August 2, 2018: Does President Trump Have a White Stripe Down His Back?

 

8/2/18: Paul Manafort gets pummeled in court. Did Trump’s onetime campaign manager launder tens of millions of dollars in cash? It seems so. Did he avoid paying taxes whenever he could? Yes. Did he live a lavish lifestyle, while doing the bidding of Putin and his allies in the Ukraine? Yes! 

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“Cyprus is, effectively, the money-laundering country of choice for criminals from Russia.” 

Bill Browder, critic of Vladimir Putin

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If it walks like a skunk...

 

Testimony shows Manafort once spent $21,000 for a watch. He shelled out $15,000 for an ostrich skin coat, $9,500 for a vest to match. He spent $900,000, at one store, in just five years, on suits, $450,000 for landscaping at one of his seven homes and millions more on renovations for a home he gave a daughter. Manafort often liked to pay his bills with drafts on Cyprus banks. 

The reason would seem clear. “Cyprus is, effectively, the money-laundering country of choice for criminals from Russia,” Bill Browder, a leading critic of Vladimir Putin tells reporters. “And the reason … is because the Cypriot authorities turn a very active blind eye to the money-laundering.” 

How extensive is the spider’s web of cash woven by criminal types working through Cypriot banks? According to the Dallas Morning News, when the Panama Papers leaked in May 2016 (revealing massive tax evasion by many of the world’s wealthiest individuals), the Bank of Cyprus was cited 4,657 times.

 

Why might this worry the President of the United States? Consider who organized a group of investors in 2014 to buy the Bank of Cyprus for $1.3 billion. That would be none other than Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Who co-chaired the bank with Mr. Ross, who stepped down join the cabinet in 2017? 

The Morning News reports: 

Ross’s first co-chair was Putin appointee Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB agent and long-time associate of Putin. In 2015, Strzhalkovsky was replaced by Maksim Goldman, is [sic] director of strategic projects at Viktor Vekselberg's Renova Group and sits on the board of Rusal. 

 

Trump’s name appears 3,540 times. 

Just for fun, consider the shady possibilities revealed in the sentences above. Putin’s name appears in the Panama Papers. So does President Trump’s. Actually, his name appears 3,540 times; although there may be some plausible explanation why “Trump” turns up as often as it does. 

The Guardian, a leading British paper, has examined the leaked documents and detailed a complex $2 billion money trail that leads straight back to Putin. Vekselberg is currently under sanction by the U.S. government, which means he’s blocked from getting his mitts on an estimated $1.5-$2 billion dollars in assets. Rusal, a company which exports aluminum, is owned by Oleg Deripaska, and in April was placed under sanctions by the Treasury Department. Deripaska and Manafort have a long history of working on all kinds of questionable deals. 

We also know that Manafort possessed something of immense potential value during the 2016 campaign. In an email to a Russian intermediary, Manafort offered to keep Deripaska informed on what positions Trump was planning to take regarding sanctions on Russia. Here one might surmise that Manafort would be working hard to steer Trump in a direction the Russians would want him to go in order to end those sanctions, perhaps for the right price. “If he [Deripaska] needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in a July 7, 2016, email, sent to Konstantin Kilimnik.

 

Who is Kilimnik? His name surfaced again in March when Mueller’s team was wrapping up a case against a Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan. Zwann’s crime: lying to the F.B.I. about dealing with Kilimnik. 

Zwaan wasn’t the only man dealing with Kilimnik during the campaign. As Bloomberg explained last spring: 

Now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has fleshed out another detail. [Rick] Gates said he knew Kilimnik was a onetime Russian military intelligence officer, according to a Tuesday court filing. The FBI is even more direct: Agents believe he has “ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016,” according to the [court] filing.

 

You can call all of the above “Fake News” if you like. But there’s more we already know and likely a great deal more that Mueller and his team have uncovered in the last fifteen months. 

We’ve all heard the cliché about the duck. Let’s try this instead. If it walks like a skunk, hisses like a skunk, and emits noxious gas like a skunk, it’s a skunk. The fundamental question Mueller must answer in weeks to come: Does President Trump have a white stripe down his back?