for the liberals only

The reading of Simpson's testimony is really interesting. You can pretty much skip everything until page 24-25. Things get juicy around page 36, Simpson is speaking about Don's ties to organized crime.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018...f-interview-with-fusion-gps-co-founder-346342

 

And this guy, his name - his real name or his original n_ame that he came to
the United States wasn't Sergi Millian. It was Siarhei Kukuts, and that's a pretty
different name. And he changed his name when he got to Atlanta.
And when we looked at him some more, we found two different resumes for
him. In one resume he said he was from Belarus and he went to Minsk State;
and then in another he was from Moscow and went to Moscow State. In one he
said he worked for the Belarussian Foreign Ministry; in the other, he said he
worked for the Russian Foreign Ministry.
He was a linguist, also an interesting thing about his background. And as
time went on, yeah, we found other things about him. We found a picture of him
with Donald Trump. He boasted to people that he had sold hundreds of millions
of dollars in Trump condos, Trump real estate to Russians, that he was some kind
of exclusive agent for Trump in Russia and that he organized this trade fair.
·And then, you know, as further time went on, we fourid he was connected to
Michael Cohen, the President's lawyer. And eventually, after boasting about a lot
of this stuff on camera, on tape, to the TV network, he backed away from all of it
suddenly when the Russia controversy began to get hot.
And Michael Cohen was very adamant that he didn't actually have a
connection to Sergi, even though he was one of only like 100 people who followed
Sergi on Twitter. And they -- we had Twitter messages back and forth between
the two of them just - we just pulled them off of Twitter.
And then, I guess, la.st but not least, he, you know - as we became more
and more interested in his background and the press started to write stories about
him, it came out that he was associated with this Russian friendship entity called

Rossotrudnichestvo, and that he was involved in organizing a junket to Moscow for
some American businessmen that was the subject of an FBI investigation,
because it was a suspected recruiting operation . And the FBI had questioned
people who were involved in this trip about whether they were recruited by the
Russians when they went to Moscow.
So it was that kind of thing.
MR. SCHIFF: To your knowledge, was Mr. Millian one of the sources for
Christopher Steele in the dossier?
MR. SIMPSON:

I'm not in a position to get into the identity of the sources

for the dossier for security reasons, primarily.
MR. SCHIFF: And what other concerns were raised or issues were raised
about Mr. Trump's connections to Russia, either in the first phase or the second
phase of your work, separate and apart from Mr. Steele's so-called dossier?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, eventually, partly through Sergi Millian, partly
through other things we learned, we gradually began to understand more about
·Michael Cohen, the President's lawyer, and his background, and that he had a lot
of connections to the former Soviet Union, and that he seemed to have
associations with organized crime figures in New York and Florida, Russian
organized crime figures. And MR. SCHIFF: And which figures were those?
MR. SIMPSON: I was afraid you were going to ask me that. I can't
remember a lot of the names. There was Simon Garber, the taxi king . And I guess
another guy's name is Evgeny Freidman, who are people he was in
the taxi business with .
There was some other transactions that are in some litigation in Florida
over a mysterious missing payment that some of the people in that dispute had
been identified as organized crime figures. Those are the ones that come to
mind.
So Mr. Cohen had a very different image for much of the campaign as
a - simply a sort of pugnacious New York lawyer, and we gradually began to see
that he was, you know -- people told us he spoke Russian. And his father-in-law
is from Ukraine. He seems to have a lot of business dealings over there and, in
fact, has a conviction for a money laundering-related crime.
All these things caused a good bit of concern . I guess the big one, the
other big one, was the Agalarovs, who seemed to be, you know, the central figures
in the Trump-Russia relationship. And so we spent a lot of time looking at them .
I, as sort of an amateur student of Russian oligarchs and criminals, I hadn't
come across them before. So I thought -- I at first didn't think they were that
interesting. But as we've, you know, learned more about them, it's become more
troubling .
You know, I now -- I know now that they've been -- the Agalarovs started
operating in the United States around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and
are associated with people who are connected to previous episodes of money
laundering that are serious, the Bank of New York scandal.
And they themselves -- we found a case in tax court involving the Agalarovs
that describes a lot of activity from that period and a criminal investigation of the
Agalarovs from that period.

 

are you implying that a 70s new york real estate broker might have a shady past?

you really don't need to be a liberal to get that

 

They're implying that someone from New York City in general might have a shady past.

Not exactly a stretch.

 

The real meaning of liberalism. You're welcome.

https://fee.org/articles/ludwig-von-mises-and-the-real-meaning-of-liberalism/

 

It's a bit more than that. If I've learned anything about supporters of President Flim Flam it's that something like being associated with international mafia figures is of no concern. Got it. Why this stuff matters is because in their research, separate from what Steele was doing, Fusion GPS discovered what appeared to be an extensive money laundering operation involving the Drumpf Organization and Russian mafia figures with ties to the Kremlin going back to the 1990's. I'll cut to the chase.
I think Don was originally targeted by the Russian government, through members of their organized crime network, for his usefulness in laundering money. Activities Don profited from but that left him with enough deniability so he could pretend he didn't know he was involved in nefarious activities. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Then he announced he was running for prez. That allowed Putin to strive for two goals simultaneously. One, help Don get elected in the off chance Americans would be dumb enough to vote for him. Two, do what they could to de-legitimize Hillary's assumed presidency by publishing any dirt they could get on her through Wiki-leaks. Don's election was just a stroke of luck for Vlad which has not turned out exactly as he planned in terms of manipulating Don. But it has turned out better than anything he could have hoped for in terms of the damage to American democracy Don has inflicted as well as Vlad's goal of destabilizing Western democracies generally.

 

I've said from the start, if there is definitive evidence of this I will support impeachment.

 

Based on public reports years ago. All Fusion GPS does is gather public reports.

 

Well, aside from all the other stuff involving the investigation of things pertaining to the election.......all the contacts between Drumpfsters and various Russians..........Comey's firing........the Drumpf Tower meeting..........obviously one of the big areas of focus is money laundering and or financial ties to Russians generally. Mueller has a lot on his plate.

 

Yes, that's right. As Simpson explains in his testimony they don't really have the power they would need to investigate things beyond what is on the public record. That's their expertise, researching financial records. That is where the FBI and or Mueller's probe comes in. I suspect some of the stuff Fusion GPS found as well as what Steele found provided some leads for Mueller to follow up on. So nothing Steele or GPS found is enough to charge anyone. It is only research.

 

I do not support the Mueller bashing. I think he should be more active in punishing leaks though.

 

MR. SCHIFF: What period was that?
MR. SIMPSON: Early '90s. And I just know from my reading on this stuff
that a lot of agents of influence from Russia came to the United States in that

period to launder money, and that, you know, we now know that the Russian
Intelligence Services never really closed up shop, and that they continue to insert
people in the United States and run operations in the United States.
And so all of that is pretty troubling . I'd say - I could generalize and say
that, you know, as we've got deeper and deeper into understanding, you know,
Donald Trump's business career and his history, it gradually reached a point
where it seemed like most of the people around Trump had a connection to
Russian organized crime or Russia in one way or another.
I could probably think of more if I think on it, but those are the big ones.
MR. SCHIFF: And knowing what you do about the Agalarovs, what do you
think is the significance of the fact that the -- that Aras Agalarov was responsible,
at least according to these public emails, for setting up the meeting at Trump
Tower?
MR. SIMPSON:

I think it's a reasonable interpretation that that was a

Russian Government-directed operation of some sort, based on what I know now.

 

He and his team have an almost unbelievable record for the lack of leaks. I suspect he and his team are aware of vast bits of information the general public is unaware of. Things we will not learn about until he releases his findings.

 

You gotta let go of words, given how finnicky they are. Just get poetic enough to avoid confusion..

 

MR. SCHIFF: You mentioned the limitations on your ability to follow the
money in terms of the potential money laundering involving Russian figures in The
Trump Organization.
Two questions. One is, did you also look at the Kushner business
operation? Did you find any facts that caused concern in terms of potential
money laundering through the Kushner properties or organization?
And second, we do have the subpoena power that you don't.

It is within

the scope of our investigation to determine whether this was one of the Russian
active mea·sures, the use of financial means to entangle Mr. Trump. How would
you go about using that? What institutions would you look at to be able to confirm
or reject those allegations?
MR. SIMPSON:

On the first question, 1-- we looked at the Kushner project in Jersey City. Kushner was another case of someone who I sort of misjudged.

I didn't think he was going to be very interesting and very important, partly because
he was so young .
But in any event, we did look at some Kushner stuff and specifically focused
on the project in Jersey City, I think partly because Trump had a position in that
project, and discovered that it was -- one of the central mysteries of Donald Trump
is that, you know, beginning in the m id-2000s he was not a cred itworthy
businessman.
And so he - you know, so if you're analyzing, you know, someone who
says they're a billionaire but can't get a bank loan, you know, there's this whole
issue of where is the credit coming from.

And so, you know, we were always

trying to figure out where - how he was financing various things .
So anyway, we looked at this Jersey City project, and it was going to be
financed by selling visas to foreign citizens who were seeking green cards from
the United States.

And I knew from previous investigations that that program

. was - there were a lot of irregularities in that program, and that, .in fact, the
government, the U.S. Government had conducted previous investigations into
whether foreign intelligence figures were using the EB-5 program to get people
into the United States.
So in any event, we looked at all of that. And I don't believe we
concluded -- we found any specific events of fraud, but it all had taken on the
appearance of a controversial thing, which later became true.

And , in fact, it did

become very controversial that they were using EB-5 to fund that project.

 

Statist on the left and statist on the right, everywhere I look statists gonna state?

Ha. Probly.

 

MR. ROONEY: We are going to get called to votes probably here in the
next 10 to 20 minutes, so I'm going to try to do a little bit of a lightning round, if I
could.
But I just want to - you know, generally speaking, with the stories that you
were telling Mr. Schiff, you know, it's interesting that it seems like -- and correct me
if I'm wrong --it seems like--they're fascinating, by the way. I mean, the story
about him financing Doonbeg in Ireland through money that we can't really
trace but has sort of the fingerprints of Russian mobsters.
I mean, I just -- it's almost like we need a plus one. And I'm not saying
you're wrong.

I'm just saying it seems like with all this stuff that there's, you know,

not the sort of, as what Trey was talking about, allegation versus fact, that, you
know, with all those things that we talked - that you talked to Adam about, we
never really got to the fact part.
Is that true? Or do you feel like with your investigation that you made the
conclusion that you think that those things are true - or not that you think that they
are, but they are true?
MR. SIMPSON: I think it's a great question. The - you know, I mean,
essentially we ended up spending almost a year on this project. And, you know, it
was a private -- because it's all private work in the sense of nongovernmental,
without any legal process to compel production of information, we can only reach a
certain point.
And at the time that we -- you know, that Chris decided to take this to the
FBI, I wasn't convinced of the facts of anything in terms of - I wasn't convinced
that there was a specific crime that occurred.
I thought it was a possible crime of progress and that there was possibly
very serious crimes, but, you know, I'm an ex-journalist, so I'm not really in a
position to prove that anyone's engaged in a crime.
I mean, you know, sometimes you do find proof of criminal activity in an
investigation, but more often than not you find things that are suggestive or raise
questions.

And -

MR. ROONEY: Right. That's exactly my point, is that ifwe knew that
Donald Trump was working with the Russian mafia to fund Doonbeg in
Ireland, then there's no way he would be President.

So, I mean, that's why it's so

fascinating.
And, again, it might have been, but when you also add the caveat "but we
didn't" -- there wasn't actually Russian names on the ledger or whatever, like that
final step. And so, you know, I'll equate that to the election as well with your
opposition research and with the dossier and everything else.
Do you feel like, you know, we -- with what you found or what Mr. Steele
found that 'we got to the point where we could concluslvely say as fact that the

Russian Government and the Trump campaign were colluding with each other to
beat Hillary Clinton? Can we make that final step there? Or is that a lot of
circumstantial evidence that, you know, one could form an opinion to but never
gets beyond the MR. SIMPSON: I'm -- I mean, as far as I'm concerned, where we are now,
as opposed to back then -- back then we had what appeared to be credible
allegations of some sort of a pattern of surreptitious contacts between the Trump
campaign and Russian people either working for the government or acting on
behalf of the Russian Government. As Chris wrote, it was, you know, I think a
wide-ranging conspiracy, was the way he put it.
I think that the evidence that has developed over the last year, since
President Trump took office, is that there is a well-established pattern of
surreptitious contacts that occurred last year that supports the broad allegation of
some sort of an undisclosed political or financial relationship between The Trump
Organization and people in Russia.
I'm certainly not prepared to say and never wanted to be the person who
had to determine whether that's a criminal conspiracy.

 

Trump is from.....New York

 

Only compared to Hillary Clinton can Don Trump seem squeaky clean. Of course, he's not, but compared to Hillary and her crime family foundation, Trump is as clean as Pence.

 

I'm not that interested in Leftism, just Communism, get it? I'm interested in Communism as the process of tearing down centralized authority and locking authority away in a cage of decentralization

 

Who are you talking about?

 

Hm. Alright. Well, under communism, will you be respecting my desire to better myself and my aspiration for a better standard and wage of living? I'll want to get that straightened out before I decide on anything.

 

lulz. utopianists gonna utopian

 

Lee, I'm disappointed that you would post a thread with the title, 'For the liberals only."

But I'm not surprised; I've noted time and time again that leftists are most comfortable in staying in their leftwing echo chamber. And, there are plenty of liberal-only forums such as Koz and the DU if you really wanted to only hear from people you agree with.

I'm not sure what the topic is, and I'm not going to comment on it.

But you've certainly proved one of my main assertions about those on the left...

(Note to mods: if I am violating any board policy in chiming in on a thread where only partisan agreement is desired, feel free to delete my post.)

 

Internment camp for you!