You won’t believe what that eighth Trump Jr. collusion meeting attendee – just unmasked – was caught doing in 2000!
Schneiderman had Trump, Trump Jr, Eric, Ivanka Under Surveillance (patribotics.blog)Mueller says Trump Jr, Manafort can testify publicly in Senate (reuters.com)
It’s Tuesday just after noon on the East Coast, and WaPo has the name.
An American-based employee of a Russian real estate company took part in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr., bringing to eight the number of known participants at the session that has emerged as a key focus of the investigation of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian.
Ike Kaveladze’s presence was confirmed by Scott Balber, an attorney for Emin and Aras Agalarov, the Russian developers who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Balber said Kaveladze works for the Agalarovs’ company and attended as their representative.
Balber said Tuesday that he received a phone call from a representative of Special Counsel Robert Mueller over the weekend requesting the identity of the Agalarov representative , which he said he provided. The request is the first public indication that Mueller’s team is investigating the meeting.
Donald Trump Jr. agreed to take the meeting on the promise that he would be provided damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government to help his father’s presidential campaign, according to emails released by Trump Jr. last week.
Who is Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze? Here’s a tidbit from 2000:
In a a nine-month inquiry that subpoenaed bank records, the investigators found that an unknown number of Russians and other East Europeans moved more than $1.4 billion through accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco.
The accounts had been opened by Irakly Kaveladze, who immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1991, according to Citibank and Mr. Kaveladze. He set up more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers and then opened the bank accounts for them, without knowing who owned the corporations, according to the report by the General Accounting Office, which has not been made public.
If I am not mistaken, that falls under the general definition of money laundering.
The report said the banks had failed to conduct any ”due diligence” into identifying the owners of the accounts.
Late this afternoon, Citibank sent a 15-page letter to the G.A.O., saying that it had closed the accounts after being contacted by G.A.O. investigators earlier this year.
“It is clear in hindsight that our systems and tracking procedures were not sufficient to detect the nature and extent of his relationship with us,” the bank said, referring to Mr. Kaveladze. The letter, signed by the general counsel, Michael A. Ross, for the Global Consumer Business at Citigroup Inc., went on, “Given enhancements to our systems and procedures, we are confident that we would detect questionable activity and take action more promptly should a similar situation arise today.”
The bank said outside counsel had been brought in to review the matter after being alerted by the G.A.O, and that “no illegal activity in the Kaveladze-related accounts” had been found.
In an interview, Mr. Kaveladze said he had engaged in no wrongdoing. He described the G.A.O. investigation as a “witch hunt.”
Funny, but I seem to recall a certain someone in the Oval Office using that term with increasing frequency in recent months.
But that should be no surprise, because, according to a fresh story on the Patribotics blog from Louise Mensch, who has a knack for reporting the headlines weeks before the “mainstream media”,
Sources with links to New York State justice and law enforcement report that Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General of New York State, had Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump, under legal direct surveillance for some time at state level on an Enterprise Corruption case against Russian mobsters.
‘People are only looking at FISA. They forgot state law,’ one source said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matters discussed.
The RICO case – specifically, ‘Enterprise Corruption’, the name given in New York state law, formed the basis of the existing sealed indictment against Donald Trump presently at the Eastern District Court of Virginia. FISC retains some jurisdiction, but what precisely, sources did not specify.
We can believe it, based on the huge proliferation of recent news stories involving Trump and Russian business associates, for example here, here, here, and especially here.
