There’s a lot of aspects with this whole relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin that requires further scrutiny, and so far I don’t think the American people have gotten all the answers. In fact, I think there’s a lot of shoes to drop from this centipede.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/mccain-russia-trump-235966

NEW: In an interview on Fox News, Manafort juror says there was a SINGLE holdout for the 10 counts that ended in a mistrial. The final votes were 11-1 for guilty. (They convicted Manafort on the other 8 counts of tax and bank fraud.)

https://twitter.com/MarshallCohen/status/1032463982408425472

https://twitter.com/StevenLHall1/status/1032131502681673728
That tapping sound is Mueller’s conductors baton on the music stand, bringing his orchestra to order after the warmup. Now the opera begins in earnest.

Just in: Mueller’s team has again delayed Flynn’s sentencing hearing. Next update will be September 17.
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1031953592280862722

Rand Paul, after meeting with Russian leaders in Moscow this month, wants Trump to remove some of them off sanctions list so they can travel to the U.S. Paul told Fox that he’s going to ask Trump this weekend: “Why don’t we take people off the list who are in the legislature?”

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1030289811700150272

When we look back in disgust at those who've undermined the fabric of our democracy and common humanity, we don't only reserve harsh judgement for those at the top. There is plenty of rightful derision for all who condoned, collaborated, conspired, or even just remained silent.

https://twitter.com/DanRather/status/1030182927856877568

Did the Russian mafia help Trump along his way to the Oval Office?

House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger reviewed.

Before he died last year, the New York muckraking reporter Wayne Barrett told me he had discovered ‘25 to 30’ connections between Donald Trump and the mob. He was talking about Italian-American organised crime but today another New York journalist, Craig Unger, says he has found ‘59’ links to the Russian mafia. He lists them all in his new book House of Trump, House of Putin, which is damning in its accumulation of detail, terrifying in its depiction of the pure evil of those Trump chose to do business with, and enraging in that — if Unger is right — Trump acted with impunity for decades to get filthy rich laundering the mob’s blood money. This is the man who now sits in the Oval Office, Unger says. In fact, he argues, they put him there.

House of Trump, House of Putin starts with Trump’s early days in business, when his lawyer was Roy Cohn, who was also consigliere to two of the five New York Italian crime families and ‘the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54’. There were mafia figures like ‘Sonny’ Franzese, a hitman who was recorded helpfully explaining how to get rid of the bodies: ‘Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.’ When one of these Italian gangsters met Trump to buy an apartment ‘he opened his briefcase and $200,000 in cash spilled out on Trump’s table’.

To the Russians, this was small time. Unger retells a story of Barrett’s that when a Red mafiya boss, David Bogatin, came to Trump Tower, he met Trump himself and immediately bought five apartments for $6 million in cash (about $14.5 million today). Trump didn’t seem to wonder where this money might have come from. He was one of the first developers to discover that you could sell condos to shell companies that concealed the owners’ identities, Unger says. This allowed Russian criminals ‘to launder vast amounts of money’. Trump’s willingness to sell ‘no questions asked’ was so important, Unger believes, that he gave the Russian mafia a foothold in the United States.

The Trump Organization’s reply to this is that money laundering is ‘a problem for the whole real estate industry’. How are we supposed to know where anyone’s money comes from? Fuhgeddaboudit! It is a convenient alibi but not a persuasive one, given the large amount of such business done by the Trump Organization. Anders Åslund, a Swedish expert on Russian money laundering, is quoted in the book: ‘Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people.’ An investigation by the news website BuzzFeed found that 1,300 condos in Trump buildings were bought by shell companies that paid cash, a fifth of his sales since the 1980s. Unger points to the Trump World Tower in Manhattan, where a third of apartments on the highest and most expensive floors were sold this way. And more than Trump’s customers, there are Unger’s other links between Trump and suspect Russians. As Oscar Wilde might have said: ‘To have one Russian mafia connection may be regarded as a misfortune; to have 59 looks like carelessness.’

More: https://spectator.us/2018/08/did-the-mafia-help-trump-along-his-way-to-the-oval-office/

Attorney wanted for George Papadopoulo, Pro Bono! Your biggest reward will be #History. Your name will go down on history.

https://twitter.com/simonamangiante/status/1029883883616169984