dChan
Anonymous ID: 11ac20 May 15, 2020, 10:19 p.m. No.9196511   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Bang it

Was Viktor Vekselberg Bankrolling Michael Cohen’s Pro-Russia Peace Plan for Ukraine?

 

he revelation that Robert Mueller subpoenaed a bit player in the Trump-Russia melodrama, Andrii Artemenko, to appear before a Virginia grand jury last month went largely unnoticed. But among careful observers of the escalating F.B.I. probe, the development was significant. Artemenko, after all, is the Ukrainian politician who worked alongside Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, and Felix Sater, a Russian-born real-estate developer with ties to both Trump and organized crime, to hand-deliver a Kremlin-approved peace plan to former national security adviser Mike Flynn shortly after the inauguration. “What this is is another strand. It’s another person who I believe the investigators suspect is, or has been in the past, acting as a de facto agent for the Russian government, having significant policy political communications with the Trump organization,” Patrick Cotter, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and longtime white-collar defense attorney, told me at the time. Trump biographer Tim O’Brien suggested that Artemenko’s entanglement in the Mueller probe signaled that the special counsel might be “trying to look for quid pro quos that involve the exchange of either business favors or money to people in Trump’s orbit, or Trump himself, in exchange for policy shifts.”

 

Cohen and Artemenko have dismissed the notion that their effort to forge peace between Russia and Ukraine was driven by anything other than altruism. “Who doesn’t want to help bring about peace?” Cohen quipped to The New York Times, which first reported on the clandestine effort. (Cohen has vigorously denied delivering the plan to Flynn, though not his involvement in crafting it.) But a new report suggests that the peace scheme was not incentivized by Good Samaritan-ship alone: Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, recently in the news for his connection to a half-million-dollar payment to Cohen, might also have been bankrolling the endeavor.

 

Curt Weldon, a former congressman whose Russian ties have drawn congressional attention and who has known Artemenko for more than a decade, let slip that bombshell in conversation with a source, according to The Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand. Weldon, this source recalled, was incensed that the Times had exposed the Artemenko-Cohen-Sater plan, and Flynn’s alleged involvement. “We were so close,” Weldon reportedly said. The source added: “He said [he and Artemenko] had already secured funding for the promotion of the plan from Viktor Vekselberg’s fund in New York City.” (Vekselberg could not be reached for comment by The Atlantic.)

 

Moar:

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/victor-vekselberg-michael-cohen-andrii-artemenko-russia-ukraine

Anonymous ID: 11ac20 May 15, 2020, 10:21 p.m. No.9196531   🗄️.is 🔗kun

FBI’s New FISA Reformer Worked With Brennan On Terrorism Case That Launched Obama-Era ‘Unmasking’ Explosion

 

On Friday, Judge James Boasberg, the newly appointed head of the FISA court’s rotating pool of judges, selected former Justice Department official David S. Kris to oversee the reform of FBI procedures ordered by the court. David Kris John Brennan

 

It has already been reported that Kris, who served as Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division from 2009 to 2011, has been a vociferous critic of Devin Nunes in the last several years, and an equally vociferous defender of the FISA surveillance done on Carter Page (and through Page the entire Trump team). Kris’s bias in favor of surveillance is well known. Within the last two years, he has made the comments recounted by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller News Foundation:

 

“It’s disturbing that Page met that legal standard and that there was probable cause to conclude he was a Russian agent,” Kris wrote in an essay March 1, 2018, at Lawfare, a blog operated by the Brookings Institution.

 

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“The Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy,” wrote Kris, who is now a consultant at Culper Partners and frequent guest on MSNBC.

 

Kris went as far as entertaining the possibility, first proposed by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, that “Nunes might be prosecuted for obstruction of justice.”

 

Kris also wrote that the memo’s central claim that the FBI misled the FISC about Christopher Steele “was not true.”

 

In other words, Kris comes in already biased against the reality that has emerged from the Mueller investigation and the DOJ Inspector General’s report; specifically, that there was no probable cause to conclude Page was a Russian agent, but that the FBI withheld exculpatory information on Page from the FISA court, as well as withholding information about Christopher Steele that would have cast Steele’s credibility as a confidential source (and the dossier that bore his name) into doubt.

 

https://lidblog.com/david-kris-john-brennan/