Category Archives: Lands

Trump blamed Loretta Lynch for letting a Russian lawyer into the U.S.. Here’s how she actually got in

BuzzFeed reports: In the days before her June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. and other top Trump campaign aides, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was granted a visa by the US State Department to enter the country.

“In Sept. 2015, DHS paroled Natalia Veselnitskaya into the U.S. in concurrence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, allowing her to participate in a client’s legal proceedings,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to BuzzFeed News Thursday night.

“Ms. Veselnitskaya was subsequently paroled into the U.S. several times between 2015 and 2016, ending in February 2016. In June 2016, she was issued a B1/B2 nonimmigrant visa by the U.S. Department of State,” it said.

The statement contradicts remarks made by President Donald Trump earlier Thursday, suggesting that the Russian lawyer had somehow been allowed into the US by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. [Continue reading…]

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Why Macron is wrong about Assad

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: There is much to celebrate in Emmanuel Macron’s ascent to the French presidency. The election was a resounding defeat for the forces of reaction. Macron conducted himself with decency and intelligence and achieved his victory without submitting to the prevailing xenophobic impulse. In acknowledging France’s imperial excesses, in standing up to Vladimir Putin, and in resisting Donald Trump’s provocations, he seemed to herald a bold new politics that would align power with principle.

Since assuming power, however, Macron’s statements have been more equivocal. His recent comments on Syria suggest that in the balance between ideals and pragmatism, the president is leaning heavier on the latter. Speaking to the European press, Macron announced his break with past policy. “I haven’t said the deposing of Bashar al-Assad is a prerequisite for everything,” he said. “Because no one has introduced me to his legitimate successor!” Instead, he emphasised the need for “a political and diplomatic roadmap”; because, “We won’t solve the question only with military force.”

The cliche about military force would be meaningful, if it came from the party that is committed to military victory. But the monopoly on violence in Syria is held by the regime and its allies, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Together, they are responsible for over 90 percent of all civilian deaths. The West has deployed its military force primarily against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) and al-Qaeda, and, occasionally, also against anti-Assad fighters (often indiscriminately). France has never confronted Assad; and only under Trump has the US tackled the regime in five rare instances, the most significant being the cruise missile strike on the Shayrat airbase after the sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun. [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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‘Cholera is everywhere’: Yemen epidemic spiralling out of control

The Guardian reports: Ali Muhammad’s entire family are sick. In the months since his home district of Abs in northern Yemen was hit by a cholera outbreak, he has lost both parents and all six of his children have fallen ill.

“Cholera is everywhere,” he said, according to a testimony provided by Médecins Sans Frontières, who are caring for his eldest daughter at a cholera treatment centre in Abs. “The water is contaminated and I don’t drink it. We have tanks, but we don’t get water regularly. The situation cannot be worse.”

As the area grapples with both the cholera epidemic, which began to spread in April, and the impact of the country’s civil war, the life of the qat harvester has become harder and harder. “Everybody is sick and in rough shape, and their poor financial condition does not enable them to move from one health centre to another.

“My father got sick and although we hospitalised him, he passed away. My mother died as well. And I am just like many others.”

The Abs district was the scene of a deadly airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition last August that demolished a hospital supported by MSF, killing 19 people, including one of the aid agency’s staff members, and injuring 24.

Less than a year later, as the ongoing conflict hits an stalemate, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, the MSF cholera treatment centre in Abs town alone is receiving more than 460 patients daily, which is more than anywhere else in the country. [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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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 Trump White House is a confederacy of dingbats

Paul Waldman writes: The Trump White House is facing its greatest test yet, as the Russia scandal deepens and the president’s own son has provided direct and incontrovertible evidence that at the very least the Trump campaign attempted to collude with the Russian government in order to destroy Hillary Clinton. Handling this scandal would be an extraordinary challenge for even the smartest and most competent collection of government professionals and political operatives.

But this White House is a confederacy of dingbats. That’s what got them into this pickle in the first place and that’s what will keep them from getting out of it. [Continue reading…]

Hardened skeptics on the issue of Russian interference might argue that no foreign government could hope to see its interests served by installing the Trump family in power and yet six months in office has surely provided the Russians with as much and plenty more of exactly what they hoped for: chaos in Washington.

It’s hard enough for Republicans or Democrats to successfully push a legislative agenda, so the Russians surely understand American politics well enough that they couldn’t pin their hopes on any carefully defined outcome.

Washington never operates like a well-oiled machine; the predictable value of having the Trumps in power is that this would be like pouring water in the gas tank.

If the plan was to cripple the U.S. government, then everything seems to be proceeding according to plan.

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Trump claims unaware of Veselnitskaya meeting; 2013 video shows him with associates tied to email controversy

Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he was unaware of his son Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last year with a Russian lawyer at the heart of a White House controversy, telling Reuters he only learned of it a couple of days ago.

Asked if he knew that his son was meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June last year, Trump said in a White House interview: “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this.” [Continue reading…]

The Trump Jr. meeting was arranged by music publicist, Rob Goldstone, who is seen alongside Donald Trump and Russians linked to the controversy in a 2013 video obtained by CNN:

 

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Russian officials were having conversations about Trump associates even before his campaign was announced

The Wall Street Journal reports: U.S. intelligence agencies starting in the spring of 2015 detected conversations in which Russian government officials discussed associates of Donald Trump, several months before he declared his candidacy for president, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Now, in light of emails released Tuesday by the president’s eldest son concerning a 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer, investigators are going back to those early reports to see if they can understand them better.

In some cases, the Russians in the overheard 2015 conversations talked about meetings held outside the U.S. involving Russian government officials and Trump business associates or advisers, these people said.

It isn’t clear which of Mr. Trump’s associates or advisers the Russians were referring to, or whether they had any connection to his presidential aspirations.

The reports were gathered by intelligence agencies that routinely monitor Russian espionage against the U.S. Such efforts can include monitoring phone calls and emails as well as information from informants. The efforts weren’t aimed at Mr. Trump or his associates, these people said.

The U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t sure what to make of the vague and inconclusive mentions of Mr. Trump’s associates, given that he had done business in Russia and was a global celebrity well-known to prominent people there. The names of Americans do sometimes show up benignly in conversations involving Russian officials that are overheard by U.S. intelligence.

The emails released this week by Donald Trump Jr. provide details about a meeting he arranged in June 2016—as his father had effectively clinched the Republican nomination—with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to discuss allegedly incriminating information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton obtained by the Russian government.

Donald Jr. and the Russian lawyer said no information on Mrs. Clinton was disclosed in the meeting. But the emails offer the first clear public evidence that senior officials in Mr. Trump’s camp were open to offers of assistance from Russia in his quest for the White House.

A lawyer for Mr. Trump didn’t return a call seeking comment on the overheard 2015 conversations.

As with other new revelations in the probes of Russian interference in the election, the Trump Jr. emails enable investigators to look at earlier reports with fresh eyes, to see if certain statements or names now seem more significant in hindsight, the current and former officials said.

The reports on the 2015 conversations weren’t particularly illuminating, the people familiar with them said. Donald Trump had business connections in Russia—he produced the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow—and had sold properties to Russians.

In that respect, the reports in and of themselves weren’t alarming. But the volume of the mentions of Trump associates by the Russians did have officials asking each other, “What’s going on?” one former official said. [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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Key strategist in Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine will be new Russian ambassador in Washington

Politico reports: A new — and likely more aggressive — chapter in Russian diplomacy is about to begin in Washington with the departure of Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, whose soft-power approach to D.C. will be taken over by noted hardliner Anatoly Antonov.

The switch in what has become one of Washington’s most scrutinized jobs comes as the controversy over President Donald Trump and his allies’ ties to Moscow intensifies, especially with the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at the height of the campaign after being told she could provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

The scandal has at times centered on secret meetings with Kislyak — a long-time and well-respected diplomat who held the top post in Washington for nine years before his 2016 meetings with Trump officials made him a politically radioactive figure.

The 62-year-old Antonov is also a longtime diplomat, but he recently completed a nearly six-year stint as a deputy in Russia’s far more hardline defense ministry.

Antonov’s arrival is expected to be a noted shift in Washington’s diplomatic community, where Kislyak was known as an affable fixture on the embassy party circuit, and an experienced political figure with routine official access to U.S. government circles.

“It’s the continuation of a trend we’re seeing throughout Europe, where Moscow is putting in hardline, almost Soviet-style diplomats,” said Heather Conley, who runs the Europe and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

After navigating some of the most tense U.S.-Russia relations in recent memory, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Kislyak was rumored to take a post at the United Nations following his near decade of service in Washington. But as the Trump-Russia scandal flared, he was instead recalled to Moscow, though the Kremlin has not said what factored into that decision.

Where Kislyak dealt in soft power — known for lavish parties, calls for better relations between the U.S. and Russia,and a genial if unyielding demeanor — Antonov’s reputation as a hardline Kremlin acolyte precedes him.

As a defense official, Antonov was a key strategist in Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and he received a medal from Putin awarded to officials who participated in the Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula. That participation also made him a target of European Union sanctions in 2015, though he was never singled out by U.S. economic penalties.

“He was a very outspoken defender of the whole thing, very nasty in his attacks,” said former U.S. ambassador Alexander Vershbow. “You can expect to hear him talking a lot about NATO encirclement of Russia…he not only says that stuff but he believes it.” [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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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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