Collusion drip, drip, drip

President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, failed to disclose what lawmakers called a "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite" involving a banker who has been accused of links to Russian organized crime, three sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

[...]

An email chain described Aleksander Torshin, a former senator and deputy head of Russia's central bank who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as wanting Trump to attend an event on the sidelines of a National Rifle Association convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 2016.

[...]

The disclosure is the latest example of a senior Russian official seeking to make high-level contacts with the Trump campaign.

[...]

Kushner rebuffed the request after receiving a lengthy email exchange about it between a West Virginia man and Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn [now  Trump's deputy Chief of Staff], the sources said.

Kushner responded to the email by telling Dearborn and the handful of other Trump campaign officials on the email that they should not accept requests from people who pretend to have contacts with foreign officials to aggrandize themselves, according Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell.

[...]

However, Torshin was seated with the candidate's son, Donald Trump Jr., during a private dinner on the sidelines of a May 2016 NRA event during the convention in Louisville, according to an account Torshin gave to Bloomberg.

  NBC

So why did he not turn over that information, if the meeting never happened? Furthermore, why was Junior sitting next to Torshin at that dinner? Kushner had supposedly told everyone not to meet with the man. Did Junior decide on his own to buck that advice? Was he maybe intent on gaining Daddy's favor and displacing Kushner as the male heir to Daddy's favors? Or is Kushner lying?

Spanish anti-corruption officials have identified Torshin as a "godfather" in the Russian mafia — something Torshin has denied.

Ah, yes. The Russian mob. No telling who actually sent Junior to that meeting. Could have been Trump himself. The Trump cabal has a problem: who can they send to mob/money laundering/collusion meetings that will be loyal and isn't dumb as a rock?

Rick Clay, a Christian values advocate who sent the email, says that the offer was shot down by Rick Dearborn, the campaign official who initially fielded his request.

  Daily Caller

Wait, what? A "Christian values advocate" is trying to set up a "backdoor overture and dinner meeting"? Jesus. Where does all this begin and end? It's like slowly uncovering the huge part of the iceberg under the water's surface.

In a phone interview with The Daily Caller, Clay said that there was nothing “nefarious” about his outreach to the campaign.

Seriously? Why call the subject "backdoor" if it's not nefarious? Reminds me of Condi Rice testifying that no one could have known about the possibility of an attack on 9/11 when there was a specific presidential briefing headed "Bin Laden determined to strike in US."

Clay, who worked as a contractor in the Iraq War, said that he made the request for Torshin through a Pennsylvania man named Johnny Yenason.

Christ! Yet another person involved. Will there be a jail big enough for everybody?

Yenason and Clay are both affiliated with the Military Warriors Support Foundation, a non-profit group that helps wounded veterans and Gold Star families.

Which is not to say that group was in on sleazy deals to elect Trump, but if it was, how many members were in on it?

Clay says he contacted Dearborn in hopes that Trump would attend a dinner he was hosting in Louisville, Ky. to benefit veterans. Clay said he knew that Trump planned to be in town at the same time for the annual National Rifle Association convention.

A day after Clay sent the email, he said that Dearborn called him to say that the campaign had decided against Trump attending the function.

And this is where Jared's admonition to everyone not to attend comes in.

“Pass on this. A lot of people come claiming to carry messages. Very few we are able to verify. For now I think we decline such meetings,” Kushner wrote in an email released Friday night by his attorney, Abbe Lowell. “Be careful,” Kushner concluded.

[...]

In addition to the Clay email, Kushner failed to provide the committee with emails he was forwarded regarding interactions that Donald Trump Jr. had with WikiLeaks as well as exchanges that a Trump associate had with Sergei Millian, a businessman who is alleged to be a major source for the infamous Trump dossier.

[...]

According to The New York Times, Clay mentioned Torshin, and touted him to Dearborn as a lifetime member of the NRA and gun rights advocate.

Clay, who said that he vaguely remembered mentioning Torshin in his email, also wrote that he hoped to advance “shared Christian values” by having Trump attend the function.

Shared "Christian" values - with Russian gangsters. Is this plot complex enough yet?

Torshin and his assistant, Maria Butina, founded a group called Right to Bear Arms. The non-profit has come under scrutiny amid allegations that it is funded by the Russian government.

Oh, yes, there's another thing about Rick Clay:

Rick Clay, a 54-year-old [former Iraq contractor] from West Virginia, contacted Rick Dearborn, one of Donald Trump’s top campaign aides, last year to pass along a request from a friend seeking to set up a meeting between the campaign and Russia, reported CNN.

Russian intelligence services have courted American conservative and religious groups for years, and Clay told CNN that his friend had met Russians while working together with Christian organizations.

[...]

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) was aware of Clay’s efforts, according to a GOP source, and helped put him in touch with Dearborn, although the source said the West Virginia Republican had no other involvement in the situation.

  Raw Story

I suppose Senator Capito will need to lawyer up.

Clay said he wasn’t sure if his friend’s request was part of a broader effort by Russia to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

“I mean you never know about that,” said Clay, who was badly injured while working as a contractor in Iraq “I mean how can anybody ever know about that?"

“I think you would be stretching it to say it was an intelligence effort to infiltrate the Trump administration,” he added. “I think you’re stretching that. But you never know.”

Does that not sound like he knew for a fact Dearborn was working with the Russians?

One source familiar with Kushner's testimony before congressional intelligence committees said he specifically denied, under oath, that he was familiar with any attempts by WikiLeaks to contact the campaign. But, according to the source, Kushner was sent an email by Trump Jr. about his conversations on Twitter with WikiLeaks, which were first disclosed by the Atlantic this week. Kushner forwarded an email about the WikiLeaks conversations to communications director Hope Hicks, the source said.

Lied under oath to Congress? Oh yeah, that's no longer a problem since at least James Clapper's lies about secretly spying on American citizens.

"As to the document from Mr. Trump Jr., Mr. Kushner was one of many people to whom one email was sent, and he did not respond," [Kushner's attorney Abbe] Lowell said in the letter.

So, not responding is somehow the same as not knowing of any contact with Wikileaks?

Yeah, these guys are brazen.

Now:

Remember Rob Goldstone who set up and attended that fateful Junior meeting at Trump Tower to receive dirt on Hillary, and who took a powder to nobody knew where? He's coming back to testify to Mueller's team. Jared, Junior, and all the rest must be shitting bricks about now.

Rob Goldstone has been living in Bangkok, Thailand, but has been communicating with Mueller's office through his lawyer, said a source close to Goldstone.

  NBC

Sounds like Mueller already has Goldstone over a barrel.

[S]ources close to Goldstone and familiar with the investigation say they expect he will travel to the United States at some point "in the near future," as one put it.

[...]

Investigators are trying to determine whether the promised assistance from the Russian government was provided, and whether it was part of what a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer called "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between the Trump campaign and Russia.

I'd be willing to bet investigators already have determined that the information was provided and are now cementing all their evidence and making deals with participants in the scheme.

Earlier this year, a Russian-American lobbyist and another businessman [Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze] discussed over coffee in Moscow an extraordinary meeting they had attended 12 months earlier: a gathering at Trump Tower with President Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and his then-campaign chairman.

The Moscow meeting in June, which has not been previously disclosed, is now under scrutiny by investigators who want to know why the two men met in the first place and whether there was some effort to get their stories straight about the Trump Tower meeting just weeks before it would become public, The Associated Press has learned.

[...]

[One source] said Akhmetshin told congressional investigators that he asked for the Moscow meeting with Kaveladze to argue that they should go public with the details of the Trump Tower meeting before they were caught up in a media maelstrom.

  AP

Akhmetshin's lawyer (who has also represented Trump) Balber denies that was the purpose of the meeting, of course. He says it was about Akhmetshin's concern about reports that he was tied to Russian military intelligence.

Akhmetshin has denied ongoing ties with Russian intelligence, but acknowledged that he served in the Soviet military in the late 1980s as part of a counterintelligence unit.

From all this, I suspect that Jared’s delayed disclosures may hide other, far more damning ones.

  Emptywheel

Yes, and I have to hand it to Mueller's team if they can sort out this rat's nest. Like trying to untangle a fine chain necklace that's gotten tied in knots.

At least part of Robert Mueller’s probe has been informed by [ex-British spook Christopher] Steele’s infamous dossier, which alleges substantive ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government. [...] Steele has stood by his research and, reportedly, has offered up another tip: zero in on the president’s foreign real-estate deals.

  Vanity Fair

Which is pretty much what we've been watching all along. Money laundering and racketeering in Trump's real estate deals with Russian mobsters.

In December of last year, Steele informed Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian, that “the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals” between Trump and individuals with the Kremlin ties warrant investigation. “Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” the former spy said, according to a conversation detailed in Harding’s new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. “The difference is what’s important.”

[...]

[I]t’s possible that Trump was indebted to Russian interests when he descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to declare his candidacy. After the real-estate mogul suffered a series of bankruptcies related to the 2008 financial crisis, traditional banks became reluctant to loan him money—a reality he has acknowledged in past interviews. As a result, the Trump Organization reportedly became increasingly reliant on foreign investors, notably Russian ones. As Donald Trump Jr. famously said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

[...]

Bloomberg reported in July that Mueller’s team is investigating a series of deals Trump struck, including the Trump Organization’s failed SoHo development that involved Russian nationals, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and the president’s sale of a Palm Beach estate in 2008.

[...]

Russian developer Aras Agalarov, whose son Emin helped broker the controversial Trump Tower meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, paid $20 million to bring Miss Universe to Moscow. And Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the Florida mansion for a staggering sum of $95 million in 2008—despite Trump having paid just $41 million for the property four years prior.

A US president indebted to the Russian mob. That's what we got.

..but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Two other cooperating witnesses

Rinat Akmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who was present at a meeting between a Russian lawyer; Donald Trump Jr; President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and Paul Manafort, has also now appeared before a grand jury.

[...]

Rinat Akhmetshin gave evidence under oath before a grand jury convened by Mueller for several hours on 11th June this year about, among other things, the Trump Tower meeting where he was taken by Veselnitskaya. Akhmetshin, a lobbyist, has acknowledged serving as a counter-intelligence officer in the Soviet military in the past. He is now, he said in a newspaper interview, “a mercenary”, but not a Russian spy and does not work for the Kremlin. “I spend other peoples’ money to achieve other peoples’ goals” was the way he explained his work. The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating Akhmetshin’s US citizenship, his military background and whether he improperly lobbied for Russian interests.

[...]

And then there is Felix Sater, a key to Trump’s alleged Russian money train. A criminal with connections to Russian and American organised crime, a man who has already been a federal informant in the past is now once again helping the authorities.

[...]

Felix Sater [...] is likely to be centre-stage if Trump’s downfall comes from his Russian monetary connections. Born Felix Sheferovsky in Russia he is one of the most colourful characters in the Trump chronicles: someone once jailed for stabbing a man in the face with a cocktail glass (for a margarita) and who later avoided a possible 20-year sentence and $5m (£3.8m) fine by becoming a federal informer in another case, that of fraud and extortion by the mafia targeting the elderly, some of them Holocaust survivors.

[...]

Sater does not deny working for the government, but he says he did not inform on the mafia.

  UK Independent

Yeah, nobody wants to be known for that.

Sater boasted that he was so close to the Trump family that he was asked by Donald to squire Donald Jr and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow and that during it he arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair in the President’s office in the Kremlin. Ivanka acknowledges the trip took place and it may have involved sitting at Putin’s desk.

[...]

Sater is a lifelong friend of Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and a former vice-president of the Trump Organisation. Sater was convinced that Putin would help Trump to get to the White House and he and Cohen would receive the credit due for this. “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?” was the email sent to Cohen at one stage.

[...]

Cohen had initially denied having “any dealings” whatsoever with the Russians in his work for Trump. But newly leaked emails show that he asked for [Putin’s spokesman Dmitri] Peskov’s help with a Trump real estate project in Moscow in 2016 when Trump was already campaigning to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency, thus raising issues of conflicts of interest.

[...]

Sater has agreed to help a federal inquiry into alleged money laundering by Viktor Khrapunov, Kazakhstan’s former energy minister and the former mayor of the city of Almaty who was charged by Kazakh authorities with abuse of power. He is on the Interpol wanted list at the behest of Kazakh authorities. Khrapunov’s family allegedly used shell companies to buy Trump SoHo properties worth an estimated $3.1m. It is not known if any or how much of the supposedly laundered money went to Trump.

Any relevant information from the Kazakh inquiry about Donald Trump is expected to be sent to Robert Mueller. We have to wait to see whether Felix Sater, whose previous “cooperation runs a gamut that is seldom seen” according to the Justice Department has more to reveal about the US President – the man he had helped, as he had once excitedly claimed, to get to the White House.

Yeah, this will have to be made into a TV series so we can all see the whole thing one day.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 1/2/18:

Seth Abramson's latest thread on Sater's involvement.

Vanity Fair article on same.

Lordy I Hope There Are Tapes

[D]epending on what was discussed, agreed to, exchanged, or developed in further meetings, various crimes may have, in fact, occurred. The key is to get someone to cough up the details.

  Just Security

Something tells me they may already have.

Here’s where Akhmetshin comes in. Akhmetshin is a former Soviet military counterintelligence agent who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. Therein lies an opportunity for investigators: More on this in a moment. First, let’s look at his value as a source of information.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dana Rohrabacher's Russia Connection

In an earlier post, I wondered if Rohrabacher would also be involved in this Russia collusion mess. Here's some more consideration.

[Republican Congressman Dana] Rohrabacher has reportedly been warned by the FBI in the past that Russian intelligence was attempting to recruit him.

[...]

Rohrabacher’s 2016 Moscow meeting has been revisited in recent days because of the document’s connection to the anti-Magnitsky campaign that formed part of the Trump Tower meeting.

[...]

According to two sources with close knowledge of the events, officials at the Embassy in Moscow expressed doubts about the people they were meeting with and had warned the delegation that FSB presence was constant while the members were in Moscow.

[...]

State was “really concerned” about whom Rohrabacher was meeting with, another source with knowledge of the trip said. “They were under the impression they were FSB agents.”

[...]

In April 2017, [Rinat] Akhmetshin, a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer, met with Rohrabacher in Berlin and discussed the Prevezon money-laundering case with him, according to CNN. [ed: this is the now infamous case that Jeff Sessions abruptly dismissed in May.]

[...]

House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce’s office signs off on trips such as Rohrabacher’s, but doesn’t always have the full picture of what he is doing.

[...]

An itinerary for the Rohrabacher trip that included the Berlin meeting, which has not yet been made public, details several agenda items for the Berlin leg, but makes no mention of a meeting with Akhmetshin. And the itinerary for the April 2016 trip to Moscow does not list a meeting with the prosecutors.

  The Atlantic

Why would he hide these meetings? Rhetorical question.

In response to a recent itinerary submitted by Rohrabacher for a trip to Spain, Royce told Rohrabacher that he could not take meetings in Barcelona on Catalonian separatism without also meeting with government officials in Madrid. Royce also nixed a trip Rohrabacher planned to take to Russia earlier this year.

I can see why he might.

Rohrabacher at one point had requested to screen the anti-Magnitsky film in Congress and was turned down by Royce.

The Daily Mail reported that an intern in Rohrabacher’s office sent out emailed invitations to a screening of the anti-Magnitsky film in June 2016 at the Newseum, where both Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya were in attendance and which took place days after the Trump Tower meeting.

[...]

Veselnitskaya’s and Akhmetshin’s presence at last year’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing has been well-documented; less well-known is that Akhmetshin was also present at the bill markup in which Rohrabacher offered an amendment to strike Magnitsky’s name from the act.

[...]

Several sources pointed to Rohrabacher aide [Paul] Behrends, a controversial figure on the Hill, as part of the reason for the congressman’s idiosyncratic views on Russia. Other congressional staffers who have worked with or around Behrends see him as egging on Rohrabacher’s worst instincts.

[...]

Behrends reportedly took Akhmetshin around to other congressional offices, a move that raised eyebrows among other congressional staffers, who viewed it as more akin to what a lobbyist does, rather than a staffer.

[...]

Behrends “did not take me around different offices on the hill—this suggestion is false,” Akhmetshin said.

[...]

Behrends did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

He's probably lying low in hopes of escaping the Mueller machinery.

Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of people to harvest.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Rohrabacher is going to be running to hold his seat in Congress in 2018.  This can't help.

UPDATE:  More info on Rohrabacher's ties to the Magnitsky affair.

Junior's Meeting

It does look very much like the Russians came to the meeting at Trump Tower with the intention to lobby for getting the Magnitsky Act rescinded (tied to the "adoption" issue) -at least in part. But, they got their meeting by pretending to (if not acutally having - which they may have) dirt on Hillary. And that's the important piece, which the Trump Cabal would like us to think doesn't matter if they didn't actually get the dirt.

What makes it seem as though they did get their dirt is the changing lies Junior has been telling about the meeting, and the attempt at hiding who all attended and knew about it, especially Rinat Akhmetshin, who was once sued for hacking into the computer system of a Dutch mining firm to steal corporate secrets for a competitor.

At any rate, these same players are all tied to Russian gangsgters. Oh, excuse me - businessmen.

Stick around.  I'm sure there'll be an enormous amount of paper trails and both professional and amateur sleuths digging into this sordid affair.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jaysus, This Story Grows Like Audrey II

The alleged former Soviet intelligence officer who attended the now-infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials last June was previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy.

[...]

The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. was told in July 2015 that Akhmetshin had arranged the hacking of a mining company’s private records—stealing internal documents and then disseminating them.

[...]

Akhmetshin had been hired by Veselnitskaya to help with pro-Russian lobbying efforts in Washington. He also met and lobbied Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee for Europe, in Berlin in April.

  Daily Beast

Is Dana Rohrabacher going to get caught in this shitstorm?  There could be a good legal reason those GOP asshats are still defending Trump.

Hacking could be part of a pro-Russian lobbying effort. Getting Trump into the White House could certainly be part of a pro-Russian lobbying effort.

I wonder why Junior left this guy's involvement in the meeting out of the various statements, email releases and defenses he's been proffering.

Akhmetshin denied the accusation, but admitted passing around a “hard drive” filled with data on IMR’s owners. He said the information was all open-source material that he’d gotten from the former prime minister of Kazakhstan, Akezhan Kazhegeldin. The private investigator, though, said he recovered a copy of the data on a thumb drive provided by an anonymous source, and found it consisted of gigabytes of private files stolen in the computer intrusion. A computer-forensics expert examined the thumb drive and found metadata indicating some of the files had last been opened by a user with the initials “RA.”

Hmmmmmm....RA....RA....?

Lawyers acting for Akhmetshin deny that he allegedly confessed to hacking. They did not deny that he had bragged about his investigatory techniques in a public place, but claimed that his methods did not involve computer intrusion.

Whatever.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 7/19: More information concerning Rohrabacher.

UPDATE 8/29:  And more

Trump Mistakes

Rinat Akhmetshin confirmed his participation to The Associated Press on Friday.

[...]

Akhmetshin said Trump Jr. asked the attorney for evidence of illicit money flowing to the Democratic National Committee, but Veselnitskaya said she didn’t have that information. She said the Trump campaign would need to research it more, and after that Trump Jr. lost interest, according to Akhmetshin.

“They couldn’t wait for the meeting to end,” Akhmetshin said.

[...]

In reports this week, Akhmetshin has been identified as a former Russian counterintelligence officer. He denied ever serving in such a capacity.

“That is not correct,” Akhmetshin said. He said he served in the Soviet Army from 1986 to 1988 after he was drafted but was not trained in spy tradecraft.

[...]

Akhmetshin said the attorney brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents. He said he was unaware of the content of the documents or whether they were provided by the Russian government, and it was unclear whether she left the materials with the Trump associates.

Akhmetshin said the meeting was “not substantive” and he “actually expected more serious” discussion.

“I never thought this would be such a big deal to be honest,” he told AP.

  Denver Post

He's in a meeting with someone who was brought in from Russia to provide useful information for the Trump presidential campaign - a meeting in which senior people in the Trump campaign are also present - and he doesn't think it's a big deal? Suuuuure.

Just what evidence did Feselnitskaya give the Cabal? Surely they didn't get her all the way over here before finding out she had something they wanted.

One of the many mistakes the Trump Cabal has made is involving too many outsiders in their crooked affairs.

There are a lot of questions to be asked. And a lot of people to be giving answers.

I see suggestions that Goldstone (the go-between for Junior and Veselnitskaya) is "on vacation".

Goldstone’s Facebook profile says he is still based in New York. Reportedly, much of his gilded lifestyle is funded by Russian money: Agalarov is an aspiring pop star who performed the interval act at Eurovision when it was held in Baku in 2012. Reportedly his billionaire father has offered Goldstone near limitless roubles to try to make his son a star.

He is still on Oui 2’s page as co-founder and president of the company. Last year he was a judge at the Miss Universe pageant but at the moment he is taking time out to travel across Europe. Although Facebook posts suggest he might not be travelling by yacht but by passenger ferry, and the nightlife is low key and local rather than superclubs.

  UK Standard

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 8/1/17:  Leaked: Trump dictated the first Junior response.

Leaky, Leaky

The Russian lawyer who met with the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counter intelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.

NBC News is not naming the lobbyist, who denies any current ties to Russian spy agencies.

[...]

The Russian-born American lobbyist served in the Soviet military and emigrated to the U.S., where he holds dual citizenship.

  NBC

Does this make it any worse?

Futerfas said he has talked with that individual. "He is a U.S. citizen. He told me specifically he was not working for the Russian government, and in fact laughed when I asked him that question.”

Well, that settles it, then.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Make It Stop!

The following excerpted article looks to be saying that a private firm, Fusion GPS, was hired by various people to  1) get dope on what kompromat the Kremlin might have on Trump; and 2) get dope on a man named Bill Browder in an effort to help Russia neuter the Magnitsky Act which sanctions Russians accused of human rights abuses.  Or, as another article says:   Opposition Research Firm Behind Trump Dossier Worked On Pro-Kremlin Lobbying Effort

Fusion’s work on the two projects — one favorable to the Kremlin (Magnitsky) and the other unfavorable (the dossier) — has drawn attention from Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

  Daily Caller

I can see how it might.  It can also be argued that one project is favorable to Donald Trump and one unfavorable.  Apparently they are apolitical and will work for whoever pays them.  But it's interesting that their clients - with competing interests - are using the same company.  Is Fusion GPS the only game in town?*

The Republican has questioned why the FBI reportedly used an uncorroborated document financed by a Clinton ally as part of the basis for its investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

Grassley has also asked the FBI about reports that the bureau informally agreed to pay Steele $50,000 to continue his research on Trump. That payment was reportedly never made, though it is unclear why. Both the FBI and Fusion GPS have avoided answering Grassley’s questions about the dossier.

I can see why they might.

In his letters to the FBI, Grassley has cited a complaint that [Bill] Browder [a  London-based businessman] filed with the Justice Department last July. In that document, Browder said that Fusion GPS was waging an opposition research campaign against him on behalf of a Russian businessman who was under investigation in the U.S. for money laundering [as part of an influence campaign aimed at neutering the Magnitsky Act].

[...]

Browder was the leading force behind the campaign to pass the Magnitsky Act, a move which angered Russian president Vladimir Putin.

[...]

Fusion GPS had been hired by the international law firm, BakerHostetler. The law firm was in turn was working for Denis Katsyv, the head of a Cyprus-based company called Prevezon Holdings.

Prevezon, Denis Katsyv’s company, was implicated in the money laundering scheme. Prevezon reached a $6 million settlement with the U.S. government in the case in May.

Browder tells TheDC that he will testify about Fusion GPS, Simpson, BakerHostetler lawyer Mark Cymrot, and Akhmetshin, the former Soviet agent who is now a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist and consultant.

Akhmetshin was the lobbyist of record for a group formed last year called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGIF).

The organization’s official mission was to end the Russian adoption ban implemented by Putin. But in reality, HRAGIF used adoption as a dangle to compel U.S. lawmakers to revise the Magnitsky Act.

[...]

The anti-Magnitsky campaign took a new twist over the weekend after it was revealed that a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya met on June 9, 2016 with Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

[...]

After The New York Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday, Trump’s legal team pointed to Veselnitskaya’s work on Magnitsky and that lobbying campaign’s links to Fusion GPS. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team suggested that the Russian lawyer could have sought to compromise the campaign.

It has since emerged that Trump Jr. was approached for the meeting by Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who works for Emin Agalarov, a Kazakh musician whose billionaire father is close to the Russian government.

Stop! Stop! Stop! I need pictures!

There's more. I'm not even going to attempt to put it together. My brain hurts.

Read it yourself.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

*UPDATE: More on Fusion GPS