GOP talking points are loud, not necessarily revelatory

Supporters of President Donald Trump are seizing on newly released FBI reports to argue that the law enforcement agency had clear warnings within weeks after the election that the former British intelligence officer who authored a disputed dossier about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia was intent on preventing the real estate mogul from becoming president.

[...]

“These new Bruce Ohr FBI 302s show an unprecedented and irregular effort by the FBI, DOJ, and State Department to dig up dirt on President Trump using the conflicted Bruce Ohr, his wife, and the Clinton/DNC spies at Fusion GPS,” said Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, the conservative group who obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. “The FISA courts weren’t informed of this corrupted process when they were asked to approve and reapprove extraordinary spy warrants targeting President Trump.”

However, the first interview with Ohr — at least in the files released Thursday — was more than a month after the FBI asked a judge to approve surveillance on Page on October 21, 2016.

That application makes clear that the FBI was already dealing with Steele directly and includes a cautionary footnote disclosing that “a U.S.-based law firm” hired Fusion’s owner Glenn Simpson to conduct research on Trump. (Neither Steele, Simpson or Trump were mentioned by name.)

“The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign,” the application said.

  

While it's important to note that the FISA application was made before the Ohr interview, I would just like to point out that someone wanting to make sure Trump wasn't elected is NOT a bad thing. If the person passionate about that was aware of Trump's criminal money laundering activity and his usefulness as a Russian agent, one would HOPE that person would try to obtain evidence to prevent his election. It's never mentioned even by anti-Trumpers. If someone had tried to prevent Hitler from becoming Fuhrer, we would be celebrating that person.  In fact, we already do that in movies and stories about the people who even tried to assassinate Hitler.

Trump will be tweeting about this, and retweeting Trump fellator Tom Fitton, something he does regularly.

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

The Deripaska connection

If you have felt confused or uncertain about what was happening regarding the investigation into possible Trump collusion with Russia prior to the 2016 election, this New York Times article about the connections linking FBI agent Bruce Ohr, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, Paul Manafort and Christopher Steele will not help sort you out.

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

Ranting about Ohr might not have been well-advised

Yet a third article showing how investigating Ohr actually exposes shit about Trump.

A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

[...]

It was not clear from Ohr’s interview whether Steele had been directly told that or had picked that up through his contacts, but the broader sentiment is echoed in Steele’s research dossier.

[...]

The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met with higher-level Russian officials than the aide had acknowledged, the people said.

The previously unreported details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.

[...]

Trump this month proposed stripping Ohr, who until this year had been largely anonymous during his decades-long Justice Department career, of his security clearance and has asked “how the hell” he remains employed.

[...]

Trump and some of his supporters in Congress have also accused the FBI of launching the entire Russia counterintelligence investigation based on the [Christopher Steele] dossier. But memos authored by Republicans and Democrats and declassified this year show the probe was triggered by information the U.S. government received earlier about the Russian contacts of then-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The FBI’s investigation was already under way by the time it received Steele’s dossier, and Ohr was not the original source of information from it.

[...]

In the interview, Ohr acknowledged that he had not told superiors in his office, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, about his meetings with Steele because he considered the information inflammatory raw source material.

He also provided new details about the department’s move to reassign him once his Steele ties were brought to light.

Ohr said he met in late December 2017 with two senior Justice Department officials, Scott Schools and James Crowell, who told him they were unhappy he had not proactively disclosed his meetings with Steele. They said he was being stripped of his associate deputy attorney post as part of a planned internal reorganization, people familiar with Ohr’s account say.

  A P

More on Trump's rage against DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr

Why go after Ohr, when many close observers assess that he was doing his duty by reporting Steele’s information to the FBI in late November 2017? Sitting on that information from the former British intelligence officer, who had his own track record helping the United States fight Russian organize crime, would have been a serious dereliction. And why does the president risk so much politically by even threatening to pull the security clearances of an active Justice Department official without any of the ordinary procedures for doing so?

[...]

Ohr has never criticized Trump as far as anyone is aware, and has worked at the Justice Department as an award-winning civil servant for nearly thirty years in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It has been noted that Ohr had ties to the notorious Christopher Steele dossier and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, a former British agent, to investigate Trump. But there is quite likely another reason which could trouble Trump even more: Ohr’s job in the Justice Department involved facing off against Russian crime boss Semion Mogilevich whose operatives have been using Trump branded properties to launder millions of dollars for more than three decades. [...] What the public should also understand is how Mogilevich has served as an agent for Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the United States and abroad.

[...]

Over the years, no fewer than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold in all cash purchases to anonymous shell companies—the two criteria that set off alarm bells among anti-money laundering authorities. In 2002, after Trump had gone belly up in Atlantic City, Bayrock, a real estate development company that allegedly had ties to Mogilevich, moved into Trump Tower and partnered with Trump—in the process bailing out the bankrupt real estate mogul and putting him in a position to eventually run for the presidency.

[...]

And Ohr is not the only Mogilevich specialist who has been the subject of Trump’s ire. Last September, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page was fired from her position on Mueller’s probe into the Trump-Russia scandal after anti-Trump text messages exchanged between her and Peter Strzok came to light. [...] However, little attention was paid to what may well be the most interesting item on Page’s resume—her considerable experience prosecuting money laundering cases involving Russian organized crime, including working with the FBI’s task force in Budapest to prosecute a money-laundering case against Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch who partnered with both Paul Manafort and Semion Mogilevich.

[...]

In sum, a key to understanding Trump’s relationships with Russia goes through organized criminal syndicates. As I report on all this information and more in House of Trump, House of Putin, unlike the American Mafia, Russian mobsters operate as de facto state actors, with high-ranking crime bosses like Mogilevich working with and at the behest of Putin. All of which raises the question of whether Trump, by coming down on Ohr and perhaps also Page, is trying to keep the real story behind his many ties to Mogilevich operatives from unraveling.

  Just Security

I'd say that's a certainty.

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

Aha

Trump's continuous vicious rants about agents Ohr and McCabe come into focus:

Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

[...]

Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone.

[...]

“How the hell is Bruce Ohr still employed at the Justice Department?” Trump wrote on Thursday. “Disgraceful! Witch Hunt!”

[...]

Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect.

  The Atlantic

Oh, yeah. It's the money laundering and business criminality Trump's exercised about. The "NO COLLUSION!" shit is a red herring meant to keep his base looking in the wrong direction.

Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. [...] Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate.

I'm guessing he managed it.

And then there’s Andy McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI who spent more than a decade investigating Russian organized crime and served as a supervisory special agent of a task force that scrutinized Eurasian crime syndicates. McCabe is a 21-year FBI veteran who handled aspects of the Russia investigation until Mueller was appointed last May, an appointment McCabe says he pushed for. He was fired [by AG Sessions] in March, just two days short of being eligible to receive his pension and other benefits from the bureau. The official reason was that he had lacked candor when describing his interactions with the press to the Office of the Inspector General.

[...]

One member of Mueller’s team, meanwhile, has provoked more ire from the president’s allies than others: Andrew Weissmann, a seasoned prosecutor who oversaw cases against high-ranking organized criminals on Wall Street in the early 1990s and, later, against 30 people implicated in the Enron fraud scandal. Trump has also villainized the former Mueller team member Lisa Page, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering. She has been targeted by the president and his allies for mocking Trump in text messages she exchanged with Peter Strzok, a Russian counterintelligence expert in the FBI, during a period in which both briefly worked on the Mueller investigation. Strzok was fired earlier this month for writing similarly caustic messages.

Page and Strzok knew better than anybody, that the President is a money laundering Russian mobster-linked sleazebag.

Russia’s criminal syndicates have become increasingly intertwined with its intelligence services, blurring the line between Mafia dons and spies. (As the Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in his book The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia, Putin’s Kremlin has consolidated power by “not simply taming, but absorbing, the underworld.”)

Which is exactly what's happening here if Trump stays in office. And this is how Putin and Trump are ultimately tied together.

[Trump's] links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the former Soviet Union have been documented: Millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s developments and casinos throughout the 1990s, as the journalist Craig Unger has documented, as oligarchs looked for a place to hide their money in the West. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was once known as a hot spot for Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Russian Mafia, and quickly became the “favorite East Coast destination” of the top Russian mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov, according to the 2000 book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. It was also repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.

[...]

Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov [is a] Russian mob leader who ran an entire gambling and money-laundering network out of Unit 63A in Trump Tower, just three floors below Trump’s own residence.(Tokhtakhounov was a VIP attendee at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow just seven months after the gambling ring was busted by the FBI.) Trump’s own sons have boasted of the Trump Organization’s dependence on Russian money. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008. “We don’t rely on American banks,” Eric Trump reportedly told a golfing buddy in 2014. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen—who pleaded guilty last week to tax fraud and campaign-finance violations, in which he implicated the president—once bragged that he was part of the Russian mob, according to The Wall Street Journal. Cohen’s uncle, with whom he was close, owned a Brooklyn catering hall called El Caribe, in which Cohen had a stake—a hall that “for decades was the scene of mob weddings and Christmas parties,” the Times reported, and housed the offices of “two of New York’s most notorious Russian mobsters.”

[...]

It’s not just Trump Tower or Trump Taj Mahal. NBC News reported in November that Trump’s Panama hotel had organized-crime ties, and a Russian state-owned bank under U.S. sanctions, whose CEO met with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in December 2016, helped finance the construction of the president’s 65-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto.

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

The president needs to have his TV privileges revoked

He has a country to run.



Hey, you forgot to give Ohr and Brennan nasty nicknames.

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

UPDATE:

Lies or just doesn't get it

Or both.

So, he does know the statute on emoluments

Jeff Sessions is now officially and finally a pussy. 

Are there really any Trump supporters out there who don't realize just how much personal gain Trump has been accruing by using his office?  He's even currently being sued for it.

And, does "BLANK" stand for "Fucking"? 

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