dagblog - Comments for "Mueller just connected a top Trump campaign staffer to Russian intelligence"

Trump ally detained, served

artappraiser — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 22:56:06 +0000

In reply to Mueller just connected a top Trump campaign staffer to Russian intelligence

Trump ally detained, served with Mueller subpoena at Boston airport

Ted Malloch said FBI agents asked him about Roger Stone and WikiLeaks.

by Tom Winter @ NBCNews.com, Mar.30.2018 / 2:49 PM ET

A professor and author who once presented himself as a possible Trump administration ambassador to the European Union was detained and questioned by the FBI at Boston Logan airport and served a subpoena from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Ted Malloch said in an emailed statement to NBC News that he was flying from his home in the U.K. via Boston to Cleveland, Ohio to celebrate Easter when he was stopped Wednesday, an incident first reported by the Guardian.

NBC News has independently confirmed that Malloch was detained and questioned at the airport, but not the details of the encounter.

According to Malloch, when he exited his flight from London he was taken aside by a TSA official and an FBI agent, and separated from his wife.

Malloch said two FBI agents then told him he was being detained to answer questions related to the special counsel's investigation [....]

That's an exclusive? Seth

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 05:07:22 +0000

In reply to And The Guardian has this

That's an exclusive? Seth Abramson has been documenting this for maybe a year, including incidents going back to around 2002.

And The Guardian has this

artappraiser — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 02:21:52 +0000

In reply to Mueller just connected a top Trump campaign staffer to Russian intelligence

And The Guardian has this exclusive:

FBI looked into Trump plans to build hotel in Latvia with Putin supporter

Exclusive: US authorities made inquiries even before 2016 election campaign into Trump property dealings in former Soviet Union

By John Swaine @ TheGuardian.com, March 29

They wanted to build the Las Vegas of the Baltics.

In 2010, a small group of businessmen including a wealthy Russian supporter of Vladimir Putin began working on plans to build a glitzy hotel and entertainment complex with Donald Trump in Riga, the capital of Latvia.

A senior Trump executive visited the city to scout for locations. Trump and his daughter Ivanka spent hours at Trump Tower with the Russian, Igor Krutoy, who also knows compatriots involved in arranging a fateful meeting at the same building during the 2016 US election campaign [....]

There is an alternate version

artappraiser — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 02:18:13 +0000

In reply to Mueller just connected a top Trump campaign staffer to Russian intelligence

There is an alternate version of a 'splainer of this story at The Atlantic:

The Shadowy Operative at the Center of the Russia Scandal

Court documents call him Person A, but descriptions match the officer to Russian intelligence and to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.

By Natasha Bertrand, March 29, 2:19 pm

Buried in a late-night court filing in Robert Mueller’s expansive probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was an explosive claim: An adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams had knowingly been in contact with a former Russian intelligence officer as late as September 2016, prosecutors said. The revelation is the strongest connection to date between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s intelligence services, which U.S. officials say were behind the cyberattacks on Democrats during the election [....]

The former GRU officer was identified in Mueller’s latest filing only as “Person A.” But the descriptions allude to Konstantin Kilimnik—a Russian-Ukrainian dual citizen who attended a Soviet military school in Ukraine and later joined the Russian Army as a translator. Kilimnik left the army and eventually landed at the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute (IRI) in 1995, where he worked for over a decade.

Gates knew of Kilimnik’s background. He told Alex van der Zwaan—a lawyer he and Manafort worked with on a project to shore up support for Manafort’s client at the time, ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych—about the former intelligence officer’s past as a GRU officer, according to prosecutors [....]