Did Trump Pass Israeli Intelligence to the Russians?

Reports suggest that the source for classified information the president divulged to two top Russian officials was Israel.

Go to Original
By DAVID A. GRAHAM

Under siege for President Trump’s reported disclosure of classified information to two Russian officials last week, the White House has focused on the legality of any disclosure, saying the president can share what he wants.

But that narrow view overlooks the other implications of the disclosure. According to The Washington Post and others, the information was extremely sensitive, shared with the U.S. by an ally as part of an intelligence-sharing agreement so delicate that the details were not shared with allies, and were restricted within the U.S. government. So who was the source of the intelligence?

Some speculated the source was Jordan, especially after Trump called King Abdullah Tuesday morning. But The New York Times reports that the source for the intelligence was actually Israel:

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and a major intelligence collector in the Middle East. The revelation that Mr. Trump boasted about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries. It also raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the Middle East.

NBC News is reporting the same. If true, that revelation comes at a delicate time for the two countries. Trump has positioned himself as a staunch friend of Israel and is scheduled to visit the country next week, but several tensions have emerged between the U.S. and Israel.

Interestingly, there were reports that the Israeli intelligence community was wary of Trump long before the latest Russia news. In January, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that Israeli intelligence officials were concerned that if Israel shared information with the U.S., that information could end up making its way to Russia and from there to Iran, given Trump’s praise for Russia on the campaign trail. Summarizing the reporting, Haaretz wrote:

As Russian intelligence is associated with intelligence officials in Tehran, highly classified information, such as Israel's clandestine methods of operation and intelligence sources, could potentially reach Iran. Such information has been shared with the United States in the past.

Yediot Ahronot also reported that officials in the Obama administration had warned the Israelis to be wary of Trump.

It now appears that the fear of Israeli information moving to Trump and then on to the Russians has become a reality. And it happens as Trump is scheduled to travel to Israel next week.

Israeli intelligence and defense leaders have not always seen eye-to-eye with the hardline government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Trump has hailed as a friend and promised to back to the hilt. Yet there are tensions between Netanyahu and the Trump administration as well. Unlike past U.S. presidents, Trump has refused to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and he appointed a hardliner as his ambassador to the country. Yet the administration seems to be reversing its promise to relocate the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and this week a peculiar disagreement has broken out over the Western Wall, a contested site in Jerusalem.

As Trump made plans to visit the sacred site, diplomats in the country reportedly told the prime minister’s office he did not want Netanyahu there, and that the wall was located in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank. “Israel is convinced that this statement is contrary to the position of President Trump, as expressed in his firm opposition to the most recent U.N. Security Council Resolution,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. During a briefing on Tuesday, National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster refused to comment on whether the administration believed the wall was in Israel or in the West Bank. In an afternoon press briefing, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the Western Wall is “clearly in Jerusalem,” but also dodged the question.

Between the Western Wall, the embassy, and the classified disclosure, Trump and Netanyahu should have plenty to talk about during next week’s visit. That is, of course, if the Israelis are willing to tell him things he might repeat elsewhere.

U.S. lawmakers want Trump to explain giving intelligence to Russia

Go to Original
By Susan Cornwell and Susan Heavey 

President Donald Trump came under pressure on Tuesday from U.S. lawmakers, including some of his fellow Republicans, to give a fuller explanation of why he revealed highly sensitive intelligence information to senior Russian officials at a White House meeting last week.

U.S. officials said Trump discussed intelligence about Islamic State with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak at last Wednesday's talks in the Oval Office.

The information had been supplied by a U.S. ally in the fight against the militant group, the officials said. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN identified the ally as Israel but two U.S. national security sources said they doubted that. Israeli officials declined to comment.

The disclosure of Trump's discussion rocked the administration as it struggled to move past the backlash over Trump's abrupt firing on May 9 of FBI Director James Comey, whose agency is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump said on Twitter on Tuesday he had an "absolute right" to share facts with Russia, adding he wanted Moscow to be more active in fighting Islamic State militants.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for more information about reports that Trump gave intelligence information to the Russians, a spokeswoman for the panel said.

Congressional investigators are expected to seek copies of any notes taken during the meeting, a congressional source said.

Trump's main guest at last week's meeting was Lavrov, the leading promoter of Russian foreign policies that are often sharply at odds with U.S. aims in Syria and Europe.

While not unprecedented, it is rare for a foreign minister to be granted bilateral talks in the inner sanctum of the White House with a U.S. president as Lavrov was.

Trump repeatedly called during his campaign for improved U.S. relations with Russia, damaged by years of disagreement over Russia's role in Ukraine and its backing for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But his ties with Russia have clouded the early months of his presidency. Along with the FBI probe, congressional committees are investigating alleged Russian meddling in the election and whether there was any collusion by the Trump campaign.

A U.S. president has the authority to disclose even the most highly classified information at will, but U.S. and allied officials said that by giving information to Russia, Trump had endangered cooperation from an ally that has intelligence on Islamic State.

U.S. Representative Barbara Comstock, a Republican, called for immediate classified briefings for lawmakers "so that Congress can at least know as much as Russian leaders."

"Anything you give the Russians, you have to assume the worst, not the best," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News. "So clearly the president didn't do anything illegal. But my advice to the president would be if you're going to talk to the Russians about anything sensitive, run it through the system first."

TRUMP'S "ABSOLUTE RIGHT"

Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to defend his actions.

"As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety," Trump tweeted. "Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism."

Islamic State, or ISIS, holds territory in Iraq and Syria and is a common foe of Moscow and Washington.

National security adviser H.R. McMaster said Trump did not know the source of the information he disclosed to the Russians so could not have compromised the U.S. ally.

"What the president shared was wholly appropriate," he said.

The two top Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, were muted in their response to Trump giving information to Russia. Ryan's office said he hoped for a full explanation.

Asked if he had concerns about Trump's handling of classified information, McConnell answered, "No."

The top Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, called on the White House to make transcripts of the Oval Office meeting with the Russians available.

Representative Elijah Cummings, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Trump's disclosure only reinforced Democrats' call for an independent investigation into alleged ties with Russia.

"I would hope that at some point the Republicans will join with the Democrats and say, 'Look, we've got to address this.' This is indefensible," Cummings told MSNBC.

Turmoil in the White House in recent weeks has overshadowed legislative priorities such as healthcare and tax reform eyed by Trump and his fellow Republicans who control Congress.

The euro surged more than 1 percent against a broadly weaker dollar on Tuesday, rising to its highest since Trump was elected president in November. Weaker-than-expected U.S. housing data also dampened the dollar.

Controversy over Russia has also laid bare sharp divisions between the White House and U.S. intelligence agencies, which concluded in January that Russia had tried to influence the election in Trump's favor. Moscow denies that.

During the presidential campaign Trump repeatedly assailed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, for her handling of classified information by email while she was secretary of state. The FBI concluded after an investigation last year that there were no grounds to pursue any charges against Clinton.

Trump departs on Friday for his first overseas trip as president, traveling to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and Belgium on visits that will test his foreign policy skills.

Sally Yates: Trump ignored my warnings over 'compromised' Michael Flynn

• Ex-acting attorney general says White House waited over two weeks to act
• ‘There’s certainly a criminal statute that was implicated by [Flynn’s] conduct’

Go to Original
By Tom McCarthy

Sally Yates, the former top official in the justice department, said in an interview published on Tuesday that she had expected the Trump White House to take action immediately after she told them that national security adviser Michael Flynn had become “compromised with the Russians”.

Instead, the White House waited 18 days before firing Flynn, acting only after Flynn’s allegedly compromised status was unveiled in media reports.

“We had just gone and told them that the national security adviser, of all people, was compromised with the Russians and that their vice-president and others had been lying to the American people about it,” Yates told the New Yorker, referring to statements about Flynn’s Russia connections by the then incoming vice-president, Mike Pence. “We expected them to act.” She added: “We expected them to do something immediately.”

In a second interview released Tuesday, Yates said that Flynn, in his clandestine contacts with Russian operatives, had possibly committed a crime or crimes.

“There’s certainly a criminal statute that was implicated by his conduct,” Yates told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

The double interviews by Yates, the former acting attorney general dismissed by Trump over a seemingly unrelated matter, delivered another blow to the Trump administration as it reeled from reports that the president had spontaneously revealed highly sensitive information to Russian diplomats in a meeting last week.

Yates expressed surprise that Flynn had continued as national security adviser for so long. The White House has previously said it did not rescind Flynn’s security clearances in the interim period after Yates made her notification, but before he was fired.

“I think that this was a serious compromise situation, that the Russians had real leverage,” she told CNN. “He also had lied to the vice-president of the United States. You know, whether he’s fired or not is a decision for the president of the United States to make. But it doesn’t seem like that’s a person who should be sitting in the national security adviser position.”

In media appearances in mid-January, Pence denied that Flynn had been in contact with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. US intelligence agents knew that to be untrue, because they had transcripts of conversations between Flynn and Kislyak. Yates said the gap between the public version of events and the actual version gave the Russians leverage over Flynn.

The official White House rationale for Flynn’s dismissal, articulated by the press secretary, Sean Spicer, was a “trust issue” following Flynn’s failure to inform Pence of his conversations with Kislyak.

“Gen Flynn is a wonderful man,” Trump told a news conference in February after Flynn’s firing was announced. “I think he has been treated very, very unfairly by the media – as I call it, the fake media – in many cases. And I think it is really a sad thing that he was treated so badly.”

Yates was dismissed by Trump after she declined to defend his first travel ban against visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries, which she deemed unlawful.

Trump and others accused intelligence officials of inappropriately “unmasking” Flynn in captured communications, a criticism Trump made on Twitter as recently as this month. Dragnet intelligence collection conducted under the aegis of foreign surveillance is supposed to conceal the names of US persons incidentally caught up in the surveillance.

Yates told the New Yorker, however, that Flynn’s name had not been “masked” in the intelligence reports she saw. “I oftentimes would get intel reports that included the name of the US person,” Yates said. “Not because I or anybody else had asked for it to be unmasked, but because that intelligence only made sense if you knew who the identity of the US person was, and that’s an exception to the minimization requirements.”

Another such exception, according to Yates: “If it’s evidence of a crime.”

Trump's trust problem

Senior administration officials have strained their credibility with the public with months of false, misleading or tortured statements.

Go to Original
By JOSH DAWSEY

President Donald Trump was accused of leaking highly classified information to Russian officials, and White House officials wanted to fiercely rebut the charges.

But when senior national security officials issued statements Monday night, including from behind a lectern on the West Wing driveway, they spoke for an administration that has strained its credibility by issuing a series of false, misleading or tortured statements on far less important matters. And they spoke for a president who less than a week ago said publicly that his aides and surrogates can’t be expected to give accurate statements, because they don’t always know what’s going on.

“This story is false,” said Dina Powell, a deputy national security adviser. “The story, as reported, is false,” said H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, hedging his words.

News outlets — including The New York Times and Reuters — confirmed the story reported by The Washington Post and published anyway, seemingly unconcerned about the denials, which came from two officials who have been respected in Washington for decades. The episode underscored Trump's challenge after months of misstatements over far less consequential matters.

“Their credibility is completely shattered. They’ve engaged in serial lying to the American people on issues big and small — beginning with the crowd size photos. It’s unprecedented for an administration, from the top on down, to embrace a strategy of deception and lying,” said Steve Schmidt, a Republican consultant and former campaign manager for John McCain.

“Even people who have built up reputations for integrity over a lifetime of public service, they risk squandering it in this administration,” Schmidt said.

White House officials note that the media is historically unpopular, and they love combating mistakes in news stories, often posting them on Twitter. “FAKE NEWS!” Trump has posted repeatedly. Senior officials have excoriated media outlets publicly and privately, with chief strategist Steve Bannon calling the media “the opposition party.” And they note that polls show their supporters trust Trump more than the media.

Spicer didn’t respond to several phone calls seeking comment.

Still, among reporters who cover the White House, on-the-record statements from Trump’s White House carry little weight because Trump has told hundreds of falsehoods, tracked by PolitiFact and other websites. Sometimes, in a single campaign-style rally, the president will say more than a dozen things that are not true — or lack all context. He has made unsubstantiated claims, like saying former President Barack Obama put a “tapp” on his phones at Trump Tower.

Trump publicly, in “The Art of the Deal,” has bragged about his ability to exaggerate.

Spicer, the press secretary, has vehemently defended Trump both publicly and privately— sometimes screaming at reporters for their reliance on anonymous sources. But he lost credibility early among reporters for his repeated untruths about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration.

Last week, Spicer told reporters they were incorrect for even suggesting that Trump decided to fire FBI Director James Comey before a memo arrived from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Trump said within two days that he would have fired Comey no matter what the memo said, directly contradicting his spokesman and Vice President Mike Pence.

"They started burning through their credibility on Inauguration Day," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told POLITICO. "But they devoured it during the Comey story, so now their attempts to push back are basically being ignored, and rightly so."

Sometimes, White House officials have been given specific talking points by Trump, as when Spicer crowed that Trump had the largest inauguration crowd of all time, which wasn’t true. And sometimes Trump just changes his story.

“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Trump wrote on Twitter last week. He added: “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future 'press briefings' and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”

The factually challenged comments have become something of a joke. On “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, Melissa McCarthy, who plays Sean Spicer on the show, asked whether Trump had ever passed along misleading information for him to share with the media.

“Only since you started working here,” Trump, played by Alec Baldwin, said.

For reporters and spokespeople, the dynamics are different in Trump’s White House, said Stu Loeser, a longtime press secretary to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Loeser said spokespeople often spin aggressively or tell small fibs — “like a spokesman saying, ‘I haven’t seen your story,’ even though it’s been out there for 11 hours.”

But in Trump’s White House, the denials or comments are likely to matter far less — which could hurt reporters and spokespeople alike if both sides are interested in the truth.

“You need to reserve credibility for when it matters — when a call comes in late in the day and you need to be able to say to a reporter, all the jousting back and forth aside, 'I’ve never lied to you about something and this isn’t true,' said Loeser.

“If you’ve blown your credibility on crowd size or semantics, people say: What else are they going to lie about?”

American military might be asleep during Phase Zero in Asia

China’s military buildup and expansion has never evoked a consistent sense of threat on the US side.

Go to Original
By GRANT NEWSHAM

Perhaps owing to being dominant for so long, American leaders sometimes appear so confident of winning in wartime that they are myopic about what happens during peacetime – the so-called “phase zero” in US military terms.

Consider Asia.  It’s not that US forces aren’t busy in the region, but rather there’s been a longstanding indifference towards China’s military buildup and its undermining of US alliances and commitment to Asia.

If the US isn’t careful, this creeping subversion could put it in the strategic equivalent of wrestling’s Full Nelson and unable to move beyond phase zero at acceptable cost.

China’s military buildup and expansion has never evoked a consistent sense of threat on the US side — just recall a US Pacific Command chief who considered global warming his biggest challenge in the Asia Pacific.

Admiral Harry Harris, the current PACOM commander, described Chinese submarines as Model-T’s while the American versions are Corvettes.

A previous commander, Admiral Dennis Blair, also downplayed China’s capabilities, noting it would take only 10-15 minutes to neutralize Beijing’s man-made islands in the South China Sea — the so-called “Great Wall of Sand.”

Glib dismissals that make for good newspaper quotes, while the noose tightens.

If more evidence is needed of American dismissiveness mixed with a dose of hubris, consider the decision to invite China to the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise, known as RIMPAC, in Hawaii in 2014 and 2016.

The People’s Liberation Army was invited despite well-understood intelligence risks (try ‘acoustic signatures’ for starters), and apparently in the belief that exposure to US awesomeness would convince China to behave. An invitation to China for RIMPAC 2018 is apparently still open.

One would think American leaders would know better after recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan that you underestimate adversaries or overestimate yourself at your own peril.

Less recent experiences teach the same lesson. Condescension toward China’s military is this generation’s version of 1930’s thinking that the Japanese were incapable of producing fighter aircraft like the Zero or Long Lance torpedoes.

It was equally impossible that the Imperial Japanese Navy could ever match — much less outclass — the Royal Navy. Britannia had ruled the waves for a century, after all.

Improvements in China’s naval and air forces over the phase zero of the last decade are impressive and alarming. It also happened faster than all but a handful of American analysts predicted.

At the same time, Beijing has pulled US allies like the Philippines and Thailand into its orbit, raising doubts in other countries about US commitment.

US military forces — as powerful and professional as they are — would likely defeat the People’s Liberation Army in a straight up fight, though at a cost nobody much wants to think about.

This also assumes moving from phase zero to phase one (war looks likely) and then into phase two (the shooting starts) is automatic. It isn’t.

If China’s military were to do something like, say, grab Japan’s Senkaku islands or perhaps teach Taiwan a lesson, there will be voices in the US arguing that a military response carries too high a price.

This shows that if China as a smart adversary makes the proper strategic moves in phase zero, there might not be a phase one or a phase two, because the US awakes to finds itself in a stranglehold it can’t get out of, except at too high a price.

It’s always the rule to make it so that your adversary, rather than you, can’t get out of phase zero. That comes from taking the adversary seriously.

Trump’s Russia scandal keeps getting deeper: At this point, campaign collusion might be the least of his problems

Firing Comey didn't end the collusion inquiry — but Trump's clumsy cover-up and financial ties are his real problem

Go to Original
By BOB CESCA

With every passing day and every passing derp, President Donald Trump makes his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia to hijack last year’s election seem almost secondary. Surely that’s not his intention; indeed, it’s exactly the opposite. But anyone, regardless of politics, who has observed Trump’s reactions to the deepening Russia story can plainly see that the 45th president is way out of his depth.

Anyone with even a remedial understanding of politics and public relations understands that Trump is bungling the White House reaction to the ongoing investigation, turning an already harrowing treason probe into a harrowing treason probe made far more toxic by an obvious coverup.

It’s still unclear exactly what’s wrong with the president that he continues to botch and fumble the political reaction to the widening Russia scandal. We should definitely rule out, with prejudice, any argument that the president is practicing “three-dimensional chess” — that is, the “crazy like a fox” theory suggesting that Trump is working his way through a twisty Machiavellian strategy that we mere mortals are incapable of understanding. There’s nothing like that going on here. Chances are, Trump is being perpetually stymied by a combination of his desperation to kill the Russia probe; his clinical delusions, in which he believes certain things are real that clearly aren’t; his political ignorance; and, of course, his erratic knee-jerk style of blurting out gibberish and lies without any message discipline or self-censorship.

As a result, we’re treated to events like last week when the president fired James Comey, the now-former FBI director who was deeply involved with investigating Trump’s links to Russia, followed by a shit show the likes of which we have rarely witnessed in presidential politics since 1974. As if the firing of Comey wasn’t suspicious enough, the White House at first tried to claim that this happened specifically because of the way Comey had handled Hillary Clinton email scandal. That was the line throughout the first 24 hours of the aftermath.

Then came the whiplash.

Contrary to everything the White House, along with Vice President Mike Pence, had said about Comey’s firing, Trump inexplicably confessed to NBC News’ Lester Holt that he had fired Comey because he wanted the Russian scandal to end — which, of course, screams out obstruction of justice. Trump said to Holt, “And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.'”

That day White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeated Trump’s perhaps inadvertent confession, noting in the press room, “We want [the Trump-Russia matter] to come to its conclusion; we want it to come to its conclusion with integrity,” she said. “And we think that we’ve actually, by removing Director Comey, taken steps to make that happen.”

Making matters even worse, the president later hinted in a tweet that he might have secretly recorded his conversations with Comey, adding witness tampering and intimidation to the rap sheet. It’s worth noting that Trump attempted something similar just before the Senate testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates: As a last-minute threat, Trump hinted that she might have leaked details about the Michael Flynn prong of the Trump-Russia fiasco to the press.

Consequently, Trump managed to open up an entirely new wing of the scandal, further blurring the distinctions between himself and Richard Nixon while deep in the belly of the Watergate crisis. Now everyone wants to know whether Trump has a Nixonian secret recording system in the White House — and if he does, there are more than a few senators, members of Congress and federal investigators who want copies of the recordings — immediately.

All in all, we have at least several actionable if not impeachable offenses from last week alone, and it all emerged from the attempted cover-up and firing of Comey — an action Trump didn’t have to take except to relieve the pressure valves on the Russia scandal. Why? Why is Trump so desperate to scramble the story?

If he is innocent, there’s no reason for the White House to have tripped over itself so spectacularly. In that case, Comey’s investigation would ultimately have reached that conclusion. So why try to kill off the investigation that could hypothetically exonerate Trump and his closest associates and put the whole thing to rest? Obviously because Trump and his closest associates are guilty.

But guilt over collusion doesn’t even need to be proved at this point. The investigation could be entirely blown up, by Trump or someone else, and we’d still be left with a massively suspicious cover-up when various high crimes have been committed.

Furthermore, if the investigations of  the campaign collusion and the resulting cover-up are abandoned tomorrow, there’s still the third chunk of this mess that could bring down the administration: Trump’s alleged links to Russian money laundering, whether that means Trump’s laundering money for Russian plutocrats or the plutocrats’ laundering money for him. Toss into the mix the widespread rumors (unsubstantiated for now) about Russian loans having been used for Trump’s campaign war chest.

Toward the end of last week, we heard from Trump’s outside counselors, the Washington law firm of Morgan Lewis, which issued a letter confirming that Trump has various links to Russian money. It’s worth mentioning here that Morgan Lewis was voted “Russia Law Firm of the Year.” Yes, really. Jesus, is anyone in the White House paying attention to its spin? Nevertheless, the letter confirms several above-board links between Trump and Russian cash. But come on; it’s not like a review of Trump’s tax returns would show glaring evidence of money laundering or other malfeasance. We also have to assume that Trump has established an entire roster of shell corporations and fronts over the years. Are all these offshore accounts and corporate entities reflected in his stupid 1040s? Certainly not.

By the way, Morgan Lewis did, in fact, confirm one of the “loony” conspiracy theories you might have heard on Rachel Maddow’s show and elsewhere. It turns out that Trump stumbled into a $54 million windfall when he sold his colossal Florida estate to Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian “Fertilizer King,” for $95 million — a house Trump had purchased for $41 million. It’s important to note that Rybolovlev allegedly laundered a considerable amount of his personal fortune through the Bank of Cyprus, the bank that previously employed Wilbur Ross, Trump’s secretary of commerce. If you think everything about that transaction was on the level, I have some robot insurance to sell you.

Trump should be terrified. No one knows for sure whether he is, but he should be. Charges of collusion are very much alive and he knows it. But the thing is, those collusion charges could evaporate tomorrow and we’d still be left with two more scandals: the cover-up and the dubious financial links to Russian oligarchs. Those could be more than enough to summarily boot him out of the Oval Office and into a federal penitentiary where orange could be the new orange.

Trump stupidly thought he could use and abuse the power of the presidency to wiggle out of this predicament, but it’s the unstoppable wiggling that’s getting him into more and more trouble. For a guy who everyone says is so media savvy, Donald Trump is even more incompetent at cleaning up his own messes than he is at being president.

Dutch Documentary Part II: Blood on Trump and Kushner's Hands from Deals with Africa War Zone Diamond Mines

Lev Leviev's diamond empire stretches from Angola to Moscow, London and Amsterdam.

Go to Original
By Steven Rosenfeld

The Trump family’s business partners have blood on their hands owing to deals with notorious diamond brokers who operate mines in wartorn Africa and own jewelry stores in London, Moscow and Amsterdam.

That's the premise in Part Two of a documentary series by the Dutch TV network Zembla, The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump: King of Diamonds. It shows how the U.S. president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have apparent partnerships with an Israeli billionaire who is tied to “trading in blood diamonds,” as the film's description notes, and how this relationship overlaps with power circles in Russia reaching President Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs.

“In the second part of our program about Donald Trump’s controversial friends, we will set our sights on the Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, who is controversial because he is suspected of trading in blood diamonds,” says the documentary's YouTube summary. “He is one of the world’s biggest diamond traders and owns prestigious stores in New York and Moscow, but he is also the owner of Siebel, the Netherlands’ biggest jewelry chain. Leviev has ties with Russian president Putin, U.S. president Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Trump, however, claims he hardly knows this ‘King of Diamonds.’ Zembla investigates Lev Leviev’s business empire.”

The first part of the documentary series focused on Trump’s ties to Russian mobsters and oligarchs. That eye-opening report showed how Trump nurtured deals with oligarchs seeking to get their riches out of Russia and revealed how Trump signed off on international money-laundering schemes, including one set up by the law firm of ex-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. In the second part, we see how Trump is willing to make deals with anyone who can offer him a return, regardless of the suffering involved. The documentary also shines a light on Kushner’s relationships, which blend business, politics and religion. 

There are a half-dozen takeaways from Part II, said James S. Henry, a corporate lawyer-turned-financial investigative reporter who has written lengthy exposés of Trump’s Russian connections and is featured in the film.

“I think the real news and interest in Part Two involves the exposure of apparent Trump partner Leviev's reported deep involvement in (a) trafficking in Angolan blood diamonds by way of his special arrangement with Eduardo dos Santos and family, the country's long-time dictator and chief kleptocrat; (b) Leviev's close ties to Putin; (c) Leviev's extensive business dealings with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner; (d) the extensive financial support that both Leviev and Kushner have given to extremist Israel settlers—support that appears to be inconsistent with the role that Kushner has apparently been given by the Trump administration with respect to the peace process; and (e) Leviev's alleged extensive use of non-transparent Dutch and other offshore holding companies to facilitate all these dodgy practices,” Henry wrote in an email to AlterNet.

Sander Rietveld, the documentary’s lead reporter, said Part Two is relevant for American audiences and lawmakers because it raises questions about Trump’s business relationships that can only be answered by examining his tax returns. Congressional Democrats have said Trump’s returns must be fully released before any consideration of federal tax reform.

“I think this is an excellent example of why President Trump needs to disclose his tax returns,” Rietveld said in an email. “Only when he does so, we'll know if and how he was engaged in a business deal with Lev Leviev [beyond the public relations materials shown in the film]. Given the extensive business empire of Leviev, Trump and he could have been together in real estate in the U.S., in Russia or in Eastern Europe. Or in some kind of diamond operation. According to well-established experts and investigators these kinds of operations in Africa and specifically in Angola are related to severe human rights abuses committed by security firms hired by mining companies.”

The film also examines the business circles Kushner travels in, showing overlapping ties between conservative Jewish groups and clerics and politically powerful Russians and Israelis, including Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The overlap of business and ideology and politics is another takeaway from this story,” Rietveld said. “Jared Kushner, the president's man for the Middle East, and Leviev's company AFI USA not only made a multimillion-dollar deal; they also seem to share a political view on Israel and the Palestinian territories. Both of them have been active in supporting settlements on the West Bank, which according to international law are illegal. And both of them have a very good relationship with the current, very right-wing Israeli government, and more personally with Bibi Netanyahu.”

The Dutch documentary series raises questions one can only hope congressional investigators and the FBI will take up and provide answers to. Viewing these programs makes it clear that Trump’s business empire and family fortune is based on deals with extremely unsavory characters, some of which could violate U.S. laws if fully scrutinized. In the meantime, one can only wonder how Trump’s sordid past will shape White House policies today and tomorrow.