What We Learned About Trump's Russian Connections This Weekend

Aside from more evidence that the President is delusional and his team are professional enablers, we did learn a few more things over the weekend about Trump's Russian connections. First, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence under Obama at the time in question, categorically stated that there were no wiretaps on Trump Tower or the Trump campaign and there was no FISA warrant to do surveillance on Trump or members of his campaign. But he clearly left open the possibility that other types of surveillance that may not have required a FISA warrant may have targeted the Trump campaign. Second, there is a pretty strong belief that there are transcripts of conversations between Russians and members of the Trump campaign and transition team. And yesterday the connections between Trump's development projects and organizations and individuals interested in laundering ill-gotten money were detailed in an in-depth piece in the New Yorker.

The interesting thing about Clapper's statement is that there was clearly some investigation going on that involved some of Trump's campaign team, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Carter Page. And there are also reports that the Obama administration sought a FISA warrant in June as part of an investigation into Russian hacking. That application was turned down but a renewed attempt was accepted in October. If that is true, then Clapper is saying pretty clearly that the October FISA warrant did not target Trump or the campaign. The assumption then would be that the targets were Russian operatives. And the next assumption would be that either the October FISA warrant, other monitoring of Trump campaign officials, or regular monitoring of Russian officials here in the US are the basis for the reports of transcripts of conversations between the Trump campaign and/or transition team and agents of Russia.

In addition, Roger Stone admitted in a tweet that he had a "legal back-channel to Assange" and WikiLeaks during the campaign. While WikiLeaks is not directly the Russian government, it is now widely assumed that the organization is a tool of the Russians. It certainly performed that role during the campaign as the assumption is that the hacked Democratic emails were provided to WikiLeaks by the Russians. Stone subsequently deleted that tweet.

The New Yorker article details a Trump development project in Baku, Azerbaijan that looks like it was merely a vehicle for money laundering, specifically in this case money laundering for Azerbaijan officials and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The Trump Organization received anywhere between $2.5 million to $5 million for their work on the project. The extensive Trump involvement in the project, especially Ivanka, and the history of corruption of the Azerbaijani partners and their connection to Iran potentially expose the Trump Organization to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that ensures that a business perform due diligence to vet their potential overseas partners. The Trump Organization claims that due diligence was performed but refused to provide that information to the New Yorker. The whole article is worth a read to see just how obviously corrupt Trump's partners in this project are.

The Azerbaijan project looks quite similar to projects that Trump put together with Bayrock Securities and the mysterious Felix Sater. Bayrock itself was formed by a Kazhan businessman with money from Russian oligarchs and it is probable that money from those oligarchs or oligarchs in the states of the former Soviet Union funded many of Trump's projects as he tried to rebuild his company after yet another bankruptcy in the early 2000s.

So that's what we know now. How this all fits together will have to wait for another, more speculative post.