Low information voters … mainly Trump voters will find the financial analysis of #TrumpRussia challenging.
However, we should all persist, because understanding the realities of foreign money in US elections, while an example of free trade and perhaps a free market, is also the exercise of an interfering power exercised not in America’s best interests.
The GOP cares little about justice and more about protecting their position with the Russians as their staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to meet with Christopher Steele in London without notifying the Democrats.
Another oligarch with close ties to Putin, Dmitry Rybolovlev, owns a 3.3 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus. Rybolovlev is known as "Russia's Fertilizer King" and has been in the spotlight for several months as the purchaser of Trump's 60,000 square-foot mansion in Palm Beach. Rybolovlev bought the estate for $54 million more than Trump paid for the property at the bottom of the crash in the U.S. real estate market.
The convoluted web that links Putin's oligarchs to Trump's political associates and top Republicans is difficult to take in.
VEB, known as President Putin's "pet bank," is now in crisis after sanctions applied by Europe and U.S. in 2014 have isolated it from the international banks that were the sources of its nearly $4 billion in hard currency loans that, according to Bloomberg, mature this year and in 2018.
Russia's international currency reserves are near a 10-year low, which has put further pressure on the president of VEB, Sergey Gorkov, to find sources of international rescue capital.
Notably, it was Gorkov who met secretly with Jared Kushner in December at Trump Tower. Kushner's failure to report the meeting with Gorkov has drawn the attention of the Senate intelligence committee that now wants to question Kushner about the meeting.
On the same day that Donald Trump traveled to Bedminster, New Jersey to begin his vacation, a private plane belonging to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich arrived at nearby Newark International Airport. Abramovich isn’t just any Russian oligarch; he’s very close to Vladimir Putin, and his wife attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in January (source: link). This flight pattern was uncovered by Juha Keskinen, who has been tracking the relevant flight information for some time (source: Juha Keskinen). Flight plans of private planes can be publicly tracked online, meaning the owners of these planes have less privacy in their travels than they sometimes think they have…
But if this is a mere coincidence, it’s a remarkable one. And it’s not the first time a Russian oligarch has flown into a particular location while Donald Trump was there. It’s happened with Dmitry Rybolovlev at least twice, though he insists those were in fact coincidences, and that he never met with Trump.
Rybolovlev actually had dinner at Maralago with Trump on one of those coincidences.
It also has inflamed simmering tensions between House and Senate investigators as they pursue simultaneous probes into the Trump-Russia connection. House Intelligence Committee Republicans did not tell Democrats on the panel, the Senate Intelligence Committee nor special counsel Robert Mueller’s office that the investigators were pursuing Steele.
The House staffers left their contact information at two addresses associated with Steele, a former agent for Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service. One of those locations was Steele’s lawyer’s office, where the former spy was meeting with his counsel when the House investigators showed up.
Senate officials—whom NBC News has reported were negotiating their own interview with Steele—fear the aggressive move could spook Steele and derail his potential cooperation with their own probe…
The Senate panel is “taking pains” not to conflict with Mueller’s investigation, according to one of several officials who spoke to POLITICO and who confirmed that assessment.
The House panel, meanwhile, is checking in with Mueller when it pursues witnesses, but is not concerned with staying out of Mueller’s lane.
“We’re not putting the brakes on our investigation just because Mueller wants something,” the congressional official said.