Well, well, well

On [AG William] Barr’s public financial disclosure report, he admits to working for a law firm that represented Russia’s Alfa Bank and for a company whose co-founders allegedly have long-standing business ties to Russia. What’s more, he received dividends from Vector Group, a holding company with deep financial ties to Russia.

On his financial disclosure report, Barr notes that he earned anywhere from $5,001 to $15,000 in dividends from the Vector Group.

The company’s president, Howard Lorber, brought Trump to Moscow in the 1990s to seek investment projects there. The trip is widely seen as the first of many attempts to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The problem, says Shugerman, “is the appearance of bias.”

He added that Donald Trump Jr. “allegedly called Lorber as he was setting up the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian [lawyer]. Lorber has extensive ties to Russia and was allegedly assisting with Trump Tower Moscow plans. On top of Barr’s other choices, which reflect partisan bias, it is bad judgment…to have any financial ties to a person so directly entangled with Trump, Don Jr. and the core of events and questions of the Russia investigation.”

[...]

Barr’s former law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where he was counsel from March 2017 until he was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, represented Russia’s Alfa Bank. (Barr earned more than $1 million at Kirkland.)

Barr also supervises, at Justice, another Kirkland & Ellis alumnus with Alfa ties. Early last year, Trump nominated Kirkland & Ellis partner Brian Benczkowski to the Justice Department’s criminal division. In his role with the law firm, Benczkowski had represented Alfa Bank and supervised an investigation into suspicious online communications between the bank and servers belonging to the Trump Organization.

Investigators found no evidence that the Trump Organization had communicated with Alfa. Still, the bank is partially owned by Russian oligarch German Khan, whose son-in-law, the London-based lawyer Alexander van der Zwaan, was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to investigators about a report his firm had written for Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

[...]

These facts didn’t get much attention during Barr’s confirmation hearing, as Congress was hyperfocused on an unsolicited memo Barr wrote prior to his nomination, which criticized the special counsel’s investigation—and whether he would release an unredacted Mueller report to Congress. Much of the information is public, but it has so far been unreported in relation to Barr.

[...]

[N]o matter what appears in Barr’s color-coded version of the report, his motives will continue to be questioned.

  Newsweek

As well they should.

There are other connections mentioned in this article, and all reasons Barr should have been recused from dealing with the Mueller investigation in any way. But one last one I want to point out:

Barr has significant assets, between $100,000 and $250,000, with Deutsche Bank, which was the only bank that would lend to Trump when all other banks viewed him as too hot to handle. The bank has also been implicated in Russian money-laundering scandals.

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

No collusion!

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker’s position at the Department of Justice continues to draw scrutiny from both Congress and watchdog groups, as does that of Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski, who previously represented the Russian entity Alfa Bank and has been screened off from the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference.

  American Oversight

The assistant AG represented a Russian bank. Jesus wept.

At the time of his confirmation in July, senators voiced concern about Benczkowski’s ties to Alfa Bank, which is owned by oligarchs connected to the Russian government. American Oversight began looking into Benczkowski’s ethics determinations in the following months, and last week received documents in response to a September FOIA request for records about any of his recusals and ethics waivers.

The documents contain communications between the DOJ and senators including Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse. Durbin and Whitehouse relate their concern over the possibility that Benczkowski could exercise, or appear to exercise, an undue influence over actions taken by the special counsel. The most recent letter contained in the documents comes from Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd on October 18, who told the senators that Benczkowski “requested to be—and is currently—screened off from any matters regarding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, including any prosecutions arising from the investigation.”

[...]

American Oversight also received a copy of Benczkowski’s ethics compliance form, dated October 9, which indicates he received authorization to participate in certain matters related to a “former client.” This week’s letter from Senate Democrats requested more information about this authorization, saying that what they had received from DOJ was too heavily redacted and that the White House usually made such authorizations public.

I had forgotten about Benczkowski.  So much shit it's hard to keep anything in mind.  And this is a big deal.  He should have never been confirmed. 

Unfuckingbelievable.

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

In other not-good-for-Trump legal news...

The author of the explosive dossier outlining the president’s alleged ties to Russia won an important legal victory on Monday, when a judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against his firm by the co-founders of Russia’s largest private bank.

In his decision to toss the case “with prejudice”—that is, permanently—Judge Anthony C. Epstein of the Washington, D.C. Superior Court concluded that the author of the dossier, former British intelligence officer agent Christopher Steele, acted “in furtherance of the right of advocacy on issues of public interest” when he decided to brief reporters on the dossier’s findings in the summer of 2016. Steele’s conduct is therefore protected by “anti-SLAPP” statutes, according to the judge, which aim to halt lawsuits brought to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected free speech.

[...]

In court documents, the Alfa plaintiffs have argued two seemingly contradictory points: first, that Steele implied they had been involved in a Trump-Russia conspiracy, and second, that the section of the dossier dealing with the bank was not in the public interest because it did not mention a specific candidate or the 2016 presidential election. Epstein caught this, and wrote that Alfa Bank could not, on the one hand, contend that Steele accused them of cooperating with Russia’s election interference, while on the other hand saying such an explosive revelation would not be in the public interest, he wrote.

The judge also called it “ironic” that Alfa’s co-founders, “who are non-resident aliens with Russian and/or Israeli citizenship,” had argued that non-resident aliens like Steele, who is a British national, don’t have First Amendment rights—even as the co-founders themselves were “ petitioning a U.S. court for a redress of their grievances and invoking a constitutional right to conduct discovery...Plaintiffs do not explain why non-resident aliens have the same right as U.S. citizens to bring defamation actions, but non-resident aliens do not have the same rights as U.S. citizens to defend themselves,” Epstein wrote in a footnote.

  The Atlantic

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

The Pee Tape never goes away

Who is Alex Van der Zwaan?


And who is Alex Van der Zwaan's father-in-law, aside from a guy with the great name German Khan?

The plaintiffs are among the backers of Alfa Bank, a financial institution that the dossier accuses of involvement in Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

[...]

Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, claiming that their reputations were unfairly tattered by the so-called dossier.

[...]

In May, the same three Russian oligarchs filed a separate libel suit in a New York state court against BuzzFeed over its publication of the dossier.

  Politico

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