals in the Oval Office, Helsinki, Mueller obstruction, Ukraine skulduggery, and his willful non-response to the covid pandemic-make clear that the longtime mob money launderer has spent most of his presidency doing Putin's bidding, just as Clinton predicted. Allow cyberattacks against the United States? Check. Encourage espionage against our people? Check. Spout the Putin line? Always. Sign up for his wish list? Like a porn addict on OnlyFans. Break up NATO? Western Europe is as divided now as it's been since the forties. Continue to get help from him? Every fucking day.

Three years after that third debate, almost exactly to the day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stormed out of a meeting with President Trump concerning his strategically obtuse decision to withdraw US troops from Syria-a move that was ore in Russia's interests than ours. "Why," she exasperatedly asked the press, "do all roads lead to Putin?"

It's actually quite simple: Trump has been mob property his entire life. The difference is that now, in 2020, the mobster who owns him is not "Fat Tony" Salerno, or "Big" Paul Castellano, or Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, or even Semion "The Brainy Don" Mogilevich. The mobster who owns him is Vladimir Putin-which makes Trump, by extension, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian government.

Previously, I wrote about Trump's longtime association with the mob, both Italian and Russian, and his almost certain career as a top echelon Confidential Informant for the Justice Department. He is, as I said, " second generation mobbed-up." Although he is not, and never can be, an actual mobster-a front can never be a member of the family, for obvious reasons-the unscrupulous Trump is an extremely useful asset to his underworld associates, and has been for decades. Front men, after all, are a vital cog in the global crime syndicate machine. That dirty money's not going to wash itself.

While the Trump Organization does deals overseas, for most of his career Donald Trump was a stateside operator. The bulk of his revenue is homegrown. As a business professional of my acquaintance who worked for years in Russia colorfully put it: "The thing to remember about Trump is that he's a venal crook, not some international criminal mastermind. His primary source of wealth, such as it is, comes from a string of golf courses, hotels, and mixed-use office buildings spread around the world, but the corn nuggets in his crown of shit are in the New York metro area and spread across the beaches of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward County, Florida."

So how did a Queens-born front-man and mob money launderer, whose business was overwhelmingly domestic, wind up an asset of a hostile foreign government?

To understand this transformation, it is instructive to think of Trump not as a human being but as an asset, in the strict sense of the word-a piece of property, like a beach house, a private jet, or an HBO Go password. Just as two different families can share a beach house, and your buddy down the street can use your login to stream Succession, so Trump can be utilized by more than one entity at a time. He can also be sold outright-or rather transferred, like the deed to a house. None of this is up to him. At all. To paraphrase Elvis Presley: he's caught in a trap, he can't walk out, because the mobsters own him baby.

As for Vladimir Putin, while he may have started as an intelligence operative, and he may pretend to be a diplomat and statesman on the world stage, his true profession, at this stage of his career, is mob boss-probably the most powerful mob boss in the world, more powerful even than his longtime associate from back in his Dresden days, Semion Mogilevich. (There was, and is, a lot of blur between IC and OC in Russia.)

Putin and Mogilevich are two foci of the small circle of oligarchs-there are subtle distinctions, but for all intents and purposes, oligarch is basically just a euphemism for mobster -who own almost everything of value in Russia. In mafia states, the mob runs the show-charging protection for businesses, taking bribes, imposing restrictions on airports, seaports, etc. The Russian mafiya is closer to the East India Company administering the entire colony of British India than some Scorsese picture. It steals from the people, and manipulates the weak central government, to keep itself in power.

(Sidenote: per Robert I. Friedman's Red Mafiya, Mogilevich has complete control of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. So if a self-styled NSA "whistleblower" contrives to spend 40 days there avoiding the media, coughEdSnowdencough, you can be damn sure the "Brainy Don" authorized it).

An ex-KGB chief, Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 1999. He's been in charge ever since. Under his reign, Russia has regressed from a burgeoning democracy to a veritable dictatorship. Putin consolidated power, destroying the independent judiciary, clamping down on press freedoms, using false-flag operations to win popular support, and exploiting his power for personal gain. He is more like a tsar than a president-although the Romanovs did not possess nuclear weapons, and their wealth, obscene as it was, paled in comparison to Putin's own.

Bill Browder, the American-born British national who was an early investor in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who left the country after the government became too corrupt to continue doing business there, tells a hair-raising story about Putin: After the rise of the oligarchs in the early 2000s, Putin had the richest, most powerful oligarch-Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the energy concern Yukos-arrested. At a humiliating show trial during which the accused oligarch was kept in a cage, Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud. He was sent to prison, and his sizable assets seized.

After this sobering display, the other oligarchs approached Putin and asked what they needed to give him to avoid the same fate as Khodorkovsky, whose fate none of them wanted to share. Putin replied: "Half." Since then, ill-gotten gains have poured into his coffers. The oligarchs boast fabulous wealth, but by virtue of claiming half of their money, Putin bests them all. Browder has suggested that Putin may well be the world's richest individual.

And if this all sounds like the world's greatest mob boss making the world's biggest mob-boss flex, well, you say "tomato," I say whatever the Russian word for "tomato" is. Whatever he might have been before that series of power moves, Putin emerged afterward as a no-doubt-about-it mob boss. Khodorkovsky, the fallen oligarch, himself said as much, in a recent interview.

Whether Putin is more powerful than Mogilevich is anyone's guess. But only one of them is concurrently the head of state of a G8 country, one of a handful of nations that has nuclear capability-and, despite what revisionist historians at Fox News would have us believe, America's chief adversary since 1945.

Donald John Trump's association with the Russian mafiya-as opposed to the homegrown Italian one-began, best as we can tell, in 1984, when the Soviet soldier-turned-mobster David Bogatin purchased five of his condos for $6 million. Trump Tower was one of just two buildings in all of New York City that allowed units to be purchased by shell companies. Fishy deals like this did not deter Trump, who had traveled in underworld circles all his life.

By '84, as covered previously, Trump was already a Confidential Informant for the FBI. He'd been on the radar of the KGB since 1977, when he married the former Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovakian national who someone managed to emigrate from that Eastern Bloc country to Canada. As Luke Harding writes in his masterful and must-read book, Collusion ( excerpted here by Politico):

Zelníčková was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, "incredibly difficult." Zelníčkováa moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.

According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan....There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited [her father] in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or "cover."

Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two-at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika, or Communist Party reform-Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband's growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?

The KGB was really, really good. Are we to believe that the Soviets would not at least try to use Ivana-and her father Milos, stuck behind the Iron Curtain in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic-to get to Trump? Would not some cooperation be expected as the price of her being allowed to emigrate in the first place?

The Russians began to actively cultivate Trump in 1986, soon after his landmark real estate deal with Bogatin. As Harding tells it, Trump was invited to Moscow by Natalia Dubinina, the daughter of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, whom he met at a luncheon in New York in '86. The following year, he took her up on the offer. "On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana's Italian-American assistant," Harding writes. "Moscow was, Trump wrote, 'an extraordinary experience.' The Trumps stayed in Lenin's suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square....The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was-in effect-under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged."

Donald John Trump was a textbook KGB mark. The agents must have been drooling. Harding cites an internal memo circulated by the agency at the time, advising how to spot potential recruits: "Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject's natural characteristics?" Like a great baseball prospect, Trump was a five-tool player. Harding continues, writing about the internal memo:

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: "Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft ... and exploitation of his position to enrich himself." Plus "any other information" that would compromise the subject before "the country's authorities and the general public." Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening "disclosure."

Finally, "his attitude towards women is also of interest." The document wanted to know: "Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?"

We don't know what, if any, kompromat was gathered on that first trip to Moscow. But we do know that Trump is a serial philanderer, with a taste for Eastern European women. This wasn't exactly a state secret; by '87, he was already a tabloid legend. Are we really to believe that the KGB-arguably the best intelligence agency in the world at human intelligence gathering-would not have tried to honeypot him?

It was upon his return from that fateful Moscow trip that Trump began to branch out in his interests. "For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics," Harding points out. "Not as mayor or governor or senator.

"Trump was thinking about running for president."

And indeed, in 1988, Trump flirted with the idea of entering the presidential race, going so far as to deliver a speech in New Hampshire. He toyed with running again in 2000, on the Reform Party ticket, even hiring his old friend Roger Stone to run the exploratory committee before ultimately dropping out. Is it really a coincidence that his dormant political ambitions manifested themselves immediately after his Moscow trip, and never went away?

So, yes, the Soviets were absolutely, positively recruiting Trump on his 1987 visit to Moscow-which began, not coincidentally, on the Fourth of July (Russians love that kind of symbolism). But the KGB was not the only spy network interested in the real estate developer. The trip also attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency-the latter, by this time, becoming the bigger outfit, owing to the emphasis on signals intelligence collection that began in the late seventies.

As the pseudonymous mob expert known as Lincoln's Bible put it, during our recent telephone conversation: "It's 1987-the height of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan is president. The Russia desk is the largest, most important desk in the largest intelligence agency in the world (the NSA). And Trump was already a top echelon Confidential Informant for law enforcement. How could they not have known about that trip? It would have been gross negligence not to have known."

And if our intelligence community knew, would they really not bother interviewing Trump upon his return from Moscow? He'd been wined and dined by the Party elite, after all, and they would have wanted to hear all about it. Beginning in 1987, then, Trump was not only a Confidential Informant for the FBI, but was also being utilized by the CIA.

Again: the two intelligence services were really fucking good. If the KGB was all over the guy, the CIA would have known, and thus taken some kind of action. "There is no universe in which he wasn't being surveilled/tracked and used by our guys," Lincoln's Bible told me. "Not one that I can see." If so, Trump's counterintelligence file is over three decades old.

Moscow also marked a transition of sorts. Ownership of the mob asset known as Donald Trump began its gradual transfer from La Cosa Nostra to the Russian mafiya. Not long after the trip, Trump spent time aboard the Lady Ghislaine, the yacht owned by the British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. That sounds perfectly above board, until you consider that Maxwell, born Jan Hoch in Czechoslovakia, was a seditious little fucker. His classified dossier at the British Foreign Office described him as "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia." He was affiliated with Israeli intelligence and the KGB. He was business partners with Semion Mogilevich, so he was mobbed up. And his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, would in 1991 begin a long and scandalous relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. For all we know, nothing untoward happened on that yacht. But given the nexus of key OC figures-Mogilevich, the two Maxwells, Epstein-it is hard to write it all off as mere coincidence.

Four-and-a-half years after Trump's visit to Moscow, the USSR fell. Rapacious "oligarchs" raced to gobble up the country's wealth and natural resources. Untold billions, maybe trillions, of dollars were removed from Russia, most to banks in quasi-Western places like Cyprus. This created unprecedentedly vast opportunities for willing money launderers in the West-and Donald John Trump was well positioned to benefit from the windfall.

Trump needed the help. By the early nineties, his casinos were going bust, US banks had stopped lending to him, and he desperately needed Russian capital to stay afloat. My business professional contact who lived in Russia explains what likely happened, incrementally, over the next two-and-a-half decades:

Take someone who cannot get credit from a bank headquartered in the English speaking world because he's already burned every major US and UK bank in New York and London. Canadian banks don't take American risk that American banks won't take and Australian banks won't touch him because their government blacklisted him from doing business in the country. But he has a massive cash need because if he does not have lines of credit to keep servicing his previous debts and his lifestyle and his next big thing, he can't attract investors into his businesses to keep the ball rolling.

This is a critical point. Trump is not just greedy for his own sake. He has to keep earning, or he will have outlived his usefulness to his mafiya whoremasters. His very life depends on his ability to do deals.

The professional continues:

So Trump needs money that doesn't ask a lot of questions. He's happy to pay extra-and pay it he will-because in his mind interest comes without cost: he can write it off his taxes, or he can flush it in bankruptcy, or he can pass it on to his customers, or he can get his investors to give him enough to wash it all out, or he can refinance if and when the straight lending world comes back to him. He's happy to take Russian money because in his mind, it's an asset to him to have Russian lenders; it makes him more likely to play the real estate market in Russia.

But he knows that if his name and a Russian lender's appear on the same finance document, that's discoverable: by the IRS, by the agencies he probably reports to, by the gaming commissions, by the state regulators, by his ex-wives, by his last set of creditors, by the next bankruptcy trustee he has to deal with. So how does he get money from a Russian bank into his pocket, and how does he repay money to the Russian bank, without leaving that paper trail?

Simple. He does not borrow directly from the Russian bank. He borrows from a straw-man bank, like Deutsche, and has the Russian bank act as a silent guarantor.

The Mazars and Deutsche Bank documents almost certainly contain damning information that confirms all of this, and that will collapse his Trump Tower of Cards-which is why Trump has moved heaven and earth to keep them secret.

Whoever ultimately controlled the dirty rubles in the nineties, when Trump first opened his doors to the Russians, in the twenty-tens the kopek stops with Vladimir Putin. Would any Russian bank be able, in this day and age, to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Deutsche Bank, or any other straw-man bank," without Putin's awareness, if not approval? If you borrow money from a loan shark, but the transaction is made through your local branch bank, guess what? You're still borrowing money from a loan shark-and in that world, the penalties for nonpayment are brutal.

In the event, by the time Trump began his presidential run in 2015, the transition was complete. He was no longer a creature of the Italian mob. He was fully owned by the Russians-by Mogilevich and the mafiya, and ultimately by Vladimir Putin. The president really is Putin's puppet, just as Hillary Clinton claimed.

What's more, plenty of people in the intelligence community and the Justice Department know this is the case, because they have seen his counterintelligence file, or have worked with Trump in his capacity as CI. Robert Mueller must know. James Comey must know. Andrew McCabe must know. James Clapper and John O. Brennan must know. And while all of these individuals have dropped hints, none save Mueller have produced actual receipts-and a lot of his Report remains redacted. It's no accident that Trump has done everything in his considerable power to impugn these people. He knows what they have on him, so he must attack their credibility.

To wit: When Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok that Trump is "not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" and Strzok replied, "No. No he won't. We'll stop it," they were discussing national security, not Democrat/Republican politics; two of the FBI's best Russian mob experts were highly, and rightly, concerned that an asset of a hostile foreign power would win the White House. No wonder Trump wants us to believe their text exchanges were romantic in nature, and constantly frames Page and Strzok as lovers-the truth could end his presidency.

Alas, Page's worst fears were realized. The President of the United States answers to the Kremlin. That sounds like something from a bad movie, but in the time of the worst pandemic in over a century, it has immediate, and grave, real-world consequences.

"We have been taken over," Lincoln's Bible said, "and a quarter of a million innocent civilians are going to die because of it."
As with "Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Spy," this piece was written with a lot of help from Lincoln's Bible. Photo: President Ronald Reagan Shaking Hands with Donald Trump and Ivana Trump During The State Visit of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at The State Dinner in The Blue Room, 2/11/1985. From the Reagan Presidential Archive.

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From Trump to tRUmp: How the Mob's Man Became Putin's Puppet

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ON 19 OCTOBER 2016, in the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton opined that Vladimir Putin would "rather have a puppet as president of the United States," meaning Donald John Trump, than a formidable adversary like her. As Trump short-circuited like a Star Wars droid on the fritz ("No puppet.

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Roger Stone's mentor was Arthur Finkelstein. (Additional source. Also, " Arthur's Boys " work on Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.)

Lee Atwater's mentor was also Arthur Finkelstein. ( Here are some of their "dirty tricks" on a campaign together in 1978.)

Arthur Finkelstein was an openly gay, (non-practicing) ethnically Jewish man who frequently worked with anti-gay and anti-Semitic candidates. His recent death cannot change the man he was, or the effect he had on political discourse in the US and around the world. In fact, it was Finkelstein and Atwater's longtime client, Strom Thurmond, who lobbied to abolish the "Fairness Doctrine". Thurmond did ultimately succeed in his efforts, and this paved the way for much of the current media landscape. If the Fairness Doctrine remained in place today, would we have the current iteration of Fox News, Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh? At least in their current form and presentation style, no, they likely would not exist.

Arthur Finkelstein had a much bigger role on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign than has been previously reported by almost anyone. (The sole exception I'm aware of is Dr. András Göllner's 'Creatures in the Budapest hills' articles. Part one, part two, part three.)
Let's start to piece some of this together:
Black Manafort Stone Atwater was a prominent consulting firm which worked to rebrand dictators and terrorists.

Paul Manafort was brought onto the Trump campaign by Roger Stone.

Donald Trump Jr. received his first email from Rob Goldstone about the infamous Trump Tower meeting on June 3, 2016.

That meeting occurred on June 9, 2016, but what happened in between June 3-9? Well, Donald Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone exchanged emails, and likely had at least one phone conversation. Also, on , Alex Castellanos begins work on a new super PAC supporting Trump, Rebuilding America Now, which spends roughly $22 million on Trump's campaign.

Along with Lee Atwater and Arthur Finkelstein, Rebuilding America Now's Alex Castellanos also worked for Senators Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. In fact, Alex Castellanos in discussing attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2014, says, "I served my apprenticeship in politics working for mad-genius GOP pollster and strategist Arthur Finkelstein."

Additionally, over $20 million of the super PAC's expenditures went to Dwight J. Sterling. Dwight Sterling is a partner and President of Multi Media Services. According to Sterling's bio, seen below, he worked with Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates.

The Rebuilding America Now super PAC was founded by Donald Trump and Paul Manafort's mutual friend, Tom Barrack. The key hires for this super PAC also include Ken McKay and Laurance Gay.

According to Ballotpedia, " Ken McKay was hired by convention manager Paul Manafort as a senior advisor to Trump's campaign in April 2016 but left the campaign in early June 2016 to join the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now."

Ken McKay served as Rick Scott's chief strategist during his 2010 run for governor. He was (briefly) the chief of staff to former RNC chair Michael Steele. He began work during the 2016 election cycle for Chris Christie's presidential campaign.

Chris Christie was of course in the running for Trump's VP spot at one point, but the nomination went to Mike Pence, who publicly endorsed (albeit on tape) Rebuilding America Now.

Longtime Paul Manafort associate Laurance Gay worked on the Rebuilding America Now super PAC.

"The advantage that we bring, without compromising any of the boundaries, is we know how Manafort thinks. I've done over 40 campaigns with Paul," Gay said.

Additionally, Jim Murphy was brought onto Trump's campaign on . "Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's campaign chairman who also hired Mr. Wiley, helped bring Mr. Murphy on board."

When Trump's " boyhood friend" Ron Lauder ran for NYC mayor in 1989, his campaign manager was the same Jim Murphy. The chief strategists for Lauder's campaign were Roger Ailes and Arthur Finkelstein.

In the late 1990s, when Finkelstein was working for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Finkelstein was responsible for Bibi's win in 1996), Arthur often flew from New York to Israel with Ron Lauder on Lauder's private jet.

Ron Lauder also visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow in April of 2016. (Additional source.)

Ron Lauder is currently implicated in Netanyahu's ongoing corruption scandal.

The same corruption scandal linked to Beny Steinmetz and Jared Kushner.

Jared's dad, Charles Kushner, is longtime friends with Bibi Netanyahu as well.

****

I'm going to work to keep expanding on all of this, but I wanted to create a resource that's easier to get to. For now, here are some threads which help explain the significance of what I've laid out so far.

They are long, sometimes overly convoluted. Apologies for that. It all remains a work in progress.

*Arthur Finkelstein threads related to GOP connections, his work in Hungary and links to Putin (through Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is Putin's puppet with the EU and NATO):

*'Finkelstein's Hungarian links point to both Putin & the Trump campaign' Twitter Moment here.

*Paul Manafort, Reince Priebus 'Big Data' link. Thread here.

*'Why did the Trump campaign talk to Putin's man in Ukraine in 2016?' (Some Manafort related info here, plus more). Twitter moment here.

*Jared Kushner is traveling to Israel to try and save Bibi Netanyahu. Don't fall for Trump's lies. Full thread.

*I could not possibly dislike @tedcruz more, but it looks to me like @VP @mike_pence helped sink his campaign. Thread.

*Paul Manafort. War in Ukraine. Russian spies. Cyber warfare. Micro targeting. US sanctions on Russia. Keystone XL. Rosneft. Mega Thread.

*Paul Manafort. Tom Barrack. Jared. Trump Tower. Ukraine. A Russian spy. Money laundering. Mike Flynn. Sanctions. Etc. Thread.

*'Alleged Russian hacker sent Democratic documents to a Florida GOP operative'

The Florida GOP operative is Aaron Nevins.

Aaron Nevins's dad is Buddy Nevins.

Buddy Nevins knows Roger Stone. He even wrote an article about Roger in 2008.

Buddy Nevins admitted in another article that he has known Connie Mack IV since at least 2000.

Arthur Finkelstein first worked for Connie Mack III. Finkelstein began work for Connie Mack IV in 2004, and the two worked together in Hungary until Arthur's death in 2017.

Here's my thread on Aaron Nevins's work for the Florida GOP.

Stay tuned for much more.

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Trump, Putin and the mob. Research collection. Part 1: Trump campaign connections.

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Roger Stone's mentor was Arthur Finkelstein. (Additional source. Also, " Arthur's Boys " work on Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.) Lee Atwater's mentor was also Arthur Finkelstein. ( Here are some of their "dirty tricks" on a campaign together in 1978.) Arthur Finkelstein was an openly gay, (non-practicing) ethnically Jewish man who frequently worked with anti-gay and anti-Semitic candidates.

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It wasn't Donald's "-isms." It wasn't his nature, or his voters, or our own politics. I t was what we knew about him from journalists like Wayne Barrett. It was what we knew about Donald's history, that NO ONE in the current media was

And then came Paul Manafort. He entered the scene as a campaign manager. We knew what that meant. We knew who Manafort was, and where he came from. That was the moment we began to dig.

What we found is a simple truth. And now, we're bringing that truth to you.

We're bringing it in such a way that you can scrutinize it. Bang on it all you want. Bring us your refutations to the evidence that we're presenting herein. We've been doing that to ourselves over all these months.

DIG ALL YOU WANT. If you are intellectually honest, we are confident that you will come to the same conclusion. Because, no matter what rabbit hole we ventured down (and there are endless rabbit holes), this singular truth always surfaced. Glaringly.

It is there for all to see. Here it is...

There is a man who controls our President.

And his name is not Vladimir Putin.

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There is a man who controls our President. And his name is not Vladimir Putin.

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It wasn't Donald's "-isms." It wasn't his nature, or his voters, or our own politics. I t was what we knew about him from journalists like Wayne Barrett. It was what we knew about Donald's history, that NO ONE in the current media was And then came Paul Manafort.

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"Seth is a first-rate reporter and wonderful story-teller, and the tale he tells here is mind-boggling." -Jane Mayer, staff writer at
The New Yorker and author of Dark Money

"Seth Hettena has written a history of the president's dealings with Russia that reads like a page-turning mob thriller." -Charles Kaiser in
The Guardian

"Seth Hettena ... lays out the entire labyrinth of ties Trump has long had with the Russian mafia in New York, and with the Russian government itself. His essential insight is that there is no clear distinction between the two."-Andrew Sullivan in the
Times Literary Supplement

"Seth Hettena skillfully weaves many threads-most fresh or previously hidden-into a rich tapestry tying together decades of Donald Trump's deep involvement with Russia." -David Cay Johnston, author of the
New York Times bestseller The Making of Donald Trump

"Hettena's book in particular is important for grasping the global reach and the contemporary political impact of Russian organized crime... Today, that lens is even more important as the economic and political activities of Russian organized criminals reverberate across the globe, especially to London, Spain, and the tangled world of the American president.."-Professor Louise Shelley, founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) at George Mason University, in
War on the Rocks

"If you wish to wade deep in the dealings between Trump World and Russian investors, Hettena follows the dirty money." -Carlos Lozada in
The Washington Post

"A succinct history of Donald Trump's numerous links to Russia. ... Hettena's worrying conclusion is that Trump is so indebted to Russia that there is no telling where his own influence ends and Putin's begins." -Mitch Mott in
The Advertiser (Adelaide, Australia)
Trump / Russia: The Definitive History
Available from Melville House

Uncovering the full, shocking history behind Donald Trump's decades-long involvement with Russia

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the relationship between members of Trump's campaign and Russian operatives continues, there is growing evidence that Trump has spent decades cultivating corrupt ties to Russians and the post-Soviet state.

In Trump/Russia: A Definitive History, I chronicle the many years Trump has spent wooing Russian money and power. From the collapse of his casino empire-which left Trump desperate for cash-and his first contacts with Russian deal-makers and financiers, on up to the White House, I reveal the myriad of shady people, convoluted dealings, and strange events that suggest how indebted to Russia our forty-fifth president might be.

As the story unfolds beyond the publication of my book, I'll be writing here with further thoughts and observations. For any publicity inquiries, please contact publicity@mhpbooks.com

Interview with Don Lemon on CNN Tonight, November 30, 2018

Interview on MSNBC's Morning Joe, May 8, 2018

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"Seth is a first-rate reporter and wonderful story-teller, and the tale he tells here is mind-boggling." -Jane Mayer, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Dark Money "Seth Hettena has written a history of the president's dealings with Russia that reads like a page-turning mob thriller."

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See all briefings

Analysis

Putin's Payout: 12 Ways Trump has Supported Putin's Foreign Policy Agenda

In May 2017, the FBI formally opened a counterintelligence investigation into the President of the United States to determine whether he had been working on behalf of the Russian government, according to The New York Times. The inquiry into the President was formally folded into the Special Counsel's investigation, and its current status remains unclear. Whether or not the Kremlin is exercising direct influence over an American president, one thing is clear: the actions of the Trump administration have constantly served to advance the foreign policy agenda of the Kremlin.

Trump's Russia Cover-Up By the Numbers - 272 contacts with Russia-linked operatives

A new brief from the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Moscow Project shows that, based on public reporting and indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller, there are at least 272 known contacts between Trump's team and Russia-linked operatives during the campaign and transition, including at least 38 meetings.

See all briefings

Latest in the News

With the 2020 election fast approaching, it's vital to remember Mueller's conclusions: The Trump campaign colluded... https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251521134790672385

That's why the administration, led by Trump and Bill Barr, are trying so hard to undermine the report's conclusions... https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251520842254729217

And of course, there's plenty of evidence that the Russian government is interfering to help Trump again-and Trump... https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1251520599828180993

The Moscow Project is an initiative of the Center for American Progress that is dedicated to uncovering the truth about Trump's involvement in Russian attacks on our democracy.

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See all briefings Putin's Payout: 12 Ways Trump has Supported Putin's Foreign Policy Agenda In May 2017, the FBI formally opened a counterintelligence investigation into the President of the United States to determine whether he had been working on behalf of the Russian government, according to The New York Times.

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Donald Trump on Russia & missing Hillary Clinton emails (C-SPAN)

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When I call dotard a "mobster," I'm not being cute.
Or provocative.
Or jumping on MSM's sudden embrace of what they've always known & obfuscated.
NO.
I'm bringing U the truth.
Donald Trump was born into a front organization of the Genovese crime family.
He was theirs from birth..

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
When I call dotard a "mobster," I'm not being cute.
Or provocative.
Or jumping on MSM's sudden embrace of what they've always known & obfuscated.
NO.
I'm bringing U the truth.
Donald Trump was born into a front organization of the Genovese crime family.
He was theirs from birth..

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Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

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When I call dotard a "mobster," I'm not being cute.
Or provocative.
Or jumping on MSM's sudden embrace of what they've always known & obfuscated.
NO.
I'm bringing U the truth.
Donald Trump was born into a front organization of the Genovese crime family.
He was theirs from birth..
— LB 🌻☮️ (@LincolnsBible) June 15, 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
When I call dotard a "mobster," I'm not being cute.
Or provocative.
Or jumping on MSM's sudden embrace of what they've always known & obfuscated.
NO.
I'm bringing U the truth.
Donald Trump was born into a front organization of the Genovese crime family.
He was theirs from birth..

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
When I call dotard a "mobster," I'm not being cute.
Or provocative.
Or jumping on MSM's sudden embrace of what they've always known & obfuscated.
NO.
I'm bringing U the truth.
Donald Trump was born into a front organization of the Genovese crime family.
He was theirs from birth..

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
When I call dotard a "mobster," I'm not being cute.
Or provocative.
Or jumping on MSM's sudden embrace of what they've always known & obfuscated.
NO.
I'm bringing U the truth.
Donald Trump was born into a front organization of the Genovese crime family.
He was theirs from birth..

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting on the American tax system. Since 2009 he has taught the business, property and tax law of the ancient world at Syracuse University's law and graduate business schools.

In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump argued that he was "clean as a whistle"-young enough that he hadn't had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.

But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he'd hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan.

Advertisement

Why did Trump get his casino license anyway? Why didn't investigators look any harder? And how deep did his connections to criminals really go?

These questions ate at me as I wrote about Atlantic City for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then went more deeply into the issues in a book, Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business. In all, I've covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that time I've encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime. Some of Trump's unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in court; some haven't. And some of those links have continued until recent years, though when confronted with evidence of such associations, Trump has often claimed a faulty memory. In an April 27 phone call to respond to my questions for this story, Trump told me he did not recall many of the events recounted in this article and they "were a long time ago." He also said that I had "sometimes been fair, sometimes not" in writing about him, adding "if I don't like what you write, I'll sue you."

I'm not the only one who has picked up signals over the years. Wayne Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump's real-estate dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men.

No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump's record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding's associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.

This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn't just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.

From the public record and published accounts like that one, it's possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump's career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.

Now that he's running for president, I pulled together what's known - piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett's files. What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures - not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.

Neither Trump's campaign spokesperson, Hope Hicks, nor Jason Greenblatt, the executive vice president and chief legal officer at the Trump Organization, responded to several emailed requests for comment on the issues raised in this article.

Here, as close as we can get to the truth, is what really happened.

***

After graduating in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania, a rich young man from the outer boroughs of New York City sought his fortune on the island of Manhattan. Within a few years Donald J. Trump had made friends with the city's most notorious fixer, lawyer Roy Cohn, who had become famous as lead counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among other things Cohn was now a mob consigliere, with clients including "Fat Tony" Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful Mafia group in New York, and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos.

This business connectionproved useful when Trump began work on what would become Trump Tower, the 58-story high-rise where he still lives when he's not at his Florida estate.

There was something a little peculiar about the construction of Trump Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Most skyscrapers are steel girder construction, and that was especially true in the 1980s, says John Cross of the American Iron & Steel Institute. Some use pre-cast concrete. Trump chose a costlier and in many ways riskier method: ready-mix concrete. Ready-mix has some advantages: it can speed up construction, and doesn't require costly fireproofing. But it must be poured quickly or it will harden in the delivery truck drums, ruining them as well as creating costly problems with the building itself. That leaves developers vulnerable to the unions: the worksite gate is union controlled, so even a brief labor slowdown can turn into an expensive disaster.

Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures controlled the ready-mix business in New York, and everyone in construction at the time knew it. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob, urged on by major developers such as the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump ended up not only using ready-mix concrete, but also paying what a federal indictment of Salerno later concluded were inflated prices for it - repeatedly - to S & A Concrete, a firm Salerno and Castellano owned through fronts, and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, by choosing to build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself "at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers."

Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled both the concrete business and the unions involved in delivering and pouring it. The risks this created became clear from testimony later by Irving Fischer, the general contractor who built Trump Tower. Fischer said concrete union "goons" once stormed his offices, holding a knife to throat of his switchboard operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which included no-show jobs during construction of Trump Tower.

But with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally fear Salerno or Castellano - at least, not once he agreed to pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery delays.

The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment building, as one of the acts establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise. (While the concrete business was central to the case, the trial also proved extortion, narcotics, rigged union elections and murders by the Genovese and Gambino crime families in what Michael Chertoff, the chief prosecutor, called "the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.'')

FBI agents subpoenaed Trump in 1980 to ask about his dealing with John Cody, a Teamsters official described by law enforcement as a very close associate of the Gambino crime family. The FBI believed that Cody previously had obtained free apartments from other developers. FBI agents suspected that Cody, who controlled the flow of concrete trucks, might get a free Trump Tower apartment. Trump denied it. But a female friend of Cody's, a woman with no job who attributed her lavish lifestyle to the kindness of friends, bought three Trump Tower apartments right beneath the triplex where Donald lived with his wife Ivana. Cody stayed there on occasion and invested $500,000 in the units. Trump, Barrett reported, helped the woman get a $3 million mortgage without filling out a loan application or showing financials.

In the summer of 1982 Cody, then under indictment, ordered a citywide strike-but the concrete work continued at Trump Tower. After Cody was convicted of racketeering, imprisoned and lost control of the union, Trump sued the woman for $250,000 for alteration work. She countersued for $20 million and in court papers accused Trump of taking kickbacks from contractors, asserting this could "be the basis of a criminal proceeding requiring an attorney general's investigation" into Trump. Trump then quickly settled, paying the woman a half-million dollars. Trump said at the time and since then that he hardly knew those involved and there was nothing improper his dealings with Cody or the woman.

***

There were other irregularities in Trump's first big construction project. In 1979, when Trump hired a demolition contractor to take down the Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower, he hired as many as 200 non-union men to work alongside about 15 members of the House Wreckers Union Local 95. The non-union workers were mostly illegal Polish immigrants paid $4 to $6 per hour with no benefits, far below the union contract. At least some of them did not use power tools but sledgehammers, working 12 hours a day or more and often seven days a week. Known as the "Polish brigade," many didn't wear hard hats. Many slept on the construction site.

Normally the use of nonunion workers at a union job site would have guaranteed a picket line. Not at this site, however. Work proceeded because the Genovese family principally controlled the union; this was demonstrated by extensive testimony, documents and convictions in federal trials, as well as a later report by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force.

When the Polish workers and a union dissidentsued for their pay and benefits, Trump denied any knowledge that illegal workers without hard hats were taking down Bonwit with sledgehammers. The trial, however, demonstrated otherwise: Testimony showed that Trump panicked when the nonunion Polish men threatened a work stoppage because they had not been paid. Trump turned to Daniel Sullivan, a labor fixer and FBI informant, who told him to fire the Polish workers.

Trump knew the Polish brigade was composed of underpaid illegal immigrants and that S&A was a mob-owned firm, according to Sullivan and others. "Donald told me that he was having his difficulties and he admitted to me that - seeking my advice - that he had some illegal Polish employees on the job. I reacted by saying to Donald that 'I think you are nuts,'" Sullivan testified at the time. "I told him to fire them promptly if he had any brains." In an interview later, Sullivan told me the same thing.

In 1991, a federal judge, Charles E. Stewart Jr., ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate a fiduciary duty, or duty of loyalty, to the workers and their union and that the "breach involved fraud and the Trump defendants knowingly participated in his breach." The judge did not find Trump's testimony to be sufficiently credible and set damages at $325,000. The case was later settled by negotiation, and the agreement was sealed.

***

While Trump's buildings were going up in Manhattan, he was entering a highly regulated industry in New Jersey - one that had the responsibility, and the means, to investigate him and bring the facts to light.

From the beginning, Trump tried to have it both ways. While he leveraged Roy Cohn's mob contacts in New York, he was telling the FBI he wanted nothing to do with organized crime in Atlantic City, and even proposed putting an undercover FBI agent in his casinos.In April of 1981, when he was considering building a New Jersey casino, he expressed concern about his reputation in a meeting with the FBI, according to an FBI document in my possession and which the site Smoking Gun also posted. "Trump advised Agents that he had read in the press media and had heard from various acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in Atlantic City," the FBI recorded. "Trump also expressed at this meeting the reservation that his life and those around him would be subject to microscopic examination. Trump advised that he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City but he did not wish to tarnish his family's name."

Part of the licensing process was supposed to be a deep investigation into his background, taking more than a year for would-be casino owners, but Trump managed to cut that short. As he told the story in The Art of the Deal, in 1981 he threatened to not build in Atlantic City unless New Jersey's attorney general, John Degnan, limited the investigation to six months. Degnan was worried that Trump might someday get approval for a casino at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, which could have crushed Atlantic City's lucrative gaming industry, so Degnan agreed to Trump's terms. Trump seemingly paid Degnan back by becoming an ardent foe of gambling anywhere in the East except Atlantic City-a position that obviously protected his newfound business investment as well, of course.

Trump was required to disclose any investigations in which he might have been involved in the past, even if they never resulted in charges. Trump didn't disclose a federal grand jury inquiry into how he obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan. The failure to disclose either that inquiry or the Cody inquiry probably should have disqualified Trump from receiving a license under the standards set by the gaming authorities.

Once Trump was licensed in 1982, critical facts that should have resulted in license denial began emerging in Trump's own books and in reports by Barrett-an embarrassment for the licensing commission and state investigators, who were supposed to have turned these stones over. Forced after the fact to look into Trump's connections, the two federal investigations he failed to reveal and other matters, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement investigators circled the wagons to defend their work.First they dismissed as unreliable what mobsters, corrupt union bosses and Trump's biggest customer, among others, had said to Barrett, to me and other journalists and filmmakers about their dealings with Trump. The investigators' reports showed that they then put Trump under oath. Trump denied any misconduct or testified that he could not remember. They took him at his word. That meant his casino license was secure even though others in the gambling industry, including low-level licensees like card dealers, had been thrown out for far less.

This lapse illustrated a fundamental truth about casino regulation at the time: Once the state licensed an owner, the Division of Gaming Enforcement had a powerful incentive not to overturn its initial judgment. State officials recited like a mantra their promise that New Jersey casinos were the most highly regulated business in American history, more tightly regulated than nuclear power plants. In Temples of Chance I showed that this reputation often owed less to careful enforcement than to their willingness to look the other way when problems arose.

***

In 1986, three years after Trump Tower opened, Roy Cohn was disbarred for attempting to steal from a client, lying and other conduct that an appellate court found "particularly reprehensible."

Trump testified that Cohn, who was dying from AIDS, was a man of good character who should keep his license to practice law.

This was not the only time Trump went to bat publicly for a criminal. He has also spoken up for Shapiro and Sullivan. And then there was the case of Joseph Weichselbaum, an embezzler who ran Trump's personal helicopter service and ferried his most valued clientele.

Trump and Weichselbaum were so close, Barrett reported in his book, that Weichselbaum told his parole officer about how he knew Trump was hiding his mistress, Marla Maples, from his first wife, Ivana, and tried to persuade Trump to end their years-long affair.

Trump's casinos retained Weichselbaum's firm to fly high rollers to Atlantic City. Weichselbaum was indicted in Ohio on charges of trafficking in marijuana and cocaine. The head of one of Trump's casinos was notified of the indictment in October 1985, but Trump continued using Weichselbaum-conduct that again could have cost Trump his casino license had state regulators pressed the matter, because casino owners were required to distance themselves from any hint of crime. Just two months later Trump rented an apartment he owned in the Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan to the pilot and his brother for $7,000 a month in cash and flight services. Trump also continued paying Weichselbaum's firm even after it went bankrupt.

Weichselbaum, who in 1979 had been caught embezzling and had to repay the stolen money, pleaded guilty to two felonies.

Donald Trump vouched for Weichselbaum before his sentencing, writing that the drug trafficker is "a credit to the community" who was "conscientious, forthright, and diligent." And while Weichselbaum's confederates got as many as 20 years, Weichselbaum himself got only three, serving 18 months before he was released from the urban prison that the Bureau of Prisons maintains in New York City. In seeking early release, Weichselbaum said Trump had a job waiting for him.

Weichselbaum then moved into Trump Tower, his girlfriend having recently bought two adjoining apartments there for $2.4 million. The cash purchase left no public record of whether any money actually changed hands or, if it did, where it came from. I asked Trump at the time for documents relating to the sale; he did not respond.

As a casino owner, Trump could have lost his license for associating with Weichselbaum. Trump has never been known to use drugs or even drink. What motivated him to risk his valuable license by standing up for a drug trafficker remains unclear to this day.

Trump, in his phone call to me, said he "hardly knew" Weichselbaum.

***

The facts above come from court records, interviews and other documents in my own files and those generously made available by Barrett, who was the first journalist to take a serious investigative look at Trump. Our files show Trump connected in various deals to many other mobsters and wise guys.

There was, for example, Felix Sater, a senior Trump advisor and son of a reputed Russian mobster, whom Trump kept on long after he was convicted in a mob-connected stock swindle. And there was Bob Libutti, a racehorse swindler who was quite possibly Trump's biggest customer at the casino tables at the time. Libutti told me and others about arrangements that went beyond the "comps"-free hotel rooms and services, for example-that casinos can legally give to high-rollers. Among these was a deal to sell Trump a less-than-fit horse at the inflated price of $500,000, though Trump backed out at the last minute. Libutti accused Trump of making an improper $250,000 payment to him, which would have cost Trump his license. The DGE dismissed Libutti as unreliable and took Trump at his word when he denied the allegations. (Libutti was a major figure in my 1992 book Temples of Chance.)

Some of the dealings came at a remove. In Atlantic City, Trump built on property where mobsters controlled parts of the adjoining land needed for parking. He paid $1.1 million for about a 5,000-square-foot lot that had been bought five years earlier for just $195,000. The sellers were Salvy Testa and Frank Narducci Jr., a pair of hitmen for Atlantic City mob boss Nicky Scarfowho wereknown as the Young Executioners. For several adjoining acres, Trump ignored the principal owner of record and instead negotiated directly in a deal that also likely ended up benefiting the Scarfo mob. Trump arrangeda 98-year lease deal with Sullivan, the FBI informant and labor fixer, and Ken Shapiro, described in government reports as Scarfo's "investment banker." Eventually the lease was converted into a sale after the Division of Gaming Enforcement objected to Sullivan and Shapiro being Trump's landlords.

Trump later boasted in a sworn affidavit in a civil case that he made the deals himself, his "unique contribution" making the land deals possible. In formal hearings Trump later defended Sullivan and Shapiro as "well thought of." Casino regulators thought otherwise, and banned Sullivan and Shapiro from the casino industry. But the Casino Control Commission was never asked to look into FBI reports that Trump was involved, via Shapiro, in the payoffs at the time of the land deals that resulted in Mayor Michael Mathews going to prison.

Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators, Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on. For instance, Barrett reported in his book that Trump was believed to have met personally with Salerno at Roy Cohn's townhouse; he found that there were witnesses to the meeting, one of whom kept detailed notes on all of Cohn's contacts. But instead of looking for the witnesses (one of whom had died) and the office diary one kept, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) took an easier path. They put Trump under oath and asked if he had ever attended such a meeting. Trump denied it. The inquiry ended.

Taking Trump at his word that he never met with the mobsters in Cohn's townhouse saved the casino investigators from having to acknowledge their earlier failure-that from the start, they had never properly investigated Trump and his connections to criminals. They certainly had the leverage to push harder if they chose. Indeed, two of the five Casino Control commissioners in 1991 declared that the DGE showed official favoritism to Trump. Commissioner David Waters complained that DGE did not go nearly far enough in seeking a $30,000 fine against Trump for taking an illegal loan from his father, which could be grounds to revoke Trump's casino licenses. Waters called it "an outrage that the Division of Gaming Enforcement would take this position and fail to carry out what I understand to be its responsibility to enforce the provisions of the Casino Control Act."

***

Even after he got his license, Trump continued to have relationships that should have prompted inquiries. For example, he made a deal to have Cadillacs dolled up with fancy interiors and exteriors beginning in 1988, marketing them as Trump Golden Series and Trump Executive Series limousines. The modifications were made at the Dillinger Coach Works, which was owned by a pair of convicted felons, convicted extortionist Jack Schwartz and convicted thief John Staluppi, who was so close to mobsters that he was invited to the wedding of a mob capo's daughter. New York liquor regulators proved tougher than those in New Jersey, denying Staluppi, a rich car dealer, a license because of his rap sheet and his extensive dealings with mobsters, as Barrett's former reporting partner Bill Bastone found in public records. So why did Trump repeatedly do business with mob owned businesses and mob-controlled unions? Why go down the aisle with an expensive mobbed-up concrete firm when other options were available?

"Why'd Donald do it?" Barrett said when I put the question to him. "Because he saw these mob guys as pathways to money, and Donald is all about money."

From a $400 million tax giveaway on his first big project, to getting a casino license, to collecting fees for putting his name on everything from bottled water and buildings to neckties and steaks, Trump's life has been dedicated to the next big score. Through Cohn, Trump made choices that-gratuitously, it appears-resulted in his first known business dealings with mob-controlled companies and unions, a pattern that continued long after Cohn died.

What Trump has to say about the reasons for his long, close and wide-ranging dealings with organized crime figures, with the role of mobsters in cheating Trump Tower workers, his dealings with Felix Sater and Trump's seeming leniency for Weichselbaum, are questions that voters deserve full answers about before casting their ballots.

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Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?

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David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting on the American tax system. Since 2009 he has taught the business, property and tax law of the ancient world at Syracuse University's law and graduate business schools.

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Donald Trump's glittering empire of New York skyscrapers and Atlantic City casinos have long had a darker side, allegations that the mob helped build them.

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Martin Scorsese's new film, The Irishman, conjures up a lost world. It depicts an era when the Mafia was so powerful that it set off alarms in the Kennedy White House, and Scorsese even hints that organized crime was behind JFK's assassination.

But by the end of the three-hour-plus movie, the nostalgia fades and so does the pinkie-ring finery. Every made man Scorsese introduces to the viewer is snuffed out until all that's left is Frank Sheeran (played by Robert DeNiro), a disheveled, wheelchair-bound ex-hit man who's haunted by his memories. At the film's end, a pair of FBI agents plead with Sheeran to talk about his victims, telling him there's no reason to keep silent anymore because there's no one left to protect. "Everybody's dead, Mr. Sheeran," one agent says. "They're all gone."

Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump's buildings and his casinos attracted underworld figures like "Fat Tony" Salerno, the Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the Genovese crime family. Salerno, who's portrayed in the film by Domenick Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying concrete that built Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Salerno also controlled the local concrete workers union, and when a strike shut down construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few buildings that wasn't affected was Trump Tower.

The Irishman is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt. (The title is a reference to the special kind of painting Sheeran did that left his victims' brains on the wall.) The book is full of characters who didn't make it into the movie, but they did surface in Trump's world. One is Philadelphia mob boss Philip Testa, the "chicken man" whose 1981 murder by nail bomb Bruce Springsteen sings about in the song "Atlantic City." Testa's son sold Trump premium land that became a casino parking lot. Another figure in the book is Testa's successor, Nicodemus "Little Nicky" Scarfo, whose associates tried to lease Trump land for his casino in Atlantic City - until New Jersey casino regulators quashed the deal.

Trump wasn't the only one who knew the people in the world of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him. There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day in the last week before election, and the lawyer didn't want them to run. So Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters union drivers who delivered the paper wouldn't cross it. So the ads were never delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Biden's door was always open. "You could reach out for him, and he would listen," he wrote.

The Biden story isn't in the movie. There wasn't room enough for everyone to make it into Scorsese's epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does - and with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New York's five Mafia families. "I'm the fucking boss, that's who I am," Salerno once boasted in a secretly recorded conversation. "Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine." Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the till.

In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened its doors, the future president reportedly met the Genovese family boss. The common thread linking Salerno and Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who represented both men. Cohn, the heavy-lidded henchman to Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced the two men in his Manhattan townhouse, according to the late journalist Wayne Barrett. Under oath, Trump swore that wasn't true, but he also swore that he didn't know that Cohn represented Salerno, a fact that had been widely reported in Cohn's obituary a few years earlier.

And it's not just Trump who has links to the world depicted in The Irishman. It also overlapped with some of the figures in Trump's world, past and present. Roger Stone, Trump's longtime political adviser, also met Salerno when he visited Cohn's Manhattan brownstone. This was in 1979, and Stone had been tapped to run Ronald Reagan's political operation in New York. Cohn, dressed in a silk bathrobe, introduced Stone to the mobster and then offered to help him with the Reagan campaign. Cohn's advice would change the course of Stone's life: "What you need is Donald Trump." Cohn sent the young political operative off to meet the up-and-coming real estate developer. It was a path that would lead 40 years later to Stone's conviction last month on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks.

Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, also crossed paths with Salerno as New York's top federal prosecutor in the 1980s. Giuliani was obsessed with Salerno. "Tony was the Tip O'Neill of the underworld and would reside forever in Rudy Giuliani's mind," wrote the legendary New York columnist Jimmy Breslin. Giuliani went after Salerno with such zeal that the mobster's defense attorney complained that the prosecutor ″has made it his personal mission to bury my client.″

In March 1986, Giuliani announced that a grand jury had indicted Salerno and others on charges that included rigging construction bids. Trump Plaza, a co-op apartment building on Manhattan's East Side, was specifically mentioned in the 29-count indictment. Salerno arranged things so his concrete company got a $7.8 million contract at Trump Plaza. It just so happens that while these bids were being rigged, the building was under construction, right around the time that Trump met Salerno in Cohn's townhouse. Even so, the indictment makes it clear that the bid-rigging occurred without the knowledge of developers.

The FBI had uncovered the concrete bid-rigging scheme at Trump Plaza by secretly bugging Mafia homes and hangouts, including the Palma Boys Social Club, where DeNiro and his "rabbi" Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, sit down with Salerno in Scorsese's film. Giuliani, by his own account, listened to countless hours of secretly recorded conversations of mobsters, and he reportedly was able to pull off a convincing impression of the mobster's scratchy voice. "When you listen to those guys for thousands of hours, you can't help but sound like them," Giuliani once said.

More than three decades later, it's Giuliani who is under federal investigation for his dealings in Ukraine, Trump is the president on the brink of impeachment, and bosses like Salerno are dead and gone, except for in the movies. As Giuliani finds himself in the crosshairs of prosecutors with the U.S. attorney's office he once ran, it's worth pondering what was on those tapes. Salerno died in prison in 1992, but his words captured on tape live on. When Giuliani says he has "insurance" on his famous client, is it to Trump's connection to the lost word of The Irishman that he's referring?

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The Real-Life Mob Families of 'The Irishman'? Donald Trump Knew Them

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Martin Scorsese's new film, The Irishman, conjures up a lost world. It depicts an era when the Mafia was so powerful that it set off alarms in the Kennedy White House, and Scorsese even hints that organized crime was behind JFK's assassination.

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Just Security has compiled and curated all publicly available documents related to Congress's impeachment and trial of President Donald J. Trump. This collection seeks to include significant original source material, including relevant legislation, trial materials, letters, subpoenas, deposition and witness transcripts, executive branch communications, and litigation documents.

Please note that this page was recently reorganized to make the resource more user-friendly.

Please contact us if there are documents you believe should be added to the Clearinghouse.

For documents related to Congress's various Russia investigations, see our Public Document Clearinghouse: Congressional Russia Investigations.

Readers may also be interested in Just Security's Ukraine Timeline and Kate Brannen's "A Who's Who of Ukraine Witnesses."
Table of Contents
A. Party Submissions (Briefs, Memoranda, Letters, etc.)
B. Trial Procedure Documents
C. Trial Floor Proceedings
D. Historical Documents

A. Impeachment Articles and Resolutions
B. Committee Reports
C. Executive Branch Reports
D. Evidentiary Documents
1. Whistleblower Complaint and Related Documents
2. Other Evidentiary Documents (phone records, text messages, Parnas productions, etc.)
E. Committee Witness Testimony
1. Public Hearings
2. Depositions
F. Judiciary Committee Hearings
1. Public Hearings
2. Executive Branch-Congress Correspondence
3. Majority-Minority correspondence
G. Congressional Subpoenas and Related Documents
1. State Department
2. White House/National Security Council
3. Defense Department
4 . Office of Management and Budget
5. Department of Energy
6. Private Citizens
7. Minority Witnesses
H. Miscellaneous Congressional Documents
1. Communication from or within Congress
2. Committee Press Releases
I. Miscellaneous Executive Documents
1. Communications from or within the Executive Branch
2. OLC Memoranda (Contemporary and Historical)
J. Historical Impeachment Materials
III. Related Litigation and FOIA Documents

I. Senate Trial Documents A. Party Submissions Return to Table of Contents B. Trial Procedure Documents Return to Table of Contents C. Trial Floor Proceedings

Day 1: January 16, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 2: January 21, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 3: January 22, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 4: January 23, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 5: January 24, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 6: January 25, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 7: January 27, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 8: January 28, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 9: January 29, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 10: January 30, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 11: January 31, 2020 (video and transcript)

Day 12: February 3, 2020 (video and transcript)

Floor Speeches: February 4, 2020 (video and transcript)

Floor Speeches and Vote: February 5, 2020 (video part 1, part 2, and transcript)

Return to Table of Contents D. Historical Documents Return to Table of Contents II. House Impeachment Documents A. Articles of Impeachment and Resolutions
Related Resolutions
Return to Table of Contents B. Committee Reports Return to Table of Contents C. Executive Branch Reports Return to Table of Contents D. Evidentiary Documents
1. Whistleblower Complaint and Related Documents

OLC Memorandum Regarding Whistleblower Complaint and Related Communications

Letters Related to Whistleblower Complaint

Relevant Statutes
Return to Table of Contents
2. Other Evidentiary Documents (phone records, text messages, Parnas productions, etc.)

Lev Parnas Document Production and Related Documents

Documents Relating to Former National Security Advisor John Bolton
Return to Table of Contents E. Committee Witness Testimony
1. Public Hearings

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for First Open Hearing (November 13, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for First Open Hearing (November 13, 2019)

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent

Ambassador William B. Taylor

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Second Open Hearing (November 15, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Second Open Hearing (November 15, 2019)

Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (November 15, 2019)

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Third Open Hearing (November 19, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Third Open Hearing (November 19, 2019)

Jennifer Williams, aide to Vice President Mike Pence

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Fourth Open Hearing (November 19, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Fourth Open Hearing (November 19, 2019)

Ambassador Kurt Volker, former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine

Tim Morrison, a White House aide with the National Security Council

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Fifth Open Hearing (November 20, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Fifth Open Hearing (November 20, 2019)

Ambassador Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union

Trump administration responses to Sondland's testimony

Vice President Mike Pence

Statement by VP Pence's Chief of Staff Marc Short (November 20, 2019)

Comments made to WISN 12 News (November 20, 2019)

Statement (via Twitter) by Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus (November 20, 2019)

Comments made by Secretary Pompeo during press availability (November 20, 2019)

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Fifth Open Hearing (November 20, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Fifth Open Hearing (November 20, 2019)

Statement by DOE Press Secretary Shaylyn Hynes (November 20, 2019)

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Sixth Open Hearing (November 20, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Sixth Open Hearing (November 20, 2019)

Laura Cooper, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs

David Hale, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (did not provide an opening statement)

Chairman Schiff Opening Statement for Seventh Open Hearing (November 21, 2019)

Ranking Member Nunes Opening Statement for Seventh Open Hearing (November 21, 2019)

Fiona Hill, former National Security Council senior director for Europe and Russia
David Holmes Return to Table of Contents
2. Depositions in Closed Hearings

Acting DNI Joseph Maguire

Ambassador Kurt Volker

Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch

Fiona Hill

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent

Ambassador P. Michael McKinley

Ambassador Philip Reeker

Ambassador Gordon Sondland

Ambassador William B. Taylor

Laura K. Cooper (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, Department of Defense)

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman

Catherine M. Croft (Special Adviser for Ukraine, Department of State)

Christopher Anderson (Former Special Adviser for Ukraine, Department of State)

Special note: Confirmation Hearing for John Sullivan for U.S. Ambassador to Russia

Timothy Morrison

Mark Sandy

David Hale, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs

Jennifer Williams

David Holmes
Witnesses Who Failed to Comply with Congressional Subpoena for Testimony Communications Between the Executive Branch and Witnesses
White House/National Security Council

Fiona Hill

Defense Department

Laura Cooper
Return to Table of Contents F. Judiciary Committee Hearings
1. Public Hearings

December 4, 2019:
Full hearing video
Return to Table of Contents
2. Executive Branch-Congress correspondence

Letter from Chairman Nadler to President Trump, informing of an impeachment hearing and the President and his counsel's right to participation (November 26, 2019)

Letter from Chairman Nadler to President Trump, regarding participation in upcoming impeachment proceedings(November 29, 2019)

Chairman Nadler Notifies President Trump & Ranking Member Collins of Privileges Provided During Impeachment Inquiry (November 29, 2019)

Letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to Chairman Nadler, declining participation in the upcoming impeachment hearing (December 1, 2019)

Chairman Nadler Statement on White House Refusal to Participate in First Impeachment Hearing (December 2, 2019)

Letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to Chairman Nadler, denouncing the impeachment Inquiry(December 6, 2019)

Return to Table of Contents
3. Majority-Minority correspondence
Return to Table of Contents G. Congressional Subpoenas and Related Documents Return to Table of Contents Return to Table of Contents Return to Table of Contents

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to OMB Acting Director Vought, transmitting a subpoena of documents (October 7, 2019) (OMB subpoena schedule)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to OMB Acting Director Vought, requesting a deposition (October 11, 2019)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to OMB Associate Director Duffey, requesting a deposition (October 11, 2019)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to OMB Acting Director Vought, transmitting a subpoena (October 25, 2019)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to OMB Associate Director Duffey, transmitting a subpoena (October 25, 2019)

Return to Table of Contents Return to Table of Contents

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to Igor Fruman, requesting documents and a deposition (September 30, 2019)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to Lev Parnas, requesting documents and a deposition (September 30, 2019)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to Rudolph Giuliani, transmitting a subpoena of documents (September 30, 2019) (Giuliani subpoena schedule)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to Semyon Kislin, requesting documents and a deposition (September 30, 2019)

Letter from John M. Dowd (Counsel to Parnas and Fruman) to Nicolas Mitchell (HPSCI Counsel), regarding Parnas and Fruman (October 3, 2019)

Letter from House Chairmen Cummings, Engel, and Schiff to John Dowd, transmitting subpoena of documents from Parnas and Fruman (October 10, 2019) (Parnas subpoena schedule) (Fruman subpoena schedule)

Letter from Jon Sale (Counsel to Giuliani) to Nicholas Mitchell (HPSCI Counsel), giving notice that Giuliani will not comply with the subpoena (October 15, 2019)

Return to Table of Contents Return to Table of Contents H. Miscellaneous Congressional Documents
1. Communication from or within Congress

Letter from Majority Leader Hoyer and Chairman Engel to Secretary Pompeo, regarding attacks on career foreign service officers, including Ambassador Yovanovitch (April 12, 2019)

Republican Staff of the three House Committees to Republican Members of three committees, Key Points of Evidence from the Democrats' Closed-Door "Impeachment Inquiry" (Nov. 12, 2019)

Letter from Senator Johnson to Representatives Jordan and Nunes regarding firsthand information about President Trump's actions toward Ukraine (November 18, 2019)

Letter from Under Secretary of State Bulatao to Senator Menendez, regarding the testimony of State Department personnel in the House impeachment inquiry (November 18, 2019)

Letter from Senator Schumer to Defense Secretary Esper on protection of Defense Department witnesses including Vindman and Cooper (November 18, 2019)

Letter from Under Secretary of State Bulatao to Senator Menendez, regarding the testimony of State Department personnel in the House impeachment inquiry (November 18, 2019)

Letter from Senator Menendez to Assistant Secretary Evanoff, calling for a State Department investigation into the use of personal phones for official business (November 19, 2019)

Letter from Senator Graham to Secretary Pompeo, requesting documents related to Ukraine and Biden (November 21, 2019)

Letter from Under Secretary of State Bulatao to Senator Menendez, regarding the testimony of State Department personnel in the House impeachment inquiry (November 18, 2019)

Letter from Chairman Schiff to Vice President Pence, regarding the declassification of material in the supplemental written submission of Jennifer Williams (December 6, 2019)

Letter from Chairman Schiff to Chairman Nadler, accompanying the submission to the Judiciary Committee of the classified supplemental written submission of Jennifer Williams (December 11, 2019)

Return to Table of Contents
2. Committee Press Releases
House Intelligence Committee House Judiciary Committee Return to Table of Contents I. Miscellaneous Executive Documents
1. Communications from or within the Executive Branch

Letter from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Rood to four Congressional Committees, certifying that the Government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to address corruption (May 23, 2019)

Letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone from Steven A. Engel, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, Re: Testimonial Immunity Before Congress of the Former Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Implementation (September 16, 2019)

Letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone from Steven A. Engel, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, Re: Testimonial Immunity Before Congress of the Former Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary(September 16, 2019)

Letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to House Leadership (October 8, 2019)

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone letter to Chairman Nadler on non-participation of President's lawyers in Judiciary Committee hearings (December 1, 2019)

Letter from OMB General Counsel Mark R. Paoletta to GAO General Counsel Tom Armstrong, regarding the apportionment of funds for security assistance for Ukraine (December 11, 2019)

Letter from President Trump to Speaker Pelosi, protesting the impeachment (December 17, 2019)

Return to Table of Contents
2. Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Memoranda

OLC Memorandum, "Attempted Exclusion of Agency Counsel from Congressional Depositions of Agency Employees" (May 23, 2019)

OLC, Letter Opinion to the President Regarding Absolute Immunity of the Deputy National Security Advisor (October 25, 2019)

OLC Memorandum, "Exclusion of Agency Counsel from Congressional Depositions in the Impeachment Context" (November 1, 2019)

OLC, Letter Opinion to the President Regarding Absolute Immunity of the Legal Advisor to the National Security Counsel (November 3, 2019)

OLC, Letter Opinion to the President Regarding Absolute Immunity of the Acting Chief of Staff(November 7, 2019)

OLC, Memorandum Opinion Re: House Committees' Authority to Investigate for Impeachment (January 19, 2019)

Historical OLC Memoranda
Return to Table of Contents J. Historical Impeachment Materials
Johnson

Nixon

Clinton
Return to Table of Contents III. Related Litigation and FOIA Documents
U.S. v. Lev Parnas, et al.

New York Times and Charlie Savage FOIA Litigation

American Oversight FOIA Litigation

Buzzfeed FOIA Litigation

Center for Public Integrity FOIA Litigation

Kupperman v. House of Representatives, et al.

Committee on the Judiciary v. Donald F. McGahn II
Return to Table of Contents IV. Miscellaneous Hatch Act Complaint Return to Table of Contents
Image: A view of the hearing room before FBI Director James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill June 8, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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Rachel VanLandingham, Lt Col, USAF (Ret.)

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Public Document Clearinghouse: Ukraine Impeachment Trial

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Just Security has compiled and curated all publicly available documents related to Congress's impeachment and trial of President Donald J. Trump. This collection seeks to include significant original source material, including relevant legislation, trial materials, letters, subpoenas, deposition and witness transcripts, executive branch communications, and litigation documents.

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Buried deep in Robert Mueller's indictment of Paul Manafort is a new link between Donald Trump's former campaign and Russian organized crime.

The indictment ( PDF), unsealed on Monday, includes an extensive look into Paul Manafort's byzantine financial dealings. In particular, it details how he used a company called Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States.

The Cyprus-based Lucicle Consultants Limited, in turn, reportedly received millions of dollars from a businessman and Ukrainian parliamentarian named Ivan Fursin, who is closely linked to one of Russia's most notorious criminals: Semion Mogilevich.

Mogilevich is frequently described as " the most dangerous mobster in the world." Currently believed to be safe in Moscow, he is, according to the FBI, responsible for weapons trafficking, contract killings, and international prostitution. In 2009, he made the bureau's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

"Ivan Fursin was a senior figure in the Mogilevich criminal organization," Taras Kuzio, a non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS' Center for Transatlantic Relations and a specialist on the region told The Daily Beast.

Martin Sheil, a retired criminal investigator for the IRS, said the indictment, with its connections to Fursin, helps illuminate the murky world Manafort operated in before taking the reins of Trump's presidential bid.

"This indictment strongly indicates the existence of a previously unknown relationship between an alleged Russian organized crime leader and Mr. Manafort," Sheil told The Daily Beast.

According to the indictment, Manafort and his former business partner, Rick Gates, used Lucicle to avoid paying taxes on money which they then spent on a variety of pricey items: clothes, antiques, and at least one Mercedes-Benz.

Paul Manafort's attorney, Kevin Downing, told reporters on Monday that the idea that anyone would engage in such a scheme is laughable.

"The second thing about this indictment that I, myself, find most ridiculous is a claim that maintaining offshore accounts to bring all your funds into the United States, as a scheme to conceal from the United States government, is ridiculous," he told a scrum of reporters on the steps of a D.C. courthouse.

But the indictment alleges otherwise. According to Mueller's team, from April 2012 to March 2013, Lucicle transferred more than $1.3 million to a home improvement company in the Hamptons, where Manafort owns property.

Lucicle also sent more than $200,000 to a New York men's clothing store from March 2012 to February 2013. In that same window of time, it also sent more than $100,000 to a New York antique dealer, more than $340,000 to a Florida contractor, $88,000 to a landscaper in the Hamptons, and a comparatively paltry payment of $7,500 to a clothing store in Beverly Hills.

On Oct. 5, 2012, Lucicle wired in $62,750 to pay for a Mercedes-Benz. And on Valentine's Day of 2013, it sent $14,000 to a Florida art gallery. In total, according to Mueller's indictment, Lucicle wired more than $5 million into the U.S. for Gates and Manafort.

At least some of the money Manafort and Gates used to pay for all those goodies appears to have come from Fursin. The New York Times reported in July that Lucicle and Fursin are tied to an "offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine."

According to the Times, "Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York." It was one month after that transfer that Lucicle started shelling out millions to pay for cars, clothes, and real estate, according to the indictment.

That isn't Fursin's only connection to Manafort. He is also a lawmaker for the Party of Regions, which paid at least $17 million to Manafort's firm.

In addition, Fursin's longtime business associate, Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, has an off-again, on-again partnership with Manafort. Together, they tried to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan for a cool $850 million. Firtash also bankrolled Ukraine's Party of Regions.

Firtash has his own legal complications. He is currently under indictment in U.S. federal court for allegedly orchestrating an international titanium mining racket. The acting U.S. attorney in Chicago recently dubbed him an "organized-crime member" and an "upper-echelon associat[e] of Russian organized crime." His attorneys say those charges are mere "innuendo," according to the Chicago Tribune.

A December 2005 report from the Austrian Federal Criminal Investigation Agency said the FBI described Fursin and Firtash as senior members of the Semion Mogilevich Organization.

Ken McCallion, a former federal prosecutor who represented Yulia Tymoshenko in a civil case against Manafort and Firtash, told The Daily Beast that Fursin and Firtash are close.

"It was very similar to the relationship between Manafort and Gates," he said. "Gates was a significant player in the criminal activities that Manafort engaged in... He played a major role, he was a major lieutenant in Manafort's organization. By the same token, Fursin was one of the chief lieutenants of Firtash."

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Mueller Reveals New Manafort Link to Organized Crime

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Buried deep in Robert Mueller's indictment of Paul Manafort is a new link between Donald Trump's former campaign and Russian organized crime. The indictment ( PDF), unsealed on Monday, includes an extensive look into Paul Manafort's byzantine financial dealings. In particular, it details how he used a company called Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States.

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Depending whom you ask, Paul Manafort is either a political genius or one of the world's biggest criminals. He is potentially both - in the most Machiavellian sense of those combined terms.

The 63-year-old political strategist and lobbyist is the central figure in a complex criminal scheme which has disrupted global events for over a decade, culminating in his tour of duty as the campaign chairman for a Russian-engineered campaign to elect Donald Trump in last year's presidential election.

In July, federal agents burst into Manafort's apartment in Alexandria, Virginia in a pre-dawn raid. They ordered him and his wife, Kathleen, out of bed and searched them for weapons. Investigators hauled away business binders and copies of his computer files. They also took photos of his expensive Italian-made suits, a leaked detail which may hint at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's potential indictment.

Prosecutors told Manafort they intend to indict him for possible tax law violations, money laundering, failing to register as foreign agent and using offshore holdings in criminal activity going back 11 years. Manafort's phone was tapped under a FISA warrant from 2014 to early 2016 and then again before the election until after the inauguration.

Manafort worked for the Kremlin since 2006 and is alleged to have stolen millions from Ukrainians.

In June 2005, Paul Manafort met with unassuming Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. U.S. diplomatic cables at the time described Deripaska as "among the two to three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis" and "a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin's trips abroad."

Manafort and Deripaska struck a lucrative $10 million-a-year deal to lobby for Russia beginning in 2006. Under the arrangement, Manafort would influence Russian politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics. Deripaska has since been banned from the U.S. for ties to organized crime but he's traveled here as a Russian diplomat.

In 2007, Manafort and Deripaska partnered in an offshore company registered in the Caymen Islands. Deripaska invested $18.9 million in a Ukrainian telecom and paid Manafort's firm $7.4 million. Deripaska later backed out of the deal and sued Manafort for the return of his Money.

It should be noted that a favorite Russian money laundering technique is for two conspiring companies to set up a joint offshore company whose only purpose is to connect two international parties via a phony transaction. One of the parties then sues the other in order to obtain a judge's ruling which effectively "cleans" the money through a corrupt court in the country in which the offshore holding is registered.

Manafort set up a similarly suspect offshore company with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitro Firtash. They hatched a plan to buy New York's Drake Hotel then cancelled the deal leaving employees stranded without salaries. Firtash is wanted in the U.S. on suspicion of bribery and organized criminal activity. He was arrested in Austria in 2014 and is expected to be extradited to the US soon. Firtash may provide direct evidence to implicate Manafort. Both of Manafort's known offshore holding were exposed in the Panama Papers.

Manafort fomented political division in Ukraine resulting in the death of 100 Ukrainian protesters.

Manafort's consulting efforts for the Kremlin officially ended in 2009 but he stayed in the Kremlin's orbit assisting Vladimir Putin in his invasion and political disruption of Ukraine.

In 2010, he helped elect former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych is a violent convicted felon but Manafort was able to 'rebrand him' by fomenting divisive politics. "He used damaging techniques to divide Ukrainian society and help Putin to achieve a simple goal," Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, told Bloomberg.

Manafort and Yanukovych became close albeit through a translator, as neither of them spoke each other's' language. The bromance was cemented in lengthy sauna conversations which spanned from politics to style. They became so close, "Yanukovych started to resemble Manafort in his Italian suits and carefully coiffed dark hair parted on the side," according to Bloomberg. This could explain why prosecutors took photos of Manafort's suits when they barged into his apartment.

Yanukovych's party illegally paid Manafort $12.7 million for his work between 2007 and 2012. Investigators found a "black ledger" detailing the payments in Manafort's Kiev office. One $750,000 payment Manafort received was invoiced to a Belize-registered offshore company called Neocon.

In 2014, Manafort advised Yanukovych on the final days of his Putin-backed presidency which resulted in the death of 100 protestors. Manafort's daughter, Andrea, decried his new-found riches as "blood money" in text messages which were later published after her phone was hacked.

Yanukovych was deposed by the 2014 demonstrations and he fled to Moscow. Manafort continued to consult for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, earning another $1 million and making seventeen trips to the country.

Much of Manafort's international offshore dealings were routed through the Bank Of Cyprus. Investigators obtained documents of Manafort's Cypriot transactions earlier this year. The bank is widely considered a Russian laundering front. Its former Vice Chair Wilbur Ross is Trump's Commerce Secretary, is also under investigation.

U.S. Investigators have been working with Ukrainian prosecutors as "part of a broad investigation to recover stolen Ukrainian assets," according to the Associated Press.

Manafort brought his divisive politics to the U.S. on behalf of the Kremlin and Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Manafort has been in Republican politics since his days at Georgetown law school in the early 70's. He later worked for the campaigns of General Ford, Ronald Reagan, the first President Bush and Bob Dole. He also served as the deputy political director for the Republican National committee.

Manafort's big shot at political fame in the U.S. came when he joined the Trump Campaign in March last year. A month later, he was at a Trump campaign event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., also attended by Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions. It remains a mystery if the group held any formal meetings at the hotel. Manafort's surveillance warrant was likely not in effect then though it's widely believed Ambassador Kislyak's phone was monitored as a matter of course.

Manafort was promoted to campaign chairman in June giving him control of its then $20 million budget, included approval on advertising and media strategy. That's important because of suspected coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in targeted Facebook advertising began as early as June 2015.

In June 2016, Manafort took notes on his phone while at a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and several Russian operatives who had been actively working on dropping the Magnitsky sanctions against Russia. The Russians' stated intent of the meeting was to hand over dirt on Hillary Clinton. The FBI obtained Manafort's notes from the meeting which may lead to another criminal indictment involving espionage.

In July, Manafort engineered the selection of Mike Pence as Donald Trump's VP pick by faking a mechanical issue with Trump's plane, forcing the presidential nominee to overnight in Pence's home town of Indianapolis. Pence has his own ties to Deripaska but it's unknown if these extend to any offshore holdings.

Manafort was in charge of the campaign when Wikileaks published the first batch of Russian hacked DNC emails. A Trump Tower server linked to Russia's Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health recorded a dramatic increase in traffic after the hack. The server was likely reconciling stolen voter data Russia had hacked with other publicly available data. Investigators were surveilling the servers as part of a FISA warrant, as first reported by Louise Mensch's Patribotics blog and later confirmed by the BBC.

In August, Manafort was forced to resign after his "black ledger" of payments from Ukraine was exposed. He continued to advise Trump and VP Mike Pence behind the scenes.

The FBI resumed their wiretaps before the election so their surveillance likely included conversations between Manafort and Pence who spoke daily throughout the transition. Pence was instrumental in selecting Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser even after he was warned Flynn may be compromised by the Russians.

Manafort's lobbying for ruthless dictators and ties to a suspect campaign funding operation with ties to gambling families and Trump.

Back in 1980, Manafort launched Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm with another Trump adviser Roger Stone. They represented murderous warlords and dictators from the Philippines to Angola. The firm retroactively registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

One of BMSK's senior directors, Dennis Whitfield, is also an adviser to the Strategic Campaign Group. In May, investigators raided the SCG offices in Annapolis, Maryland.

Investigators took computers which may implicate the company in an attempt to defraud donations intended to support Republican candidates. SCG shares an address with a law firm linked to another offshore company owned by the Cordish gambling family. Reed Cordish serves as assistant to the president for intragovernmental and technology initiatives at the White House and reports directly to Jared Kushner.

The Strategic Campaign Group is also linked to Penn National Gaming, which was a partner in Donald Trump's Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Trump's casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year of operation resulting in a $10 million fine, according to CNN.

If Manafort is indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller it could be at the same time as others involved in his criminal scheme.

Elizabeth de la Vega spent 21 years as a Federal prosecutor, including four years as part of an organized crime strike force. She believes Mueller will indict Trump, Flynn, Manafort simultaneously to remove the possibility of a pardon. "Here, as a practical and logistical matter, Trump has no way to pardon Flynn, Manafort, Kushner and others until they are indicted," de la Vega tweeted. "It is most likely that Mueller will indict Trump, Flynn, Manafort et al. simultaneously. At that point, Trump is out of luck," she says.

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View all posts by Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy

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Depending whom you ask, Paul Manafort is either a political genius or one of the world's biggest criminals. He is potentially both - in the most Machiavellian sense of those combined terms. The 63-year-old political strategist and lobbyist is the central figure in a complex criminal scheme which has disrupted global events for over a decade, culminating in his tour of duty as the campaign chairman for a Russian-engineered campaign to elect Donald Trump in last year's presidential election.

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FBI tracked alleged Russian mob ties of Giuliani campaign supporter - Center for Public Integrity

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WASHINGTON - A prominent commodities trader who acknowledges a business history with a reputed Soviet Bloc crime figure and a notorious arms dealer has been one of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's top campaign supporters. Commodities trader Semyon (Sam) Kislin and his family also lavished thousands of dollars in contributions to Democratic Sen.

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Today the Stanford Internet Observatory published a white paper on GRU online influence operations from 2014 to 2019. The authors conducted this research at the request of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and began with a data set consisting of social media posts provided to the Committee by Facebook. Facebook attributed the Pages and posts in this data set to the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (Главное управление Генерального штаба Вооружённых сил Российской Федерации), known as the GU, or by its prior acronym GRU. It removed the content in or before 2018. The data provided by Facebook to SSCI consisted of 28 folders, each corresponding to at least one unique Facebook Page. These Pages were in turn tied to discrete GRU-attributed operations. Some of these Pages and operations were significant; others were so minor they scarcely had any data associated with them at all.

While some content related to these operations has been unearthed by investigative journalists, a substantial amount has not been seen by the public in the context of GRU attribution. The SIO white paper is intended to provide an overview of the GRU tactics used in these operations and to offer key takeaways about the distinct operational clusters observed in the data. Although the initial leads were provided by the Facebook data set, many of these Pages have ties to material that remains accessible on the broader internet, and we have attempted to aggregate and archive that broader expanse of data for public viewing and in service to further academic research.

Several key takeaways appear in the analysis:

Traditional narrative laundering operations updated for the internet age. Narrative laundering - the technique of moving a certain narrative from its state-run origins to the wider media ecosystem through the use of aligned publications, "useful idiots," and, perhaps, witting participants - is an "active-measures" tactic with a long history. In this white paper we show how narrative laundering has been updated for the social-media era. The GRU created think tanks and media outlets to serve as initial content drops, and fabricated personas - fake online identities - to serve as authors. A network of accounts additionally served as distributors, posting the content to platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. In this way, GRU-created content could make its way from a GRU media property to an ideologically aligned real independent media website to Facebook to Reddit - a process designed to reduce skepticism in the original unknown blog.

The website for NBene Group, a GRU-attributed think tank. In one striking example of how this content can spread, an NBene Group piece about the annexation of Crimea was cited in an American military law journal article.

The emergence of a two-pronged approach: narrative and memetic propaganda by different entities belonging to a single state actor. The GRU aimed to achieve influence by feeding its narratives into the wider mass-media ecosystem with the help of think tanks, affiliated websites, and fake personas. This strategy is distinct from that of the Internet Research Agency, which invested primarily in a social-first memetic (i.e., meme-based) approach to achieve influence, including ad purchases, direct engagement with users on social media, and content crafted specifically with virality in mind. Although the GRU conducted operations on Facebook, it either did not view maximizing social audience engagement as a priority or did not have the wherewithal to do so. To the contrary, it appears to have designed its operation to achieve influence in other ways.

A deeper understanding of hack-and-leak operations. GRU hack-and-leak operations are well known. This tactic - which has been described in detail in the Mueller Report - had a particularly remarkable impact on the 2016 U.S. Election, but the GRU conducted other hack-and-leak operations between 2014 and 2019 as well. One of the salient characteristics of this tactic is the need for a second party (such as Wikileaks, for example) to spread the results of a hack-and-leak operation, since it is not effective to leak hacked documents without having an audience. In this white paper we analyze the GRU's methods for disseminating the results of its hack-and-leak operations. While its attempts to do so through its own social media accounts were generally ineffective, it did have success in generating media attention (including on RT), which led in turn to wider coverage of the results of these operations. Fancy Bear's own Facebook posts about its hack-and-leak attack on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), for example, received relatively little engagement, but write-ups in Wired and The Guardian ensured that its operations got wider attention.

Some of the most noteworthy operations we analyze in this white paper include:

Inside Syria Media Center (ISMC), a media entity that was created as part of the Russian government's multifarious influence operation in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Although ISMC claimed to be "[c]ollecting information about the Syrian conflict from ground-level sources," its actual function was to boost Assad and discredit Western forces and allies, including the White Helmets. Our analysis of the ISMC Facebook Page shows exceptionally low engagement - across 5,367 posts the average engagement was 0.1 Likes per post - but ISMC articles achieved wider attention when its numerous author personas (there were six) reposted them on other sites. We counted 142 unique domains that reposted ISMC articles. This process happened quickly; a single article could be reposted on many alternative media sites within days of initial publication on the ISMC website. We observe that, while both Internet Research Agency (IRA) and GRU operations covered Syria, the IRA only rarely linked to the ISMC website.

APT-28, also known as Fancy Bear, is a cyber-espionage group identified by the Special Counsel Investigation as GRU Units 26165 and 74455. This entity has conducted cyber attacks in connection with a number of Russian strategic objectives, including, most famously, the DNC hack of 2016. The Facebook data set provided to SSCI included multiple Pages related to hacking operations, including DCLeaks and Fancy Bears Hack Team, a sports-related Page. This activity included a hack-and-leak attack on WADA, almost certainly in retaliation for WADA's recommendation that the International Olympic Committee ban the Russian team from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The documents leaked (and, according to WADA, altered) by Fancy Bears purported to show that athletes from EU countries and the US were cheating by receiving spurious therapeutic use exemptions. Our analysis of these Pages looks at their sparse engagement on social platforms and the stark contrast to the substantial coverage in mainstream press. It also notes the boosting of such operations by Russian state-linked Twitter accounts, RT, and Sputnik.

CyberBerkut, Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Ukraine, and "For an Exit from Ukraine," a network of Pages targeting Ukraine, which has been subject to an aggressive disinformation campaign by the Russian government since the Euromaidan revolution in 2014. Our investigation of these Pages highlights the degree to which apparently conflicting messages can be harnessed together in support of a single overarching objective. (This also suggests a parallel with the tactics of the IRA, which frequently boosted groups on opposite sides of contentious issues.) Among the multiple, diverging operational vectors we analyzed were attempts to sow disinformation intended to delegitimize the government in Kyiv; to leverage a Ukrainian civil-society group to undermine public confidence in the army; and to convince Ukrainians that their country was "without a future" and that they were better off emigrating to Poland. While the Pages we analyzed worked with disparate themes, their content was consistently aimed at undermining the government in Kyiv and aggravating tensions between Eastern and Western Ukraine.

The linked white paper and its conclusions are in part based on the analysis of social-media content that was provided to the authors by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the auspices of the Committee's Technical Advisory Group, whose Members serve to provide substantive technical and expert advice on topics of importance to ongoing Committee activity and oversight. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions presented herein are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or its Membership. The Quora profile for Sophie Mangal, one of the personas that authored and distributed ISMC content.
Considered as a whole, the data provided by Facebook - along with the larger online network of websites and accounts that these Pages are connected to - reveal a large, multifaceted operation set up with the aim of artificially boosting narratives favorable to the Russian state and disparaging Russia's rivals. Over a period when Russia was engaged in a wide range of geopolitical and cultural conflicts, including Ukraine, MH17, Syria, the Skripal Affair, the Olympics ban, and NATO expansion, the GRU turned to active measures to try to make the narrative playing field more favorable. These active measures included social-media tactics that were repetitively deployed but seldom successful when executed by the GRU. When the tactics were successful, it was typically because they exploited mainstream media outlets; leveraged purportedly independent alternative media that acts, at best, as an uncritical recipient of contributed pieces; and used fake authors and fake grassroots amplifiers to articulate and distribute the state's point of view. Given that many of these tactics are analogs of those used in Cold-War influence operations, it seems certain that they will continue to be refined and updated for the internet era, and are likely to be used to greater effect.

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New White Paper on GRU Online Operations Puts Spotlight on Pseudo-Think Tanks and Personas

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Today the Stanford Internet Observatory published a white paper on GRU online influence operations from 2014 to 2019. The authors conducted this research at the request of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and began with a data set consisting of social media posts provided to the Committee by Facebook.

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Seth Abramson is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, legal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is the author of eleven books and editor of five anthologies.

Abramson's latest book is "Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump's International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy." It is published by St. Martin's Press.

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Seth Abramson Discusses New Book "Proof Of Conspiracy"

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Seth Abramson is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, legal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is the author of eleven books and editor of five anthologies.

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Looking Back at the stories about, and excerpts from, the history of criminal justice.

Donald Trump's views on criminal justice remain one of those mysteries he will presumably carry with him, if elected, into the Oval Office, where he'll sort it all out with the help of the nation's best minds. We do know that he's a "huge fan" of the police, and that he'd like to see them get more power. But he hasn't suggested what kind of power, or how he'd do that. More jobs would solve the problem of mass incarceration, he told the Washington Post editorial board last month. And he's been crystal clear on the death penalty, which he would make harsher by eliminating lethal injections since they're "too comfortable."

But one helpful lens for determining Trump's views on crime and law enforcement is via his past encounters with those alleged to be on the wrong side of the law. That's his history with the mob. And for all of his tough law and order rhetoric, the record shows the GOP frontrunner has been remarkably tolerant. In the course of his forty years of business deals, Trump has encountered a steady stream of mob-tainted offers that he apparently couldn't refuse.

On the campaign trail, Trump has been coy about his past dealings with unsavory characters. But he couldn't resist a Trump-style boast: "I've known some tough cookies over the years," he told Chris Matthews in February. "I've known the people that make the politicians you and I deal with every day look like little babies."

Actually, there's an old FBI memo that puts a different spin on Trump's attitude about the mob. It is a classic example of a young but already shrewd Trump hard at work. It was written in 1981 by a veteran Bureau agent, reflecting meetings that he and a fellow FBI official were having with the 35-year-old developer from Queens, then a rising star in New York's business firmament. The topic of the meetings was Trump's pending plunge into the Atlantic City casino industry. And while the memo was written in the stilted language of FBI-bureaucratese, Trump's wide-eyed comments were recorded with what seems like barely suppressed amusement. "Trump advised agents that he had read in the press and media and had heard from various acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in Atlantic City," the memo states.
View note
This was a little like saying he had heard that there had once been a man named Al Capone who failed to pay all of his taxes. But Trump, presumably shaping an argument he might need somewhere down the road, pressed on: "Trump advised that he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City but he did not wish to tarnish his family's name inadvertently."

There were a few reasons why the FBI agents may have found this claim slightly disingenuous.

For starters, at the time Trump's mentor on issues of politics and business was Roy Cohn, a lawyer whose other clients included a passel of mobsters, among them the bosses of the Genovese and Gambino crime families. Cohn, who served as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief witch hunter before going into private practice, operated out of a townhouse on East 68th Street where clients Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Paul "Big Paul" Castellano were regular visitors. Besides getting advice on their legal problems, as a former secretary later recalled to Wayne Barrett in his 1992 book, "Trump: The Deals and the Downfall," the visits by the mob titans to their lawyer's office allowed them to talk shop without having to worry about FBI bugs. Cohn told a reporter that Trump called him "fifteen to twenty times a day, asking what's the status of this, what's the status of that," according to Barrett's book.

Another reason the FBI might not have taken Trump's professed ignorance at face value was that Trump had already brushed up against his share of wiseguys in New York's gritty construction business, without apparent concern. To help build his first big Manhattan project, the Grand Hyatt New York on East 42nd Street, Trump had chosen a notorious demolition company secretly owned in part, according to the FBI, by a top Philadelphia mobster who doubled as crime lord of Atlantic City. To pour concrete for the new hotel, Trump picked a firm run by a man named Biff Halloran who was convicted a few years later for his role in what prosecutors dubbed a mob-run cartel that jacked up construction prices throughout the city. For the carpentry contract, Trump settled on a Genovese family-controlled enterprise that was central to another mob price-fixing racket, as found by a subsequent federal probe.

And then there was the person who had introduced Trump to the FBI agents in the first place. This was a 6-foot-5 bear of a man named Daniel Sullivan, a former Teamsters leader who was serving as what Trump called his "labor consultant" at the time. Sullivan wore other hats as well: He was partners with a reputed Atlantic City mobster named Kenneth Shapiro who controlled the local scrap market and who was in the process of selling Trump a large plot of land at top dollar on which to build his casino.

Sullivan, who had once been close to Jimmy Hoffa, was also secretly operating as an FBI informant, filling in the Bureau on the various mobsters who crossed his path. I know this because Sullivan, who died of a heart attack in 1993, told me all about it, proudly providing copies of the FBI memos as proof. And Sullivan wasn't just bragging. The FBI agents confirmed to me both the authenticity of the documents and the meetings Sullivan had arranged for them with the budding casino kingpin.

I met the burly ex-Teamster in the late 1980s when I was working on a story for the New York Daily News about Trump's use of yet another dubious contractor to demolish the old Bonwit Teller building to make way for the edifice that would serve as emblem of his empire. That was Trump Tower, the brassy condominium high rise on Fifth Avenue where he resides and from whose lobby he announced his presidential bid in June.

On paper, the demolition contractor was a union company, as were all of Trump's vendors at the time. But Local 95 of the demolition workers was essentially a subsidiary of the Genovese crime family, and few union rules were enforced. Most of the workers were undocumented immigrants from Poland and they were paid so little and so sporadically that many were forced sleep on the job site. A rank and file union dissident later sued Trump for failing to pay pension and medical benefits required under the union contract. Trump denied knowing about conditions at the work site. Sullivan, who by now had his own gripes with Trump, said otherwise. He testified in the civil suit that he had repeatedly warned the developer about the problems. Trump, in a rush to clear the site, had dismissed his concerns, he said.

Despite Trump's insistence that he never settles lawsuits, he wound up settling that one for an undisclosed sum. Whatever the amount, it seemed to make the union dissident and his attorneys quite satisfied.

In Trump's defense, as a developer of major projects in New York, it was hard back then to avoid the mob. From the 1970s through the '90s, the Five Families had a chokehold on both major construction firms and most of the unions that represented workers on job sites. And no one has ever labeled Trump a mob associate, the FBI's term of art for those under the sway of organized crime.

But for someone who expressed such concern about possible entrapment by the Cosa Nostra in his Atlantic City casino ventures, Trump has willingly teamed up with a succession of mob-tied figures who had nothing to do with the construction industry.

Take the time Trump decided to lend his name to a line of luxury stretch limousines. The entrepreneur who came up with this wonderfully Trumpian idea was a wealthy and successful auto dealer from Long Island named John Staluppi. According to the FBI and its informants, Staluppi was also a made member of the Colombo crime family. As William Bastone detailed recently in The Smoking Gun, Trump proudly unveiled the lavish autos, complete with Italian leather upholstery, liquor dispensers, TVs and paper shredders, at a trade show in Atlantic City in 1988. Staluppi, whose record included convictions for theft of auto parts, wisely kept out of camera range at the trade show. He had been under steady investigation by federal and state law enforcement for over a decade and detectives had followed him to meetings with Colombo family boss Carmine "The Snake" Persico. Trump insisted he knew nothing about those problems and ordered twenty of the limos for his casinos.

The builder had few reservations as well about his dealings with another allegedly mob-tied businessman with a problematic background who ran a helicopter service ferrying high-rollers to Trump's casinos. The businessman, Joseph Weichselbaum, was living in an apartment in Trump Plaza, another of the tycoon's East Side high-rises, when he pleaded guilty to federal charges of cocaine smuggling in 1986. The men were close enough that Trump agreed to accept part of the rent as helicopter service in barter. Weichselbaum also maintained Trump's own private helicopter. And when Weichselbaum faced sentencing, Trump provided a letter to the court endorsing his friend as "conscientious, forthright and diligent." Weichselbaum received a three-year sentence and came home to reside in an even posher pad at Trump Tower, where his girlfriend had managed to buy two combined apartments. When Trump was asked in 1990 by casino officials about his letter to the judge on Weichselbaum's behalf, the casino mogul could not recall having written it.

Casino regulators raised another problem with Trump that year as well. They charged that his casinos had given free rein at the gambling tables to a wealthy horse breeder named Robert LiButti, who had insisted that no blacks or women serve as dealers while he was playing the craps tables. Trump's casino executives complied. They had good reason to want to humor LiButti who lost more than $20 million in gambling wagers at the casinos between 1984 and 1990. To keep LiButti as a loyal customer, the regulars charged, Trump's casinos had comped the gambler with gifts of luxury autos, including Rolls Royces and Ferraris, as well as trips to Europe and the Super Bowl.

Trump's casinos were fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for the violations. But there was yet another issue: In 1991, casino regulators barred LiButti altogether from Atlantic City gambling, not for his bad manners but because they ruled he was an associate of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. Part of the evidence against LiButti included wiretapped conversations in which he talked about flying with Trump in his copter and offering advice on running the casinos. But when a reporter asked Trump about his biggest high-stakes gambler, the casino mogul answered, "I wouldn't know him if he was standing in front of me."
Tom Robbins was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting on brutality in New York prisons, a collaboration between The Marshall Project and The New York Times. He reported on politics, labor, and organized crime for the Daily News and the Village Voice from 1985 to 2011.

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Looking Back at the stories about, and excerpts from, the history of criminal justice. Donald Trump's views on criminal justice remain one of those mysteries he will presumably carry with him, if elected, into the Oval Office, where he'll sort it all out with the help of the nation's best minds.

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Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, one lobbyist's pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

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Full text of "Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America"

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Also by Robert I. Friedman Zealots for Zion : Inside Israel s West Bank Settlement Movement Copyrig ht Copyright © 2000 by Robert I. Friedman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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A vulnerability in the messaging app WhatsApp has allowed attackers to inject commercial Israeli spyware on to phones, the company and a spyware technology dealer said.

WhatsApp, which is used by 1.5bn people worldwide, discovered in early May that attackers were able to install surveillance software on to both iPhones and Android phones by ringing up targets using the app's phone call function.

The malicious code, developed by the secretive Israeli company NSO Group, could be transmitted even if users did not answer their phones, and the calls often disappeared from call logs, said the spyware dealer, who was recently briefed on the WhatsApp hack.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, is too early into its own investigations of the vulnerability to estimate how many phones were targeted using this method, said a person familiar with the issue.

As late as Sunday, as WhatsApp engineers raced to close the loophole, a UK-based human rights lawyer's phone was targeted using the same method.

Researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab said they believed that the spyware attack on Sunday was linked to the same vulnerability that WhatsApp was trying to patch.

NSO's flagship product is Pegasus, a program that can turn on a phone's microphone and camera, trawl through emails and messages and collect location data.

NSO advertises its products to Middle Eastern and western intelligence agencies, and says Pegasus is intended for governments to fight terrorism and crime. NSO was recently valued at $1bn in a leveraged buyout that involved the UK private equity fund Novalpina Capital.

In the past, human rights campaigners in the Middle East have received text messages over WhatsApp that contained links that would download Pegasus to their phones.

WhatsApp said teams of engineers had worked around the clock in San Francisco and London to close the vulnerability. It began rolling out a fix to its servers on Friday last week, WhatsApp said. All users should update to the latest version of WhatsApp, which was issued on Monday, the company said.

"This attack has all the hallmarks of a private company known to work with governments to deliver spyware that reportedly takes over the functions of mobile phone operating systems," the company said. "We have briefed a number of human rights organisations to share the information we can, and to work with them to notify civil society."

WhatsApp disclosed the issue to the US Department of Justice last week, according to a person familiar with the matter. A justice department spokesman declined to comment.

NSO said it had carefully vetted customers and investigated any abuse. Asked about the WhatsApp attacks, NSO said it was investigating the issue.

"Under no circumstances would NSO be involved in the operating or identifying of targets of its technology, which is solely operated by intelligence and law enforcement agencies," the company said. "NSO would not, or could not, use its technology in its own right to target any person or organisation, including this individual [the UK lawyer]."

The UK lawyer, who declined to be identified, has helped a group of Mexican journalists and government critics and a Saudi dissident living in Canada sue NSO in Israel, alleging that the company shares liability for any abuse of its software by clients.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, said the attack had failed. "We had a strong suspicion that the person's phone was being targeted, so we observed the suspected attack, and confirmed that it did not result in infection," said Mr Scott-Railton. "We believe that the measures that WhatsApp put in place in the last several days prevented the attacks from being successful."

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Other lawyers working on the cases have been approached by people pretending to be potential clients or donors, who then try and obtain information about the ongoing lawsuits, the Associated Press reported in February.

"It's upsetting but not surprising that my team has been targeted with the very technology that we are raising concerns about in our lawsuits," said Alaa Mahajne, a Jerusalem-based lawyer who is handling lawsuits from the Mexican and Saudi citizens. "This desperate reaction to hamper our work and silence us itself shows how urgent the lawsuits are, as we can see that the abuses are continuing."

On Tuesday, NSO will also face a legal challenge to its ability to export its software, which is regulated by the Israeli ministry of defence.

Amnesty International, which identified an attempt to hack into the phone of one its researchers, is backing a group of Israeli citizens and civil rights group in a filing in Tel Aviv asking the defence ministry to cancel NSO's export licence.

"NSO Group sells its products to governments who are known for outrageous human rights abuses, giving them the tools to track activists and critics. The attack on Amnesty International was the final straw," said Danna Ingleton, deputy director of Amnesty Tech.

"The Israeli Ministry of Defence has ignored mounting evidence linking NSO Group to attacks on human rights defenders. As long as products like Pegasus are marketed without proper control and oversight, the rights and safety of Amnesty International's staff and that of other activists, journalists and dissidents around the world is at risk."
Additional reporting by Kadhim Shubber in Washington This article has been amended since publication to note that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook

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WhatsApp voice calls used to inject Israeli spyware on phones

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A vulnerability in the messaging app WhatsApp has allowed attackers to inject commercial Israeli spyware on to phones, the company and a spyware technology dealer said. WhatsApp, which is used by 1.5bn people worldwide, discovered in early May that attackers were able to install surveillance software on to both iPhones and Android phones by ringing up targets using the app's phone call function.

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Yes.

The biggest challenge we face moving forward isn't the Russians. It's really other Americans who see this technique and see the political gain that can come from it and adopt it on their own, meaning they come up with their own news outlets which maybe aren't telling the truth, but tell a truth that is preferred.

We have started looking for alternative facts. We have to have a baseline of fact and fiction in this country, or you can't have political debate. We can't go to Congress and have good policies because we don't even agree what's actually happening in the real world.

The reason social media influence works is because of bias. One, we go to social media for confirmation bias. We want to read things that confirm what we already believe.

The second part is implicit bias. We like getting information from people that look like and talk like us. The Russians understood this very well. Tell people what they want to hear, and look like them, and they were more likely to take it, whether it's true or not.

So, a way to get around that is to help the consumer. Rather than trying to have the government regulate everything or even have social media companies trying to determine what is good or bad news, is to create an independent rating agency that rates on two sort of axes.

The first one is fact vs. fiction. What is - a rating period, how do they perform over time? And the other one is opinion vs. reporting. It's very hard on social media to know, is this an opinion article that I'm receiving or is this actually a reported article?

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Russia hacked U.S. minds and undermined democracy, author says

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"Russian trolls were different from normal trolls," says Clint Watts, a former U.S. government intelligence analyst who observed how Russia deployed a campaign of disinformation to discredit Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump. Nick Schifrin talks with Watts, author of "Messing With the Enemy," about what Americans can do to withstand future attempts by Russia to meddle in democracy.