Category Archives: Issues

Judge in Hawaii rules grandparents are exempt from Trump travel ban

The Washington Post reports: A federal judge in Hawaii has ruled that grandparents and other relatives should be exempt from the enforcement of President Trump’s travel ban, which bars people from six Muslim-majority countries.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson ruled Thursday night that the federal government’s list of family relatives eligible to bypass the travel ban should be expanded to include grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts and other relatives. Watson also ordered exemptions for refugees who have been given formal assurance from agencies placing them in the United States.

In Watson’s ruling, he said the government’s definition of what constitutes close family “represents the antithesis of common sense.”

“Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents,” Watson wrote. “Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members. The Government’s definition excludes them. That simply cannot be.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s Russian laundromat

Craig Unger writes: In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.

A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.

If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.

In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.

Since Trump’s election as president, his ties to Russia have become the focus of intense scrutiny, most of which has centered on whether his inner circle colluded with Russia to subvert the U.S. election. A growing chorus in Congress is also asking pointed questions about how the president built his business empire. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for a deeper inquiry into “Russian investment in Trump’s businesses and properties.”

The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.

But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s. [Continue reading…]

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Liu Xiaobo’s fate reflects fading pressure on China over human rights

The New York Times reports: Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, catapulted to fame in 1989, when the Communist Party’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square created an international uproar.

Now, nearly three decades later, Mr. Liu has died of cancer while in state custody, a bedridden and silenced example of Western governments’ inability, or reluctance, to push back against China’s resurgent authoritarians.

Mr. Liu’s fate reflects how human rights issues have receded in Western diplomacy with China. And it shows how Chinese Communist Party leaders, running a strong state bristling with security powers, can disdain foreign pleas, even for a man near death.

“It’s certainly become more difficult,” said John Kamm, an American businessman and founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, who for decades has quietly lobbied China to free or improve the treatment of political prisoners. He said his attempts to win approval for Mr. Liu to leave China for treatment, as Mr. Liu and his wife requested, got nowhere.

“I tried my best. I did everything I could,” he said before Mr. Liu died. “Things are pretty difficult right now. It’s hard for me to get the kinds of responses I need.” [Continue reading…]

Nicholas Kristof writes: The Mandela of our age is dead, and Liu Xiaobo will at least now find peace after decades of suffering outrageous mistreatment by the Chinese authorities.

Liu, 61, is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in custody since the Nazi era, and his death is an indictment of China’s brutal treatment of one of the great figures of modern times.

Even as Liu was dying of cancer, China refused to allow Liu to travel for treatment that might have saved his life. In a move that felt crass and disgusting, the Chinese authorities filmed the dying Liu without his consent to make propaganda films falsely depicting merciful treatment of him.

In the coming weeks, China will probably try to dispose of Liu’s remains in a way that will prevent his grave from becoming a democratic pilgrimage spot. The authorities no doubt will attempt to bully and threaten Liu’s brave widow, Liu Xia, and perhaps confine her indefinitely under house arrest to keep her silent.

Will Western leaders speak up for her? I fear not, any more than they forcefully spoke up for Liu Xiaobo himself. [Continue reading…]

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Voter access, not voter fraud, is a pressing national security issue

Jake Laperruque writes: The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — a body set up by President Donald Trump to investigate “the registration and voting processes used in Federal elections,” including vulnerabilities that could lead to voter fraud — is widely seen as perpetuating the myth of mass fraud in the 2016 election in order to facilitate voter intimidation and suppression, including selectively purging voter rolls.

Of the fifty states to receive a request for voter roll data from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in his role as vice chair of the commission, 44 (and the District of Columbia) have already either totally or partly refused to comply. Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann went as far as to declare, “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” and in his position as Secretary of State of Kansas, Kobach was legally bound to refuse his own request to himself.

But our nation needs more than a vociferous rejection of Kobach’s efforts. We need to put civics before partisanship and promote proactive policies to ensure accessibility and ease of voting, and the stakes for doing so are higher than ever. [Continue reading…]

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Trump administration plans to certify Iranian compliance with nuclear agreement

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration, delaying an anticipated confrontation with Iran until the completion of a long-awaited policy review, plans to recertify Tehran’s compliance with the Obama-era nuclear deal, according to U.S. and foreign officials.

The recertification, due Monday to Congress, follows a heated internal debate between those who want to crack down on Iran now — including some White House officials and lawmakers — and Cabinet officials who are “managing other constituencies” such as European allies, and Russia and China, which signed and support the agreement, one senior U.S. official said.

As a candidate and president, Trump has said he would reexamine and possibly kill what he called the “disastrous” nuclear deal that was negotiated under President Barack Obama and went into effect in January last year. The historic agreement shut down most of Iran’s nuclear program, in some cases for decades, in exchange for an easing of international sanctions.

Under an arrangement Obama worked out with Congress, the administration must certify Iranian compliance with the terms of the accord every 90 days. If the administration denies certification, it can then decide to reinstitute sanctions that were suspended under the deal.

The Trump administration issued its first certification in April, when it also said it was awaiting completion of its review of the agreement, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The senior official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations, said the review should be completed before the next certification deadline in October.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and other signatories have said repeatedly that Iran is complying with the agreement, under which the country dismantled most of its centrifuges and nuclear stockpile, shut down a plutonium production program and agreed to extensive international monitoring of all stages of the nuclear process. [Continue reading…]

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Quid pro quo: Democrats ask DOJ about Katsyv settlement involving Trump-linked lawyer

Bloomberg reports: Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee asked the Justice Department to explain a decision to settle a money-laundering case in May that involved the Russian lawyer who held a controversial meeting last year with Donald Trump Jr.

Democrats are interested because one of the lawyers involved in the case was Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with President Donald Trump’s son in an encounter arranged with the promise of damaging Russian government information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Veselnitskaya worked with a Cyprus-based company, Prevezon Holdings Ltd., that is controlled by a Russian businessman and was accused of a tax theft and money laundering scheme.

The U.S. agreed on May 12 to take $5.9 million to settle the lawsuit tied to a $230 million Russian tax fraud, avoiding a trial that was set to begin the following week.

The 17 House Democrats asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a Wednesday letter whether the involvement of Veselnitskaya, who they called a “Kremlin-connected attorney,” may have helped prompt the settlement, given her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. The president’s son said Veselnitskaya didn’t share anything related to Clinton and that the discussion centered mostly around adoption policy.

“We write with some concern that the two events may be connected — and that the department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts,” they wrote in the letter. [Continue reading…]

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Syria and the case for editorial accountability

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: On June 29, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) published a comprehensive report confirming that the nerve agent used in the Syrian regime’s April 4 attack on Khan Sheikhoun that killed 92 was sarin. The conclusion was no surprise. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials, MSF) had already found the symptoms of the victims consistent with exposure to a nerve agent. In a separate analysis, the French government had matched sarin samples from the site to regime stock. A Human Rights Watch investigation also found the regime responsible for this and three other chemical attacks since December, and said the latest attack was “part of a broader pattern of Syrian government forces’ use of chemical weapons”.

However, the response from the regime and its supporters followed a familiar pattern. There was denial, deflection and deception. There were conspiracy theories. There was whataboutery. But effluvia from this dung heap merely fouled the air until it was ignited into a noxious fire by an inveterate pyromaniac. Enter Seymour Hersh.

Seymour Hersh, a once celebrated journalist, has been reluctant to cede the limelight. But the pride of place that he earned through hard work he now wants to keep by trading on his legacy alone. Hersh, who once did the legwork for his stories – finding sources, corroborating claims, verifying evidence – is now relying on the uncorroborated claims of anonymous sources to tell tall tales that contradict available evidence. The man who broke world-changing stories from My Lai to Abu Ghraib now hops from publication to publication, writing sensational drivel, sullying his reputation and diminishing his publishers’.

His latest story, published in the German daily Die Welt, was a colourful rendition of an extant conspiracy theory: that the deaths in Khan Sheikhoun did not result from a chemical attack but were caused by toxic discharge from a conventional attack on a jihadi facility. Based on the baroque testimony of an anonymous source, Hersh concludes that there was no sarin involved. [Continue reading…]

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The investigation goes digital: Did someone point Russia to specific online targets?

Philip Bump writes: There are two benefits for political campaigns with the social-media-spawned ability to target ads to smaller universes of people.

The first is that they can tailor a very specific message to a very specific population, like pitching a drilled-down policy position to, say, Hispanic men under age 45 who are farmers near Fresno, Calif.

The second is that, because not very many people will see that message, the odds that it rises to national attention are small. You can’t hide a television ad. If you buy a television ad on cable or on a broadcast network, someone is going to see it, and, if newsworthy, it will end up on the news.

Before social media — most specifically, Facebook — campaigns had to balance cost, reach and targeting through spending on direct mail, field programs and television. Now, they can pick out individuals from a massive crowd with a tailor-made video ad for relatively little cost — with much less of a chance that their opponents find out it ever happened.

The presidential campaign of Donald Trump embraced this explicitly. In October of last year, Bloomberg News reported that the campaign’s digital arm, run by Brad Parscale, would target possible Hillary Clinton voters for an inverse pitch. The Trump campaign would not show them ads making the case for voting for Trump; instead, they showed videos that they hoped would dampen enthusiasm for Clinton — and get the voters to stay home. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting may have been legal. But that’s a low bar

Asha Rangappa writes: Like all new FBI agents at Quantico, I got to know one particular individual very well when I was in the academy there. Her name was Carla F. Bad. Strictly speaking, she was not actually a person, but an acronym, whose name was a mnemonic device for all the ways the bureau taught agents to measure people seeking positions of public trust: character, associates, reputation, loyalty, ability, finances, bias, alcohol and drugs. Carla F. Bad is the touchstone against which FBI agents learn to assess a person’s honesty, integrity and trustworthiness in the course of checking their background. And she — rather than the criminal code — might be precisely what best reveals the shortcomings of the Trump administration.

The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer to obtain incriminating information about Hillary Clinton has sparked another round of analysis on the technicalities of criminal law. Specifically, legal experts are focused on whether White House adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who also attended the meeting, violated the law by failing to disclose this meeting on his SF-86 government background form. But focusing on bright-line rules of criminality misses the point. The deeper question is whether members of Trump’s administration can uphold the trust that has been placed in them as stewards of the government they have been chosen to lead. On this front, the criminal code shouldn’t be the only yardstick. Even if Trump’s aides and family have managed to toe the line of the law, the news out of the Russia investigation so far leaves little reason to have faith in their judgment.

For the record, the SF-86 isn’t easy to fill out. The form, more than 100 pages long, asks an individual seeking a national security position — meaning a position requiring a security clearance — for every place they’ve ever lived, every country they’ve ever visited, background information on every close relative, and almost every possible variation on their contacts with foreign officials. Even knowing that a false statement can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison, it’s not uncommon for even the most honest person filling out the form to inadvertently omit a piece of information. On my own SF-86, which I completed when I was 27 to become a special agent for the FBI, I failed to disclose a speeding ticket I got when traveling home from college for Thanksgiving when I was 19. I got a grilling from the FBI: Why, they wanted to know, did I not mention this? “I forgot” wasn’t the answer they wanted, but to my relief, they did accept it. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s election commission has been a disaster. It’s going exactly as planned

Dahlia Lithwick writes: It’s hard to imagine how Kris Kobach could have screwed things up so badly.

Here is a man, seemingly hatched from an underground lab devoted entirely to perfecting the fine art of vote suppression, given a golden opportunity to suppress votes nationally by way of Donald Trump’s sore loser–based election “integrity” commission.

Here is a man who has pledged the better part of his legal career to ensuring that fewer people can vote and to treating any and all immigrants—documented or otherwise—like criminals. Here is a man, in short, who had a meeting with destiny.

As Kobach put it to Ari Berman last month, his whole master plan for world dominion was so simple: to create in Kansas—where he is running for governor and has been secretary of state for a number of years—a template for programmatic vote suppression nationwide. If he created “the absolute best legal framework,” other states and the federal government would follow. Somehow, though, Trump’s “election integrity” commission turned into one of the most colossal cockups in an administration already overflowing with them. [Continue reading…]

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The country’s first Somali-American legislator and her politics of inclusivity

Pacific Standard reports: Two days before the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump stepped out of his personal jet and into a hangar at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to promise a crowd of more than 9,000 supporters that, if elected, he would halt arrivals of Somali refugees. Minnesota has the largest Somali population in America—estimated to be around 46,000—as well as comparatively large populations of Ethiopians, Liberians, and Nigerians. “You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota,” Trump told the audience, referring to Somali immigrants as a “disaster.”

Two days later, on November 8th, a majority-white district in Minneapolis elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives, making her the country’s first Somali-American legislator. Omar’s win—in a district that includes both a portion of University of Minnesota and an immigrant neighborhood known as Little Mogadishu—represented a clear rejection of Trump’s rhetoric. And even while the incoming administration planned to reverse years of progressive policymaking, the rise of an optimistic immigrant politician served as a reminder that our country’s unique promise to newcomers was still alive.

At Omar’s election-night celebration, her husband, Ahmed Hirsi, saluted the diversity of Omar’s campaign. “Look around,” Hirsi said, waving his arms to the corners of a ballroom filled with hijab-wearing Millennials and balding brown and white heads. “This is what this country’s all about. This is America. Folks from different backgrounds, different faiths, different cultures, coming together for one good cause. So, for those who believe that Somalis are a disaster, I say you are delusional. That is not, let me tell you, that is not what this country is about.” Wearing an ivory hijab pinned with a glittering brooch, the 34-year-old Omar beamed from the front row, one of her three children perched on her lap. [Continue reading…]

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One of the biggest icebergs in recorded history just broke loose from Antarctica

The Washington Post reports: Scientists announced Wednesday that a much anticipated break at the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica has occurred, unleashing a massive iceberg that is more than 2,200 square miles in area and weighs a trillion tons.

In other words, the iceberg — among the largest in recorded history to splinter off the Antarctic continent — is close to the size of Delaware and consists of almost four times as much ice as the fast melting ice sheet of Greenland loses in a year. It is expected to be given the name “A68” soon, scientists said.

“Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes,” wrote researchers with Project MIDAS, a research group at Swansea and Aberystwyth Universities in Wales that has been monitoring the situation closely by satellite. [Continue reading…]

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Trump-Russia investigators probe Jared Kushner-run digital operation

McClatchy reports: Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.

Also under scrutiny is the question of whether Trump associates or campaign aides had any role in assisting the Russians in publicly releasing thousands of emails, hacked from the accounts of top Democrats, at turning points in the presidential race, mainly through the London-based transparency web site WikiLeaks. [Continue reading…]

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Did Donald Jr. break the law?

Norman L. Eisen and Richard W. Painter write: The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. enthusiastically accepted an offer to meet with an individual described as a “Russian government attorney” bringing “official documents and information” to help the Trump campaign and injure the Clinton campaign is a bombshell.

It raises a host of potential criminal and other legal violations for Donald Jr. and others involved, including his brother-in-law Jared Kushner; Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time; and perhaps the president himself. These new facts are a critical inflection point in the Trump-Russia matter. But they should not be exaggerated: The investigation has much further to go before Donald Jr.’s liability, or that of others, can be finally assessed.

The defense that this was a routine meeting to hear about opposition research is nonsense. As ethics lawyers, we have worked on political campaigns for decades and have never heard of an offer like this one. If we had, we would have insisted upon immediate notification of the F.B.I., and so would any normal campaign lawyer, official or even senior volunteer. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian connection has ties to former Kremlin spies

The Daily Beast reports: The Russian lawyer who peddled dirt on Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump Jr. has ties to former Russian military and intelligence officials, a key congressional committee will hear in testimony next week.

William Browder, an American financier who has investigated Russian corruption for more than a decade, will brief the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing next week on the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Russian government—including to former top members of the GRU and the FSB, two of the Kremlin’s main intelligence agencies. Those ties were spelled out in documents that Browder shared with the committee and provided to The Daily Beast this week.

“Veselnitskaya may have had her own agenda in requesting a meeting with Trump,” according Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who led the agency’s European directorate of operations. “But Russian intelligence practice is to co-opt such a person by arming them with secret intelligence information and tasking them to pass it to Trump’s people and get their reaction.”

“The key point is that essentially no Russian citizen or lawyer has compromising material on Hillary Clinton which has not been supplied to them from Russian intelligence,” Mowatt-Larssen wrote on Tuesday. “The simple assertion that she had such information is tantamount to declaring that Veselnitskaya was acting as agent of Russian government in this particular role.” [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: Veselnitskaya was in the United States at the time of the Trump Tower meeting to provide legal defense help to Denis Katsyv, accused in a New York court of helping launder through New York real estate some of the $230 million in Russian government money allegedly pilfered.

But prosecutors in that case knew that Veselnitskaya had allegedly threatened a lawyer working in Moscow in 2009 to expose the corruption, McClatchy has learned, warning his efforts would face consequences from the FSB. The FSB is Russia’s intelligence agency, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

The New York prosecution involved a Cyprus-based company called Prevezon Holdings and the case threatened to expose how Russian government officials had moved money out of their country and into safe havens — something also documented in the now-famous Panama Papers.

Efforts by some in Russia to expose the corruption made their lives extremely difficult. In 2009, the Kremlin attacked lawyers from a Russian-based nongovernmental organization called Spravedlinost, the English translation of which is Justice.

It was in that context that Veselnitskaya allegedly warned attorney Andrey Stolbunov, the leader of Spravedlinost, that the FSB would punish the rights group for its investigation — implying that he should work with the government.

Stolbunov fled Russia in 2013, saying in a 2014 interview with Radio Free Europe that he was being persecuted over his efforts to expose financial misdeeds. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: When American prosecutors accused a senior Russian official’s son of laundering $14 million by investing in Manhattan property and other assets, she was called to defend him. When Moscow regional officials battled Ikea over the Swedish retailer’s expansion, she took on their case.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. last year to discuss possible compromising material on the Democrats, has been widely depicted as a one-issue activist consumed with getting Congress to repeal sanctions against Russian businessmen.

But lawyers and others in Moscow’s legal community called her a trusted insider, one who could be counted on to argue and win important high-profile court cases that matter to the government and to one senior, well-connected official in particular. [Continue reading…]

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Frustration among Trump’s lawyers raises prospect that Kasowitz may resign

The New York Times reports: Mr. Kasowitz and his colleagues have been deeply frustrated by the president. And they have complained that Mr. Kushner has been whispering in the president’s ear about the Russia investigations and stories while keeping the lawyers out of the loop, according to another person familiar with the legal team. But one person familiar with Mr. Kasowitz’s thinking said his concerns did not relate to Mr. Kushner.

The president’s lawyers view Mr. Kushner as an obstacle and a freelancer more concerned about protecting himself than his father-in-law, the person said. While no ultimatum has been delivered, the lawyers have told colleagues that they cannot keep operating that way, raising the prospect that Mr. Kasowitz may resign.

Also, the president has fumed to close allies that he is mulling a staff change, and some members of his family have zeroed in on the chief of staff, Reince Priebus. But most Trump advisers privately concede that major changes are unlikely anytime soon.

The developments provoked sharp criticism by Democrats and even some Republicans. “Nothing’s proven yet, but we’re now beyond obstruction of justice in terms of what’s being investigated,” Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia and Mrs. Clinton’s running mate last year, said on Tuesday. “This is moving into perjury, false statements and even potentially treason.”

Republicans in Congress made little effort to defend the White House, and some expressed concern. “I voted for @POTUS last Nov. & want him & USA to succeed, but that meeting, given that email chain just released, is a big no-no,” Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, wrote on Twitter, using the acronym for president of the United States. [Continue reading…]

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The Magnitsky Act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the Trumps

Anne Applebaum writes: I don’t want to exaggerate: There is a lot we still don’t know. Also, I still believe that the most shocking, disqualifying aspects of the Trump/Russia relationship — President Trump’s hero worship of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his admiration for Russian dictatorship — are the ones that are already public. Nevertheless, the entry of Natalia Veselnitskaya into the Trump/Russia story is dramatic. This is not just because of what her role tells us about Trump and his entourage, but because of what it tells us about the possible motives of interested Russians.

To explain why, you need a few paragraphs of background. Veselnitskaya is a lawyer who has worked for many years to overturn the Magnitsky Act, a piece of U.S. legislation named after a very different Russian lawyer. Sergei Magnitsky was working for an American investor, Bill Browder, when he accidentally stumbled upon an incredible, almost unbelievable scam: Russian tax officials and police were secretly changing the ownership of companies, hijacking their names and bank accounts, and then using them to claim fake tax rebates and other payments. In effect, they were stealing vast sums of money from the Russian state.

Magnitsky learned too much about the scam, and in 2008 he was arrested. In jail he was reportedly deprived of medical care and beaten — until he died. In the wake of Magnitsky’s death, Browder launched an extraordinary crusade against the officials who had been involved in the original scam as well as Magnitsky’s death. In 2012 he convinced Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that has now forbade 44 people, including bureaucrats and tax officials associated with Magnitsky’s death, from entering the United States or doing business with U.S. banks.

The Magnitsky Act bothered the Russian leadership — in fact, it really, really bothered them, far more than it should have. In part that may have been because it focused attention on the real source of so much Russian wealth: theft from the state. In part it may have been because the powerful officials involved, like all powerful officials in Russia, care a lot about being able to travel freely to the West in order to buy property, to go skiing, to hide their money.

It also set a precedent. Suddenly there was a way to target all of those gray bureaucrats, the men behind the scenes who give the orders to loot the state and kill citizens. The Magnitsky Act was the template for the sanctions that the Obama administration placed more broadly on Russian individuals and businesses in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

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