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First Charges Filed in Mueller Investigation

LOL. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure this is not how it works.

 
Certain Russia-tied donors and inaugural attendees have drawn particular scrutiny from Mueller

Sometime around March of this year, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg flew in to a New York-area airport on a private plane — and was met there by Robert Mueller’s investigators, who questioned him and searched his electronic devices.


Vekselberg is the main owner and president of the Renova Group, a massive Russian conglomerate with aluminum and oil interests, and is one of the richest people in Russia. He didn’t directly give any money to Trump’s inauguration. But his cousin, Andrew Intrater, an American citizen who runs a US company tied to Vekselberg’s company, donated $250,000. Intrater had also kicked in $35,000 to the Trump Victory Committee during the campaign, despite having no previous history as a major political donor.

Vekselberg and Intrater attended Trump’s inauguration together, and at the January 19 candlelight dinner, they were seated with Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, according to ABC News. Later that year, that company run by Intrater paid Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, $500,000 — for, they claimed, real estate advice.

Another hefty inaugural donation, of $1 million, came from Leonard Blavatnik, who runs a company called Access Industries. Blavatnik was on the guest list for the January 19 candlelight dinner too, as well as a more exclusive “chairman’s global dinner” with top Trump allies and foreign dignitaries, per ABC.


Skolkovo Foundation President Viktor Vekselberg (left) at the 2018 Russian Investment Forum at the Main Media Centre in Sochi, Russia. Vladimir Smirnov\TASS via Getty Images
Blavatnik is a Soviet-born, UK-based billionaire who is a US citizen. He also spent years partnered with Vekselberg in Russia’s aluminum industry, according to a 2014 New Yorker profile. Together, they built the second-largest aluminum company in Russia — and eventually became part of the largest, by merging with Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal. (Deripaska also appears to be a player in the collusion investigation — he employed Paul Manafort, and Manafort tried to get in touch with him during 2016.)

Other donations and guests, too, have raised eyebrows. Alexander Mashkevitch, a Kazakh mining billionaire, was on the guest list for the “candlelight dinner,” per ABC —and happens to have been in the Seychelles around the same time as Erik Prince, Erin Banco has reported for the Intercept.

And Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, who attended Don Jr’s infamous Trump Tower meeting, were in town too — they attended an inauguration night party thrown by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who’s widely viewed as the biggest supporter of Putin’s regime in Congress.

No one mentioned here has been charged with any wrongdoing in Mueller’s probe. And it’s at least possible that many of the donations here are garden-variety influence peddling, rather than indicative of some larger and more sinister scheme. But if the Trump-Russia investigation is pursuing the time-tested strategy of following the money, this is clearly a good place to start.
 
I fear there will be too many revelations in this investigation for the average American to follow.
 
PhDeac said:
I fear there will be too many revelations in this investigation for the average American to follow.
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Journalists are responsible for breaking this down so an average person can understand it. What makes Trump so effective is it's a lot easier to dismiss something/someone with name calling or labeling it "fake" than it is to actually learn about it and make an informed choice. The solution is regularly updated information that's easy to comprehend, and can be done so quickly. That's a challenge in a case like this, but it's necessary.
 
I agree. But journalists have done a poor job of doing that so far. Conservative media has an edge because they can break things down into a simple conspiracy for a simple minded audience.

Other outlets have struggled to tell a simple cohesive story of a man who is compromised by his business interests blatantly acting on behalf of Russia with the support of his party.
 
Bill Frist with a Washington Post op-ed.

 
PhDeac said:
I agree. But journalists have done a poor job of doing that so far. Conservative media has an edge because they can break things down into a simple conspiracy for a simple minded audience.

Other outlets have struggled to tell a simple cohesive story of a man who is compromised by his business interests blatantly acting on behalf of Russia with the support of his party.
Click to expand...

Agreed.
 
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