Cohen’s Russian business associate, Felix Sater, told BuzzFeed Newsthat he and Cohen plotted to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a supposed $50 million penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow to help lure oligarchs into the project:
Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower’s most luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse, to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers to purchase their own. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told BuzzFeed News. “My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin.” A second source confirmed the plan.
This provides more evidence that the project was being rather seriously pursued with potential assistance from the Russian government, despite Trump’s presidential candidacy and despite Trump’s regular assurances that he didn’t deal with Russia. But some have argued it could also violate a 1977 law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a federal crime for U.S. citizens and businesses (among others) to bribe foreign officials.
This is all in addition to recent reports that the Trump Family’s Quasi-Legal Tax schemes have been used to transfer hundreds of $Millions in assets from former patriarch Fred Trump to the rest of the family. If Donald has used similar scheme to transfer funds to Junior, Ivanka and Eric — that could be some real serious trouble, as well as the ongoing investigations in the corruption in the charity Trump Foundation — which was run personally by Donald, Junior, Eric, Ivanka and their CFO Allen Weisselberg (who also gained an immunity deal along with David Pecker)— and has been authorized to include potential criminal charges
The Donald J. Trump Foundation has been under criminal investigation in New York for more than a month for violating the state’s tax laws.
The Department of Taxation and Finance is taking the lead on the investigation, but other agencies may be involved, an aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) told Bloomberg Tax.
The aide, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation, said the investigation could lead to a criminal referral to the state attorney general or the Manhattan district attorney.
As well as the general fraud and corruption within the Trump Family Real Estate corporation.
It is becoming increasingly clear that, in the language of business schools, the Trump Organization’s core competency is in profiting from misrepresentation and deceit and, potentially, fraud. There are many ways to make money in real estate. The normal way is to identify a need in the market, raise money by convincing lenders or investors that your plan is sound, build the structure, then either profit through ongoing rent or by selling units.
[...]
Rather famously, Trump overinvested in luxury housing, spent too much on his casinos, and completely blew his brief foray into a regional airline. Far worse, Trump did the very opposite of insuring a long record of fiscal prudence that would allow him to borrow money cheaply. Despite the company’s mixed record, it has survived and grown. It’s doing something well, so what is it?
This month, two incredible investigative stories have given us an opportunity to lift the hood of the Trump Organization, look inside, and begin to understand what the business of this unusual company actually is. It is not a happy picture. The Times published a remarkable report, on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC co-published a stunning story and a “Trump, Inc.” podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the Times piece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes.
So all of that is bad — for the entire family — and most of it doesn’t matter what happens within the Mueller investigation and won’t be stymied if he happens to lose his post for some reason.
The third slot in our bracket goes to Jared Kushner.
With the plea deal of Michael Flynn, Kushner now has multiple points of criminal exposure. Flynn and Kushner had a secret meeting during the transition Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. But among Mr. Trump’s inner circle, it is Mr. Flynn who appears to have been the main interlocutor with the Russian envoy — the two were in contact during the campaign and the transition, Mr. Kislyak and current and former American officials have said.
During that meeting Kushner requested to use Russian secure communications in order to by-pass U.S. intelligence overhearing their discussions.
Ambassador Sergey Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.
The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
Kushner, along with Steve Bannon also had a secret meeting in New York with Crown Prince of the UAE — known as MbZ — for mysterious purposes, which was followed up by another meeting with Saudi Crown Prince MbS and MbZ, former Blackwater CEO Eric Prince, UAE representative George Nader and RNC fundraiser Elliot Broidy in the Seychelle Islands in yet another “back channel” effort with Russia. Prince told congress that during this meeting he had an “informal chat” with Russian financier Kirill Dmitriev while on the island, but George Nader — who is a cooperating witness for Mueller — has said that was a lie.
Nader has submitted to three interviews with special counsel investigators and four appearances before a federal grand jury in Washington since agents stopped him at Dulles International Airport in January, served him with a grand jury subpoena and seized his electronic devices, including his cell phone. Documents obtained by Mueller suggest that before and after Prince met Nader in New York a week before the trip to the Seychelles, Nader shared information with Prince about Dmitriev, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News, which appears to be inconsistent with Prince’s sworn testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives investigative panel.
This implicates Kushner, Bannon and Prince in what may be yet another Logan Act conspiracy.
Flynn has created other exposures for Kushner in that it appears that he was the person directing Flynn when he told Kislyak that they would “review everything” regarding sanctions, which is what led to his guilty plea for lying to the FBI. The day that Flynn had his conversation with Kislyak he called back to Mar-A-Lago to report back to Kushner.
The next day, Flynn called a senior member of Trump's transition team "who was with other senior members of the Presidential Transition Team at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss what, if anything, to communicate" to Kislyak "about the US Sanctions," the document says.
Trump was at Mar-a-Lago on December 29. A press-pool report from that day indicates that transition officials at Mar-a-Lago included Stephen Miller, K.T. McFarland, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus.
Fox reported on Friday— citing a "very, very knowledgeable source" — that it was McFarland who spoke with Flynn about Kislyak on December 29.
Kushner was a senior member of the transition team and had met with both Flynn and Kislyak earlier that month at Trump Tower. He is a focus of Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 US election and whether any Trump associates played a part.
And Kusher had also told Flynn to contact Kislyak to get Russia to vote against a UN resolution against Israeli settlements during the transition before they had any actual power to negotiate foreign policy.
One transition official at the time said Kushner called Flynn to tell him he needed to get every foreign minister or ambassador from a country on the U.N. Security Council to delay or vote against the resolution. Much of this appeared to be coordinated also with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama administration's lobbying efforts to get member states to support the resolution with the Trump transition team.
Which would be yet another Logan Act violation.
The fourth entry is the top tier bracket is of course, Roger Stone.
Stone’s pal Jerome Corsi has backed out of a plea arrangement with Mueller claiming that he was being “asked to lie” — but that document includes emails between himself and Stone which indicates that he himself was the go-between for Stone to Julian Assange making Stone liable for lying to Congress because he told them that his contact to Assange was Randy Credico.
Randy Credico, a radio host believed to be the intermediary between President Donald Trump's longtime confidante Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, was subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday after he declined to be interviewed voluntarily.
The subpoena is believed to be related to his communications with both Assange and Stone, whose tweets in the weeks before the election raised questions about whether he knew in advance that emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, would be imminently published by WikiLeaks.
Corsi and Stone appear to have set Credico up as the source and concocted a cover story to keep the truth from Congress. Additional emails from Corsi’s pal Ted Malloch have apparently completed the link indicating that the same day that RT interviewed Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy apparently leaks about that interview were acquired by Malloch through his contact at RT, reporter Afshin Rattansi, then funneled to Corsi who then emailed the following to Stone.
“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.… Time to let more than [Podesta] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton]. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke -- neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”
Stone then relayed this information, with the help of a Breitbart Editor, to Steve Bannon at the Trump campaign. This was about a month before John Podesta’s email were released which were used to feed the allegation that the Clinton Foundation has been used as a “slush fund”, and that former Center for American Progress Foundation employee Jose Fernandez had made some secret deal to approve the Uranium One sale while working for Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. The fact that he never talked to Hillary or Podesta about Uranium One, and that all the Clinton Foundation donors had already left the company before the sale — never seems to get mentioned.
Additional possibilities include Jeff Sessions, Carter Page, Michael Caputo, Felix Sater and J.D. Gordon, all of whom had various interactions with Russians on behalf of the Trump campaign.
Here are the daily detailed timeline updates for the week: