There’s more to Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails than meets the eye.

In the shadow of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Donald Trump was feted by Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his pop-star son, Emin. “I’m in Moscow for Miss Universe tonight,” Trump tweeted on November 9. “Picking a winner is very hard, they are all winners. Total sellout of arena. Big night in Russia!”

Trump’s Russia visit in 2013 was far more than just an exercise in showmanship. Agalarov arranged at least one two-hour dinner for Trump at Moscow’s Nobu with high-powered Kremlin officials. Noteworthy among them, was Herman Gref, CEO of state-run Sberbank. “[Trump] is lively with a positive energy and a good attitude toward Russia,” Gref said in an interview. Trump was equally effusive. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people,” Trump told Hugh Hewitt in 2015.

Post sanctions, an effort to launder Russian money.

A year after the Moscow Miss Universe, the U.S. and E.U. imposed sanctions on Sberbank after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Sberbank CEO Herman Gref began looking for a way to move roubles out of the country. He found it in 2015. Gref’s son and another oligarch bought the Bank of Cyprus as a go-between for illegal Russian funds. A Russian laundromat, if you will. The deal was overseen by the bank’s vice-chairman, Wilbur Ross.

“Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. Paul Manafort, Trump’s Campaign Manager, also used the Bank of Cyrus to launder some of his own dirty money, including $12.7m he illegally got from a pro-Kremlin party in the Ukraine. Wilbur Ross, the chief engineer of the Russian-Cyprus deal, is now Trump’s Commerce Secretary, linking a key presidential ally to the Cyprus-based ruble washing machine.

Russian oligarch offers dirt on Hillary Clinton.

A year after the Bank of Cyprus was acquired by the Russians, on June 3 last year, an e-mail popped into Donald Trump Jr.’s inbox from British Publicist Rob Goldstone. Goldstone represents Emin Agalarov, the pop-star whose father, Aras, partnered with Trump in Miss Universe. The same oligarch who introduced Trump to Sberbank CEO, Herman Gref, who indirectly owns the Bank of Cyprus. The e-mail offered the Trump campaign explosive “kompromat” on Hillary Clinton:

“The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with [Emin’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” Goldstone wrote to Don Jr.

“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin,” Goldstone said.

“If it’s what you say, I love it,” Don Jr. replied.

The eldest Trump son looped in then Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner has ties to another Russian bank and diplomats. A few days later, Manafort and Kushner attended the follow-up meeting with Russian state attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9, 2106.  Also present was Ike Kaveladze, Aras Agalarov’s US based deputy, who is suspected of laundering $1.4Bn in Russian dirty money through fake Citibank accounts in 2000.

Senate, House committees probe Trump’s role in Russian money laundering.

Donald Trump’s personal connection to Russian oligarchs, their money-laundering deputies and Wilbur Ross raises an important question. What role, if any, does the Trump Organization play in laundering dirty Russian money? Furthermore, did Trump’s Russia support come as part of a cash-fueled relationship?

Senate and House Intelligence Committees are now looking for specific ties to money laundering. This week, they finally began receiving data from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN’s mission is to combat money laundering and protect national security from illicit use. If investigators find proof of Trump’s role in Russian money laundering, it seems like the probe could reach a very different level of criminality.

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Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Donald J. Trump, have more connecting them than Ivanka Trump. 

On April 19 last year, Donald J. Trump was taking a victory lap after winning the Republican Party nomination. In his speech, he mentioned by name a number of bold-named businessmen who were there to hear him crow. Carl Icahn, Howard Lorber and Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Trust.

“The great Steven Roth,” Trump extolled. “Steve’s building a big building on Central Park South, it’s a tremendous success.”

“I said, ‘Steve, congratulations on the building,'” The newly-minted Republican presidential nominee said.

“He said, ‘Donald, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with you.’ Is that right? My man!”

Trump and Roth have been friends (and sometimes business foes) for over 30 years.  They jointly own the 1290 Sixth Avenue office tower. Trump and Roth became business partners after Trump threatened to sue his former partners for trying to sell it to another party without his permission. 1290 Sixth Avenue became the second largest in Vornado’s portfolio but by no means the only marquee property in Roth’s sprawling Manhattan empire.

One other is 666 Fifth Avenue, which Roth’s Vornado Trust co-owns with Jared Kushner’s family. Jared made news in Manhattan’s real estate circles when he purchased the trophy building for $1.8 billion, using mostly borrowed money. By all accounts, Kushner overpaid for the building by paying twice as much per-square-foot than any other Manhattan building sale before it, according to the New York Post. Tellingly, the deal closed on Jared’s 26th birthday, Jan. 10, 2007.

It was an expensive birthday gift by any measure but for the young real estate scion it represented a giant statement to Manhattan. Two years earlier, his father, Charles Kushner, was imprisoned for 14 months after pleading guilty for tax evasion charges and for making illegal campaign contributions. Before exiting prison, Charles turned over his holdings to his eldest son to manage a business free of an ex-convict CEO. Jared was just 25. If his father’s prison sentence wasn’t enough for the young heir to handle, the circumstances that led to it, tore the Kushner clan apart.

Before being charged in 2005, Charles Kushner heard his brother-in-law was talking to investigators about his misdeeds. To gain leverage over him, Kushner paid a “very attractive, high-end call girl $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a Bridgewater, NJ, motel after she pretended to need a ride when her car broke down,” according to the Post. Jared’s father had the whole motel encounter taped and sent it to his sister, Esther. She turned the tape into the feds. Classic kompromat.

Now it seems, Kushner family history could be repeating itself. Investigators want to know if Jared has kompromat all of his own. Only this time, the disparaging evidence is financial in nature and it’s the Russians who could be holding it over him.

666 Fifth Avenue, The trophy building Jared bought for $1.8 Bn in 2007 has proved to be a financial noose around him and the family. By 2008, the building was generating just 70 cents on every dollar it owed.  Under pressure, Jared was forced to sell the pricey store space for $525 million to a partnership in 2008 and a 49 percent stake in the office portion to Stephen Ross’ Vornado in 2011. Yes, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump share more than wife and daughter, they share a business partner. A $1.2 Bn mortgage on Jared’s trophy building is due in just two years which unpaid, could destroy the family fortune.

Congressional investigators and the FBI are now probing a secret meeting Jared had with Vladimir Putin’s banker at Trump Tower in New York in December last year. The White House and the Russian bank have offered conflicting explanations for the meeting between Kushner and Sergei Gorkov.

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Russia hacked vital election infrastructure before the election. Did they rig the vote?

Some time within the week of November 3, 2016, the FBI held a hastily convened conference call with Florida’s 67 county election supervisors who operate a specific type of election voting system. They had sobering news for the officials: Russia had successfully hacked the vendor of Florida’s electronic voting machines. The FBI and Homeland Security were so concerned, a second call was organized with Florida state officials to share information on the cyber threat

The Russian hack of a voting machine manufacturer came amidst a frenzy of activity by Kremlin hackers who had successfully gained access to the State Voters Rolls in Arizona and Illinois. What gave investigators pause, however, was the fact that the Florida hack had a different target. It wasn’t just collecting voter identities; it was aimed at the manufacturers of the voting machines across the state.

Almost 20 percent of Americans vote on digital systems that don’t produce a paper trail. This includes several states such as New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina as well as several jurisdictions in swing or battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Indiana. Many of the machines are more than 10 years old and contain software no longer maintained by its manufacturers – we’re talking Microsoft XP or older – and are not updated with the latest security patches. James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology,  posed a rhetorical question in an interview with NPR:

“With the kind of stealth and sophistication that’s already out there, why wouldn’t a nation-state, cyber-criminal gang or activist group go into election systems that are completely vulnerable?”

Tampering with an electronic voting booth is fairly simple. According to a study by the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012, voting machines can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education. All you’d have to do is unlock or pick the lock, switch out the memory card, and reboot the machine. This was ably demonstrated by Andrew Appel, a Princeton professor in a 2014 YouTube video. Once in place, the hacked machine could count a completely different vote than the one intended by the voter. Most polling stations are in gyms or schools and machines are set up well before voting day so it’s not impossible to gain access to them. Also, every machine needs to be reset before every poll so they have to be opened by someone.

This kind of invasion would require a carefully coordinated attack on thousands, or at least hundreds, of voting machines. Of course you could reprogram the machines in each state at once, if you gained access to the source codes for the machines allowing you to reprogram all the memory cards at once.

According to Salon:

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results.

But a determined hacker could gain access to those source codes by hacking the manufacturer’s mainframe, as Russia is suspected of doing. They could theoretically access the codes, change them, and resave them without anyone actually knowing.

And that’s not the only weak spot. Experts warn that the entire ecosystem is vulnerable. For example, once votes are cast, the data is transferred into a database for immediate counting. The tabulation equipment is also dated and doesn’t have the basic security like encryption or strong passwords, so if you didn’t rig the vote in the actual machines, you could do it at the counting point.

To be clear, the FBI only knows there were hacks of Russian origin of the voting machine manufacturer server, and hacks of state voters rolls in at least two states but no actual manipulation of data voting machines. There are clues, however, that something went awry on voting day. Data analysts have been poring over the election results and they are finding some serious head-scratchers.

Take Wisconsin, for example. President Donald J. Trump won the state by a mere 3,000 votes, but statistical analysis of the result showed Hillary Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that voted on electronic-voting machines.

There are other discrepancies, too. Exit polls, normally reliable predictors of actual poll outcomes, seemed way off compared to actual results last year. Shortly after the election, the National Association of Voting Officials, a group of polling experts, sent a letter to election officials across the country:

“Our examination of the exit data collected by Edison Exit Polling shows a large number and unprecedented discrepancy between the exit polling and the final vote count at minimum in certain states – the so-called swing states of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida. It strongly suggests inappropriate and external meddling of our nation’s most sacred act – the act of its citizens voting.” 

NAVO points to the following:

The hacking of the most recent software updates that are applied to the machines before the election.

Modifying the running code in the machine via wireless technology.

Physically hacking the machines while voting.

And…

Modifying the tallying software local to the precinct or the database at the election center.

The NAVO analysis of exit polls vs. actual results (the full letter can be read here: 2016-election-not-democratic) points to the same vulnerabilities I’ve detailed above. There’s also anecdotal evidence of votes being counted incorrectly on voting day. In Florida, for example, there were widespread examples of voting machine malfunctions, as Ruben Major points out in his blog:

On November 7, 2017 at 3:39PM, during early voting, a report came into the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section stating that there was a “paper trail showing Donald Trump” when the voter selected Hillary Clinton.  

The election results have been widely accepted as fair since the election, except by the current administration (for different reasons… I’ll go into in another post). But now we’ve seen a pattern of an extraordinary efforts by Kremlin officials to meet with Trump’s key advisors, discussing top-secret information with them, attempts to set up secret back-channel communications with Moscow, the firing of FBI Director James Comey who was in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, unexplained Trump server connections with a Russian bank, and an extraordinary fake news operation, it’s becoming harder to gloss over the hacks of voter registration rolls and equipment manufacturers.

We may never know what happened in Florida, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania to deliver the anomalies in counties that used electronic voting machines or between exit and actual polling results, because the machines don’t leave a paper trail. The FBI is still actively investigating Russia’s hacks of voters rolls and voting machines and, considering the context of the unprecedented effort by Russia to undermine the US democracy, investigators cannot be letting any of this go.

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President Donald J. Trump has become a clear and present danger to the republic and US lives. Trump shared classified information about an ISIS plot to blow up commercial planes using laptop bomb with our enemies, endangering US lives. But that’s only the beginning of the constitutional crisis we’re heading into.

The Washington Post and the New York Times just reported President Donald J. Trump shared secret code-word information with the Russians that could isolate the US from the free world and endanger the lives of Americans. Trump handed over the classified information to the Russians when he held a closed-door meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, on Wed May 10.  The code word intel (which is classified above top secret) was acquired by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to the US under strict intelligence rules.

The information Trump revealed would help the Russians identify a secret agent within ISIS who had revealed a plot to use “laptop bombs” aboard commercial planes. The Kremlin would be keen to eliminate or disrupt the asset because of their reprehensible support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The result could mean US lives are at risk whenever Americans fly.

Although the foreign country is not named in the reports, the United States is part of the “Five Eyes” global international community which means intelligence agencies from New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and the US share information on their common good. Other alliances exist with allies who may be less forgiving of such a lapse of judgment by the US President. Even though President Trump can declassify information “at will”,  that doesn’t extend to information gathered by non-US agencies.  In short, Trump threatens the US relationship with our key allies if he reveals information the US didn’t obtain directly.

Trump’s breach of allies’ trust comes just days after Trump potentially committed another serious crime – obstruction of justice – when he colluded with Vice President Michael Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire FBI Director James Comey.

The White House’s public pretext for the firing was related to Comey’s handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation, as outlined in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein but that memo was easy bait for a President looking for a reason to fire the FBI Director.

In a deft move, Rosenstein threatened to resign over the use of his memo as cause for Comey’s ouster. The next day, absent a pretext, Trump sat down for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and was forced to reveal the truth. The emperor, it seems, had no clothes.

“When I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia … is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Trump also copped to Holt he asked Comey on three separate occasions if he was under investigation personally.  That’s not a question you would ask once, never mind three times, if you really believed the whole thing was “a made up story”, “a ruse” or “a hoax”, as the President has said in his many tweets.  It’s also now clear that Trump summoned Comey to the White House and asked him to “pledge his loyalty” just days after acting attorney General Sally Yates alerted the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was “compromised by the Russians”. Yates was later fired. A second count of obstruction of justice.

A just released memo written by Comey after Flynn was fired reveals President Trump asked the FBI Director to drop the entire investigation.  “I hope you can let this go,” Comey quotes Trump in the memo he wrote as part of a paper trail documenting the President’s efforts to obstruct justice. As an F.B.I. agent, Comey’s notes will be used in court as credible evidence.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It’s also been reported by the New York Times, the President and Vice-President secretly conspired to remove Comey. Vice President Mike Pence, who parroted the White House lie, could have been the next President of the US but he’s now been infected by the corruption virus by Trump. Pence should face an indictment on obstruction of justice charges and needs to be impeached. By conspiring with Trump, Pence has placed the US into a succession crisis.

However, even if the Justice Department indicts Trump and Pence along with the exhaustive list of co-conspirators, nothing can force the House, controlled by the Republicans, to begin impeachment proceedings. Up until now Republicans seem hesitant to even appoint an independent prosecutor so impeachment hearings seem unlikely, unless something else happens. And that something else is beginning to emerge.

Russia’s efforts to destabilize US Democracy ran very deep and now threaten to embroil the entire leadership of the GOP – including House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Ted Cruz and others. Ryan has been full-throatedly supporting Trump recently framing the President as “a driven, hands-on leader, with the potential to become a truly transformational American figure.” Now it’s emerging, there’s good reason Ryan is Trump’s pocket. According to “Kremlingate” watchers, Ryan also accepted money from Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to fill the GOP coffers. If Ryan and other Republican leaders are removed from office too, the balance of power and sheer political survival in 2018 should compel remaining Republicans in the House to act.

I asked Associate Professor Gary Darden, who teaches US Civil War at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey to explain how impeachment would work if such an indictment was coming:

“An impeachment is constitutionally speaking an indictment issued by the House for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” while the trial itself would take place in the Senate with senators as jury and chief justice as presiding judge. If the president were to be indicted in a court of law, then that would be, I think, the basis for articles of impeachment in the House. If 2/3 of the House votes in favor of any article (or charge) if impeachment, then it mandates a trial in Senate, where a conviction requires 2/3 of that body.”

The House could be reluctant to act but Darden believes:

“If criminal charges come out of the Justice Dept against the President, then it would be the basis for the House to act. If it didn’t it would be political negligence of the highest order.” 

Still, Darden points out Republicans who supported Trump hold a disproportionate number of seats in the house so the impeachment seems unlikely, but just the threat of it, and a potential lengthy prison sentence for the entire Trump family, could render the President impotent and force a resignation, as it did with Nixon.

If you’re keeping track, that now leaves Trump, Pence and Ryan all out of the running to take over as  President. The next in line for the White House is Senator Orrin Hatch (UT-R), the President pro tempore of the United States Senate. After Hatch, It’s the Secretary of State, Putin-buddy Rex Tillerson (likely to be indicted too) and then Jeff Sessions (clearly already compromised) and the rest of the cabinet.  This is why there are two potential outcomes to an impeachment crisis: President Orrin Hatch or the next Speaker of the House, if Ryan is implicated.

Whomever it is, would be President until 2020 as there simply is no mechanism for a snap election in the US. Even under these extraordinary times.

“Hate is a far better motivator than love,” a boastful Roger Stone told NPR this week. “It’s one of Stone’s golden rules.”  Stone is the political operative who helped put Donald Trump in the White House.  He says of the President, “I was like a jockey looking for his horse. You can’t win a race without a horse.” Stone is about to see his golden rule work against his winning horse.  Trump has now threatened American lives, betrayed the country, our allies, the rule of law and made his bed – with Vladimir Putin – the end result will enrage the American population which should have brutal consequences for both the President and the Russian autocrat.

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How Vladimir Putin’s ‘Kremlin, Inc.’ is pulling the levers of power in the next White House and why President-elect Donald J. Trump doesn’t mind.

To understand the relationship, we need to understand how Putin rules. The Russian President controls his country through his party, the congress (Duma) and the liberal civil service which oversee the day-to-day operation of the government. He also wields power through a handful of Russian billionaires, commonly referred to as “the oligarchs” or as one Russian magazine calls them, “Kremlin, Inc.” As a unit, they represent one fifth of Russia’s annual economic output.

Putin inherited the oligarch system from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Under Putin, the faces have changed and power has been consolidated but its vast control over all of Russia’s key industries remains. He is the undisputed Chairman who blesses any deal made by the oligarchs and retains the right to hire and fire any oligarch at any time.

The Russian President meets with his heads of business often, either at regular evening parties at his dacha in Barvikha, West of Moscow, or at his Black Sea home, near Sochi. While Putin still controls the day to day operations of the government, he largely exerts power through the oligarchs, often using the companies as foreign policy instruments of power, as he did with Gazprom in the Ukraine.

Trump’s Secretary of State appointee and outgoing ExxonMobil CEO, Rex Tillerson’s relationship with Putin goes back almost two decades. Tillerson has been jockeying for power in Putin’s inner circle since. His break came in 2012, in an apparent coup of Russia’s oil industry co-ordinated with Putin’s Energy Tsar and ally, Sergei Sechin.

At the time, Russia’s oil output was controlled by two entities, state-controlled Rosneft and privately-held TNK-BP (a joint-venture between British Petroleum and a group of oligarchs led by Mikhael Fridman).

At this point, it may be useful to give you a bit of history on Mikhael Fridman. Forbes ranks him as Russia’s second richest man, valued at more than $15.3 Bn dollars. In the years following the demise of the USSR, he went from owning a window washing company to purchasing a biscuit factory and then, with his friends, launched Alfa Bank. He recruited Pyotr Aven, a Russian insider who back in the 90’s was able to help Vladimir Putin avoid corruption charges in the St. Petersburg government. Fridman climbed the ranks and was an undisputed oligarch at “Kremlin, Inc.”

As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, after considering a libel suit filed by the bankers, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”

Fridman was at once a Moscow insider and a thorn in Putin’s side. As TNK-BP was unraveling, Fridman and his partner began to lose influence at “Kremlin, Inc.” One former Alfa Bank employee recalled a ceremony a decade ago at which Putin awarded Aven a government honor. In typical Putin style, he couldn’t resist a wry remark as he presented the award.

Putin: “Remind me, why am I giving this to you?”
Aven: “Because I haven’t done anything you can put me in jail for.”
Putin: “No, not yet.”

In 2012, Fridman resigned as TNK-BP’s CEO, after falling out with his British partners and Putin. BP began looking elsewhere for access to the Russian market, and found it in a deal with state-controlled Rosneft to develop the prized Arctic resources in Russia – but Fridman blocked the deal.

Enter ExxonMobil Chief Executive and now Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson. He threw Exxon’s weight into the Arctic deal and won it in exchange for Rosneft’s access to energy projects in the US and globally. For his work, Tillerson was awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin – one of Russia’s highest honors. He was now firmly entrenched in Putin’s oligarch circle of power at “Kremlin Inc.” Fridman was on his way out.

Mr Putin – who presided over the deal signing at his Black Sea resort – called it one of the most important deals involving Russia and the US, potentially valued at $500 Bn. The deal was subsequently killed by President Obama’s sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine. As many have noted, the lifting of Russian sanctions will not only stand to enrich Exxon, it also gives Russia a substantial stake in the global oil market including, in the US.

In 2013, Rosneft consolidated its hold over the Russian oil industry. They bought out the oligarch’s share of TNK-BP for $27BN in a $55 Bn cash and stock deal, again presided over by Vladimir Putin – this time at his mansion outside Moscow. The deal made the state-run company one of the world’s largest producer of oil.

After the collapse of TNK-BP, Fridman and his co-horts left Russia, distancing themselves from Putin and have been left largely unaffected by US sanctions. In October, Slate magazine published an article citing well-regarded cyber-security sources who uncovered what they say is an unusual regular server connection between Alfa Bank and Trump Towers.

Which brings us to Carter Page – President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s now ex-foreign affairs advisor and point-man on all things Moscow. While fashioning himself as a foreign affairs analyst, his roots are as an investment advisor with a mixed track record in Russia.

In March, Trump listed Page as one of his top foreign affairs advisers when he spoke to the Washington Post Editorial Board but by July, Trump’s team was at pains to point out that he is not a representative of the campaign.

Page may no longer represent Trump, but he remains an advisor to sanctions-targeted Gazprom, run by another of Putin’s oligarchs, Alexey Miller.  Gazprom, is the crown jewel of Putin’s resource companies at “Kremlin, Inc.” The gas corporation has been heavily affected by US sanctions, yet Page has been involved in some of its biggest deals – including the development of The Sakhalin Oil And Gas Field. Gazprom’s former deputy CFO is now an official adviser to Page’s firm, Global Energy Capital LLC.

Gazprom is more than just a gas company, it is a Russian instrument of foreign policy and power. It was Gazprom that shut off gas to its biggest and most lucrative customers during the military incursion into Crimea. The company maintains a private army, employs a half million people and runs entire cities around Russia. Gazprom’s Alexey Miller has also hosted Secretary of State appointee Rex Tillerson in public forums.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov says, “although Gazprom is an international corporation, the largest shareholder is the Russian state. There is nothing strange in the fact that the relationship between the government and Gazprom is really very close.”  In, 2001, Gazprom, led a forceful takeover of NTV, a popular television channel that was openly critical of the government.

In July this year, Carter Page – still acting as a Trump adviser – met with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and Igor Diveykin, a high–ranking Russian intelligence official.

The meeting alarmed Washington’s intelligence community and outgoing Democratic Senator Harry Reid, who scribed a letter to FBI Director James Comey asking, “whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee?”

Page has denied the meeting took place calling the accusations, “absolute garbage” but regardless of whether the meeting took place or not, Trump’s advisor has been very vocal about President Obama’s policy of exporting American values.

Page recently told the New Economic School in Moscow, “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change.”

In February 2015, Page described the West as “football team bullies” citing “condescending mistreatment” of Russia, Iran and China. He likened the treatment of these nations to the treatment of slaves and blamed the US for spurring “economic disaster” in Russia and Ukraine.

Now Senator Reid, is calling on FBI Director James Comey to be investigated, comparing him to another famed Bureau Chief with political ambitions. “I did not believe Comey was the new J. Edgar Hoover,” Senator Reid said. “I thought that he would do the right thing for the country.”

So, what we know is that Trump is now indirectly connected to at least two of the biggest oligarchs in Russia. His Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson is one of Putin’s closest non-Russian friends and tied directly to business deals with Rosneft CEO Sechin. Trump’s ex-advisor, Carter Page, reportedly met Sechin in July and  is also an investment advisor to another oligarch, Alexey Miller of Gazprom.

Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser is also connected to Putin. Flynn appears regularly on the Kremlin sponsored English language cable news network RT. Flynn flew to Moscow last year for RT’s gala and sat with Putin.

Then there’s John Bolton, who is being touted as a potential Deputy Foreign Secretary. Bolton is connected to the group of oil oligarchs and to Dick Cheney but that’s a story for another day.

And if you’ve been keeping score, Trump’s former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, worked as an adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, who was Putin’s puppet president of Ukraine.

There’s another factor driving a deep connection between Trump and Putin and that is liquid cash. While his net-worth is estimated at $3 Bn, his debt has climbed from $350M last year to $650 m this year. To finance this ballooning line-item, Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia because US banks have mostly black-balled Trump.

According the Washington Post, “since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump isn’t denying his appreciation of all things Putin. It’s his calculation that closer ties with Moscow are a benefit to Washington. He believes America’s policy of advancing human rights ahead of economic benefit is working against US interests. In a Trump world, anything that advances the country’s power is worth the price of doing business – even if it’s with autocratic rulers with a poor human rights record.

It should be noted, Putin’s aggressive stance on US politics comes at a time when sanctions have left him with a large deficit. Last week on Wednesday, the state sold off a 19% stake in Rosneft to Swiss Commodity firm, Glencore, with a sovereign wealth fund in Qatar as secondary funders. The $11 Bn dollar deal will help Kremlin pay for the growing deficit but it won’t turn the tables on the US.

Putin is betting “Kremlin, Inc.” can do that with its new ally in the West, President-elect Donald J. Trump. With Tillerson at State and Flynn as National Security Adviser, Putin will have direct influence over world affairs and the country’s military strategy, potentially working around the President-elect. This would represent an unparalleled intrusion into the most important levers of foreign influence and give Putin unprecedented power to not only benefit Russia, but to exert pressure on any nation on the planet.

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