Category: Michael Novakhov’s favorite articles

Global Security has hypothesized that Donald Trump may be a Manchurian Candidate planted by the Russian mafia in collusion with the Russian government.[1] Using a network of hackers and Internet trolls controlled by the Russian mob, the Russian government was able to influence the 2016 US Presidential election in favor of Trump. The basis of Trump’s cooperation in the plot has been alluded to in 35-page report, known as the Trump Dossier, first reported by CNN and then published by BuzzFeed on January 11, 2017, which alleges that Russia has gathered damaging intelligence on Trump which it is using to blackmail Trump. In fact, a series of studies by the Financial Times has shown how after he suffered a string of six successive bankruptcies, Trump was bailed out by Russian crime lords.

Despite his alignment with the racist right, Trump has professed ultra-right views on Israel. His connections with Israel also extend to his broad ties with the Russian mafia, many of whom hold dual citizenship in Israel. The Russian mafia is closely associated with Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement that derived originally from Sabbateanism. The Zohar and the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria, are frequently cited in Chabad works. Although the Chabad Lubavitcher movement is often listed as a part of Orthodox Judaism, it has often been condemned as heretical by traditional Jews. Rabbi David Berger, a highly popular figure in Modern Orthodox circles, wrote The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, criticizing Lubavitcher messianism as “precisely what Jews through the generations have seen as classic, Christian-style false messianism.” His views are shared and supported by many prominent Orthodox authorities. In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Rabbi Eliezer Menachem Schach, a leader of the strictly Orthodox Jews in Israel who wielded powerful influence over the country’s politics for more than two decades, waged a campaign against the Lubavitcher movement. The messianic claim, Rabbi Schach said, was “total heresy,” adding that those making it “will burn in hell.”[2]

Lubavitch messianism involves the belief in the coming of the Messiah and a goal of raising awareness that his arrival is imminent. In addition, the term also refers more specifically to the hope that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902 –1994), known to many as the Rebbe, could himself be the Messiah. Schneerson was a Russian Empire-born American Orthodox Jewish rabbi, and the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, and considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.[3] Schneerson transformed the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, that almost came to an end with the Holocaust, into one of the most influential movements in world Jewry, with an international network of thousands of educational and social centers, known as Chabad Houses. Chabad’s goal, explains Sue Fishkoff, author of The Rebbe’s Army, is to reach every Jew in the world. Chabab seeks out the support of the rich, famous and powerful, including celebrities like Bob Dylon, Jon Voigt, Whoppi Goldberg and Al Gore.[4] Schneerson’s grave attracts thousands of Jews and non-Jews for prayer.

Schneerson spoke of the position of the United States as a world superpower, and would praise its foundational values of “‘E pluribus unum’—from many one”, and “In God we trust.”[5] Schneerson was visited by Presidents, Prime Ministers, Governors, Senators, Congressmen and Mayors. Notable among them are John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Jacob Javits, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins and Joe Lieberman.[6] In 1978, the US Congress asked President Carter to designate Schneerson’s birthday as the national Education Day USA. It has been since commemorated as Education and Sharing Day. In 1994, he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his “outstanding and lasting contributions toward improvements in world education, morality, and acts of charity.”[7] President Bill Clinton spoke these words at the ceremony:

The late Rebbe’s eminence as a moral leader for our country was recognized by every president since Richard Nixon. For over two decades, the Rabbi’s movement now has some 2000 institutions; educational, social, medical, all across the globe. We (the United States Government) recognize the profound role that Rabbi Schneerson had in the expansion of those institutions.

Schneerson took great interest in the affairs of the state of Israel, where he was a major political force, both in the Knesset and among the electorate.[8] Although he never visited Israel, many of Israel’s top leadership made it a point to visit him. Prime Minister Menachem Begin who came to visit him before going to Washington to meet President Carter. Ariel Sharon who had a close relationship with Schneerson. Yitzhak Rabin. Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu also visited and sought Schneersons advice. Benjamin Netanyahu said that while serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1984, Schneerson told him: “you will be serving in a house of darkness, but remember, that even in the darkest place; the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide…” Netanyahu later retold this episode in a speech at the General Assembly, on September 23, 2011.[9]

Oligarchs

Natan Sharansky, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency said that Chabad Lubavitch was an essential connector to Soviet Jewry during the Cold War.[10] Shimon Peres has stated that it’s to Schneerson’s credit that “Judaism in the Soviet Union has been preserved.”[11] These Russian Chabad-Lubavitcher Jews composed a substantial portion of the country’s notorious “oligarchs.” As James Henry indicated in The American Interest, “one of the most central facts about modern Russia: its emergence since the 1990s as a world-class kleptocracy, second only to China as a source of illicit capital and criminal loot, with more than $1.3 trillion of net offshore ‘flight wealth’ as of 2016.” Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state’s industry was privatized largely into the hands of a handful of well-connected buyers. Simultaneously, neoliberal “market reform” policies were introduced by Boris Yeltsin, and designed and financed by senior Clinton Administration officials, neoliberal economists, and USAID, World Bank, and IMF officials. According to Henry:

By the late 1990s the actual chaos that resulted from Yeltsin’s warped policies had laid the foundations for a strong counterrevolution, including the rise of ex-KGB officer Putin and a massive outpouring of oligarchic flight capital that has continued virtually up to the present. For ordinary Russians, as noted, this was disastrous. But for many banks, private bankers, hedge funds, law firms, and accounting firms, for leading oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP, as well as for needy borrowers like the Trump Organization, the opportunity to feed on post-Soviet spoils was a godsend. This was vulture capitalism at its worst.[12]

As revealed by Karen Dawisha in her highly acclaimed Putin’s Kleptocracy, during the time Yeltsin’s chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, he was alleged to be involved with the local Mafia, ex-KGB apparatchiks and bureaucrats in schemes involving the diversion of municipal funds, illegal arms shipments, the food shortage scandal of 1991, the local gambling industry, and money laundering for the Cali drug cartel through the Real Estate Board of St. Petersburg. And when he moved into the Kremlin, Putin put his old mafia contacts to use. Mark Galeotti, a Russian organized crime expert and professor at New York University, asserted in a recent lecture at the Hudson Institute that Putin’s Russia is “not so much a mafia state as a state with a nationalized mafia.”[13]

According to a classified cable from the U.S. embassy that was published by Wikileaks, in 2010, José Grinda Gonzalez, Spain’s national court prosecutor, following a decade-long investigation, briefed U.S. officials in Madrid, informing them that the Kremlin used “organised crime groups to do whatever the government of Russia cannot acceptably do as a government.”[14] Putin’s Kremlin has used organized crime to carry out arms smuggling, assassinations, raising funds for black ops, or fomenting subversion in the former Soviet regions. Moscow relied heavily on local organized crime structures in its support for separatist movements in Transdniester, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, and the Donbas. Grinda said the mafia now exercised tremendous control over sectors of the global economy. Gonzalez claimed the KGB and its SVR successor had deliberately created the Liberal Democratic party of Russia (LDPR), which worked hand in hand with mafia groups.[15]

Grinda said he agreed with claims made by former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. “A significant part of Russian organised crime is organised directly from the offices of the Kremlin,” the International Business Times quoted Ben Emmerson, a prominent British attorney who represents the family of slain Russian defector Aleksandr Litvinenko, as saying.[16] According to Litvinenko, Russia’s intelligence and security services control the country’s organised crime network – with Gonzalez citing the federal security service (FSB), foreign intelligence service (SVR) and military intelligence (GRU).[17]

Organized crime in Russia uses legal businesses as fronts for illegal activities and for setting up illegal product lines. The expansion of organized crime in Moscow, for example, occurred through buying real estate, and through gaining controlling shares of banks and other enterprises. Grinda’s 488-page petition to the Central Court in Madrid filed in 29 May 2015 depicts links between the criminal enterprise and top law-enforcement officials and policy makers in Moscow, including some of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, Viktor Zubkov, the chairman of gas exporter Gazprom who was prime minister and first deputy premier from 2007 to 2012, and Zubkov’s son-in-law, former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. Shortly after his rise to power, Putin exploited his influence over the Russian legislature to create an oil and gas monopoly under Gazprom, Russia’s largest company, as a state-controlled operation that has exclusive rights to export natural gas from Russia.[18]

Litvinenko wrote two books, Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within and Lubyanka Criminal Group, in which he accused the Russian secret services of staging the Russian apartment bombings and other terrorism acts in an effort to bring Putin to power. November 23, 2006, Litvinenko died from what was established as a case of poisoning by radioactive polonium-210. Shortly before his death, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko claimed that Simeon Mogilevich, believed to be the “boss of bosses” of most Russian Mafia syndicates in the world, has allegedly had a “good relationship” with Vladimir Putin since the 1990s, and has contacts with al Qaeda to whom he sells weapons.[19] In the year he was murdered, Litvinenko was investigating suspicions that Roman Abramovich was involved in money-laundering and illegal land purchases.[20]

Born in Kiev, Mogilevich earnedan undergraduate economics degree from Lviv University, and specializes in sophisticated, virtually undetectable financial frauds. A 1998 FBI report reportedly said Mogilevich’s organization had “approximately 250 members,” and was involved in trafficking nuclear materials, weapons, and more, as well as money laundering.21 In early 1990, Mogilevich and his top associates settled in Israel, where they received Israeli citizenship. Mogilevich “succeeded in building a bridgehead in Israel” and “developing significant and influential [political] ties,” according to an Israeli intelligence report. In Europe and Russia, the “corruption of police and public officials has been part of the Semion Mogilevich Organization’s modus operandi,” says a classified FBI document.[21]

The corruption apparently extends to the Russian security system. In 1998, the German national television network ZDF reported that the BND had entered into a secret contract with Mogilevich to provide information on the Russian mob. His reported ties to the BND and also expolice officers in Hungary keep him informed of police efforts to penetrate his organization.[22] Mogilevich is on one of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted fugitives. Between 1993 and 1998, Mogilevich caught the FBI’s attention when he allegedly participated in a $150 million scheme to defraud thousands of investors in a Canadian company, YBM Magnex, based just outside Philadelphia, which supposedly made magnets. Russian mafia is suspected of having a sizable investment in General Motors via its interest in Canadian auto parts maker Magna International.[23]

Mogilevich is now a citizen of Israel as well as Ukraine and Russia. Close to 25% of the 200 richest people in Russia are Jewish, according to a report by Russian banking website lanta.ru. The report found that of the country’s 200 billionaires, 48 are Jews and own a combined net worth of $132.9 billion. Among the 48 Jews who made the list, 42 are Ashkenazi and together have a net worth of $122.3 billion, even though they comprise only 0.11% of the population. The wealthiest Ashkenazi is Mikhail Fridman, who has a net worth is $17.6 billion and is Russa’s second richest man. The Ashkenazi billionaires include Viktor Vekselberg (net worth of $17.2 billion), Leonid Michelson (net worth of $15.6 billion), German Khan (net worth of $11.3 billion), Mikhail Prokhorov (net worth of $10.9 billion), and Roman Abramovich (net worth of $9.1 billion).[24]

A 2012 article in the Jerusalem Post titled “At Putin’s side, an army of Jewish billionaires” mentioned three Russian-Jewish billionaire oligarchs in particular who are close to Putin: Mikhail Fridman, Moshe Kantor and Lev Leviev.[25] Under Putin, the Hasidic Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FJCR) became increasingly influential within the Jewish community of Russia, partly due to the influence and support of businessmen close to Putin, notably Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich.[26] Leviev is an Uzbeki-born Israeli citizen and devout Lubavitcher. Known as the “King of Diamonds,” Leviev has come under scrutiny by the US government and international media for, among other things, both his partnership with a Chinese business group believed to have funded North Korea and his possible role in developing West Bank settlements.[27]

Chris Hutchins, a biographer of Putin, describes the relationship between Putin and Abramovich as like that between a father and a favorite son. Abramovich was the first person to originally recommend to Yeltsin that Putin be his successor.[28] Abramovich is the primary owner of the private investment company, Millhouse LLC and is best known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, a Premier League football club. In 1996, acquired the oil company Sibneft, for about $US100 million, and sold it to Gazprom for $US13 billion a decade later. His $5.6-billion legal dispute with a former business partner, Boris Berezovsky, nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin,” uncovered evidence involving illicit activity including protection rackets, contract killings, arms dealings.[29] Abramovich is a chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (which is allied with Putin’s administration), and donates money to the Chabad movement.[30]

Kosher Nostra

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, who was also a mob consigliere, introduced Trump to clients including “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful Mafia group in New York, and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos. According to an article by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston in Politico, Salerno and Castellano dominated the construction firms that Trump hired to build his Trump Tower and Trump Plaza buildings, buying concrete from them at an inflated price to keep the unions under control. An indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump Plaza as one of the acts establishing that S&A was part of a racketeering enterprise. Michael Chertoff, the chief prosecutor in the indictment, called the Genovese and Gambino crime families “the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.”[31]

In 1987 Donald Trump purchased his first casino interests when he acquired 93% of the shares in Resorts International, which evolved from a CIA money-laundering front company set up by CIA chief Allen Dulles in the 1950’s. Resorts International has a sordid history which began in the early 1950’s when it evolved from a CIA and Mossad front company which had been established for the purpose of money laundering the profits from drug trafficking, gambling, and other illegal activities. The appropriation by the mafia of casinos like those operated by Resorts International was the result of a decision by the Meyer Lansky Syndicate to expand operations outside Las Vegas.[32] On October 30, 1978, The Spotlight newspaper reported that the principle investors of Resorts International were Meyer Lansky, Tibor Rosenbaum, William Mellon Hitchcock, David Rockefeller, and one Baron Edmond de Rothschild.[33]

Trump found himself in financial trouble when his three casinos in Atlantic City were under foreclosure threat from lenders, he was Bailed out by senior managing director of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, Wilber Ross, who Trump would later appoint to Secretary of Commerce. Ross, who is known as the “King of Bankruptcy,” specializes in leveraged buyouts and distressed businesses. In the late 1970s, Ross began 24 years at the New York City office of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, where he ran the bankruptcy-restructuring advisory practice. Along with Carl Icahn, Ross convinced bondholders to strike a deal with Trump that allowed Trump to keep control of the casinos.[34]

Ross has had direct financial ties to several leading oligarchs from Russia and the Former Soviet Union. As of February 2017, Forbes magazine lists Ross as one of the world’s billionaires, with a net worth of $2.5 billion. Ross has been Vice Chairman and a major investor since 2014 in the Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank in Cyprus, one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance. His fellow bank co-chair was appointed by Putin. Since the 1990s, Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy, and money laundering.[35]

The Financial Times FT investigation showed that Trump joined forces with the Bayrock Group, a New York property developer founded by Tevfik Arif, newcomer to the US from the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Jewish philanthropist Alexander Mashevich’s “Eurasia Group” was a strategic partner for Bayrock. Mashevich, who holds both Kazakh and Israeli citizenship, served as president of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) until 2011. The EAJC is one of the five regional branches of World Jewish Congress (WJC). In 2011, Mashevich announced his intention to found a Jewish version of Al-Jazeera, to “represent Israel on an international level, with real information.”[36]

Together with two other prominent Kazakh billionaires, Patokh Chodiev (aka “Shodiyev”) and Alijan Ibragimov, Mashkevich reportedly ran the “Eurasian Natural Resources Cooperation.” In Kazakhstan these three are sometimes referred to as “the Trio.” The Trio recently attracted the attention of many investigators and news agencies, including the September 11 Commission Report, the Guardian, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. The litany of the Trio’s alleged activities include resource grabbing, money laundering, bribery, and racketeering. In 2010, Arif and other members of Bayrock’s Eurasian Trio were arrested together in Turkey during a police raid on a suspected prostitution ring, according to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot. At the time, Turkish investigators reportedly asserted that Arif might be the head of a criminal organization that was trafficking in Russian and Ukrainian escorts, allegedly including some as young as 13.[37]

As Bayrock’s COO and managing director, Tevfik Arif hired Felix Sater, the son of a reputed Jewish-Russian mobster. Although Trump has denied knowing him, Sater appeared in photos with Trump, and carried a Trump Organization business card with the title “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Sater reportedly emigrated with his family to the United States in the mid-1970s and settled in “Little Odessa.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States expanded its immigration policies, allowing Soviet Jews, with most settling in a southern Brooklyn area known as Brighton Beach (sometimes nicknamed as “Little Odessa”), which is where Russian organized crime began in the US.[38] The investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman revealed in his book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America that the “Russian” mafia was in fact more Jewish than Russian. Sater had already served time prison for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a margarita glass. Sater pled guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families.[39] Sater’s Bayrock Group was based in Trump Tower. According to a certified US Supreme Court petition, Sater’s FBI handler stated that Sater’s father was a boss for the crime syndicate of Simeon Mogilevich.

Bayrock and Trump joined forces to pursue deals around the world, from New York, Florida, Arizona and Colorado in the US to Turkey, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Their best-known collaboration was Trump SoHo, which was featured in Trump’s television show The Apprentice. Jody Kriss, a former Bayrock finance director, has claimed in racketeering lawsuits against his former employer that Bayrock’s backers included “hidden interests in Russia and Kazakhstan.”[40] Most of the Bayrock-Trump projects either never materialized or were complete failures. SoHo was foreclosed by creditors and resold in 2014 after more than $3 million of customer down payments had to be refunded. Bayrock’s Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale was foreclosed and resold in 2012, while at least three other Trump-branded properties in the United States, in addition to many other concept projects pursued by Bayrock, from Istanbul and Kiev to Moscow and Warsaw, never happened.

Trump and Bayrock partnered with the Sapir Organization, led by the now-deceased Tamir Sapir and his son Alex, in the development of Trump SoHo. During the Cold War, Tamir Sapir, who was born to a Jewish family Tbilisi, Georgia, emigrated to the US where he sold electronics to KGB agents from a storefront in Manhattan. Sapir was ranked on Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires and was a donor to Chabad Lubavitch.[41] Sapir’s executive vice president and top aide, Fred Contini, pled guilty in 2004 to “participating in a racketeering conspiracy with the Gambino crime family for 13 years.”[42] Alex Sapir’s business partner Rotem Rosen is a former lieutenant of Lev Leviev.[43]

All the while, Sater also served as a government informant on the mob and mysterious matters of national security. Sater’s lawyer, Robert S. Wolf, while not addressing Sater’s relationship with Trump stressed Sater’s work for the government, saying he saved lives, including by providing “significant intelligence with respect to nuclear weapons in a major country openly hostile to the United States.”[44] Sater, who met Rebbe Schneerson several times as a childe, is an active member of Chabad-Lubavitch, and in 2014 was named Man of the Year by Chabad of Port Washington, NY. Sater’s rabbi, who presented him the award, explained that it was partly in response to a closed-door meeting he was invited to attend with Sater at the federal building in New York, where dozens of intelligence officers from many agencies praised Sater as a “national hero.” One officer, the rabbi explained, said Sater “probably saved tens of thousands of US lives, maybe even millions… through the brave work that he’s done.” In his own words, Sater explained that his effort aimed of achieving Tikkun Olam.[45]

Trump Tower

Trump Tower has received press attention for including among its many residents tax-dodgers, bribers, arms dealers, convicted cocaine traffickers, and corrupt former FIFA officials. A typical example involves an illegal gambling operation that reportedly took up the entire 51st floor run by the alleged Russian mobster Anatoly Golubchik and Vadim Trincher, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, Trincher’s son Illya, Hillel Nahmad, the son of a billionaire art dealer and heir of a descendant of a Jewish Lebanese art family, and another follower of Chabad-Lubavitch.[46]

“This is the top of the top of the top in organized crime in Russia,” according to the prosecutor.[47] The ring answered to Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whose organization the Interpol believes to be tied to Semion Mogilevich.[48] Tokhtakhounov, who holds both Russian and Israeli citizenship, is one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, known as the “Little Taiwanese.” In 2008, Forbes named him the world’s third most wanted, after Osama bin Laden and el Chapo. He is accused of bribing of judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics, where a Canadian figure-skating team were denied their gold medal.[49] Seven months after he was busted in 2013, he appeared near Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov operated out of Trump Tower, just three floors down from Trump’s penthouse, what prosecutors called “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world.”[50]

The indictment filed by against the gambling ring was filed Preet Bharara, then the US attorney in Manhattan. Bharara earned a reputation of a “crusader” prosecutor who for seven years was one of “the nation’s most aggressive and outspoken prosecutors of public corruption and Wall Street crime.”[51] Following the 2016 election, Bharara claimed that Trump asked Bharara to remain as U.S. Attorney, and Bharara agreed to stay on. However, he was eventually fired, after refusing to resign, as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ request for all remaining 46 US Attorneys appointed during President Obama’s administration to resign.

Trump had reportedly personally sold five separate condos in Trump Tower to David Bogatin. David’s brother Jacob Bogatin was CEO of a fraudulent company YBM Magnex International, supposedly a world-class manufacturer of industrial magnets, was founded by the Mogilevich. And Vyacheslav Ivankov, another key Mogilevich lieutenant in the United States during the 1990s, also lived for a time at Trump Tower, and reportedly had the private telephone and fax numbers for the Trump Organization in his personal phone book.[52]

In all but a handful of cases, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, FL, which describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world,” sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries. Trump uses a recruiter based in upstate New York, Peter Petrina, to find foreign workers for his resorts, golf clubs and vineyard. Petrina is of Romanian descent and has an office in Romania. Trump pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs.[53]

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. made that very claim at a real estate conference in New York in 2008, saying “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Donald Trump Jr. added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”[54] A Reuters review found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses bought as much as $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida. The buyers include Alexander Yuzvik, a former executive in a Moscow-based state-run construction firm involved in construction projects of the FSB and GRU; Andrey Truskov, co-owner of Absolute Group, the biggest wholesale electronic business in Russia; and Alexey Ustaev, the founder and president of St. Petersburg-based Viking Bank, one of the first private investment banks established in Russia after the fall of Communism.[55]

The second Financial Times article places Trump in the middle of a money laundering scheme, in which his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but for laundering hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. One of the people who said he brought Russian money into Trump projects was Sergei Millian, head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce (RACC). The Financial Times quotes former Russian MP Konstantin Borovoi in identifying the chamber as a front for intelligence operations during Soviet times. Borovoi, who is also an expert on the KGB, said “The chamber of commerce institutions are the visible part of the agent network… Russia has spent huge amounts of money on this.”[56] As explained by James S. Henry writing The American Interest, “All this helps to explain one of the most intriguing puzzles about Donald Trump’s long, turbulent business career: how he managed to keep financing it, despite a dismal track record of failed projects.”[57]

Millian came under suspicion as part of a wider FBI probe due to US intelligence concerns that Russia was activating networks long thought defunct after the end of the cold war.[58] Millian boasted in an interview with Russian state news agency Ria Novosti that he had built extensive ties with Trump and his organization, of how Russia-US relations would improve under his presidency. “I can assure you he is very positive and friendly,” he told Ria Novosti.[59] One of the RACC’s main backers is Mikhail Morgulis, a prominent Soviet émigré who also serves as Belarus honorary consul to the US. Morgulis told the Financial Times Millian explained to him he was helping Trump and the Republican party. “We have soft power and we are trying to change relations now,” Mr Morgulis said.[60] For Konstantin Zatulin, head of the Russian parliament’s CIS affairs committee and a vocal advocate of expanding Russian power, the accusations hint of McCarthyism. Nevertheless, Zatulin conceded, “While the west was playing with James Bond . . . we turned our attention to gaining respect,” said Mr Zatulin. “When the west thought the cold war competition was over, they lost respect for their opponent. Now they are waking up to this again.”[61]

Running for President

Trump’s personal counsel, Michael Cohen, along with Trump’s Russian mob-affiliated Lubavitcher business associate Felix Sater, and Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii V. Artemenko, delivered a “peace” plan for Russia and Ukraine to former national security adviser Michael Flynn before Flynn was asked to resign. The plan involved lifting sanctions on Russia in return for Moscow withdrawing its support for pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine. It would also allow Russia to maintain control over Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.[62]

Retired United States Army lieutenant general Michael T. Flynn, was Trump’s initial choice National Security Advisor, before finally being forced to resign after questionable contacts with the Russian government and revelations that he lied about them to the vice president and the FBI. In 2013, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Flynn travelled to Moscow where he became the second director of the DIA to be invited into the headquarters of the GRU, though he will later boast of being the first. “Flynn thought he developed some rapport with the GRU chief,” a former senior U.S. military official said.[63] Records show that Flynn collected nearly $68,000 in fees and expenses from Russia-related entities in 2015. The bulk of the money, more than $45,000, came from Russia Today, when he was invited to a gala in Moscow in honor of RT, to participate in a panel on “Geopolitics 2015 and Russia’s changing role in the world.”[64] Flynn, who had made semi-regular appearances as an analyst on RT after he retired from government service, sat next to Putin, and at the same table as Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Flynn was also paid $11,250 that year by the American subsidiary of a Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, and another $11,250 by a U.S. air cargo company affiliated with the Volga-Dnepr Group, which is owned by a Russian businessman. Kaspersky Lab, which makes some of the world’s most popular anti-virus software, has long suspected by US intelligence of being used to assist Russian espionage efforts. However, in December 2016, a top Kaspersky Lab official was arrested by Russian authorities and accused of spying for American companies and intelligence services. In 2007 Volga-Dnepr was removed from a list of approved UN vendors following corruption allegations against two Russian officials who steered contracts to the firm.[65]

In March 2016, Trump hired Paul Manafort who has worked in presidential politics since the 1976 Republican convention. Manafort has spent the majority of his recent career with pro-Russian groups in the Ukraine. He’s also been forging some intricate business deals for Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of Putin who has been denied entry into the United States due to alleged ties with organized crime.[66] According to Forbes magazine, Deripaska is Russia’s sixth-wealthiest man, with an estimated fortune of $13.3 billion.[67] In 2000, he and Roman Abramovich created a partnership and founded RUSAL, the largest aluminum company in the world.[68] In 2010, the Financial Times published a story exploring Deripaska’s business relations with Sergei Popov and Anton Malevsky, alleged heads of Russian organized crime groups.[69] Starting in 2005, Manafort negotiated a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska to influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the US, Europe and former Soviet republics in favor of Putin’s government. Manafort told Deripaska he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine “at the highest levels of the U.S. government — the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department.”[70]

One of Manafort’s biggest clients was the shady pro-Russian Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash. By his own admission, Firtash maintains strong ties with Ukrainian/Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich.[71] Firtash and a partner owned half of RosUkrEnergo (RUE), which was founded in 2004 and emerged as Ukraine’s sole gas importer in 2006 to 2009. Ukraine’s security service in 2005 said may be indirectly controlled by Semion Mogilevich. Russia’s state-run Gazprom owned half of RUE, and there are the reports that, as a 50-50 partner, Firtash made his billions as Putin’s handpicked surrogate.[72]

Manafort stepped down as Trump’s campaign manager in August of 2016 in response to press investigations into his ties not only to Firtash, but to Ukraine’s previous pro-Russian Yanukovych government. Bankers close to Putin granted Firtash credit lines of up to $11 billion, which helped Firtash to back Yanukovich who won power and went on to rule Ukraine for four years. The relationship had great geopolitical value for Putin: Yanukovich ended up steering the Ukraine away from the West and towards Moscow until he was overthrown in February 2014. “Firtash has always been an intermediary,” said Viktor Chumak, chairman of the anti-corruption committee in the previous Ukrainian parliament. “He is a political person representing Russia’s interests in Ukraine.”[73] Yanukovych is mentioned in the unverified Trump Dossier that went public just before the inauguration. He was said to have assured Putin that no one would ever trace alleged cash payments to Manafort back to the Russian president.[74]

Additionally, Trump recently recruited Carter Page, who is well familiar with Russian politics, as one of his foreign-policy advisors. Page, who maintains close ties to a number of prominent Russian politicians and businessmen, worked to open a Merrill Lynch office in Moscow.[75] Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a New York investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business. His partner in that venture is former Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko. By his own admission, his “e-mail inbox filled up with positive notes from Russian contacts” who were enthusiastic at the prospect of strengthening ties with the US. Page is known as a staunch defender of Russia’s ambitions as well as a routine critic of current US policymakers. In January 2017, Page, whose name appeared repeatedly in the Trump Dossier, was under investigation by the FBI, CIA, NSA, ODNI, and FinCEN.

Jared Kushner

In 2015, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser Jared Kushner, who has strong ties with the Lubavitchers, purchased the former New York Times Building in Manhattan from Leviev. Kushner, who married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka after she converted to Judaism, had become what the Times described as Trump’s “de facto campaign manager.”[76] He was principal owner in his family’s real estate company Kushner Companies, and of Observer Media, publisher of the weekly, on-line New York Observer. The Kushner’s were friends with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who stayed at their home in New Jersey, sleeping in Jared’s bedroom.[77] Trump’s foundation has donated thousands of dollars to Chabad institutions, and Haaretz also reported that the foundation of Jared’s parents gave $342,500 to Chabad institutions and projects over a 10-year period.[78] “Israel wasn’t a political discussion for him; it was his family, his life, his people,” said Hirschy Zarchi, rabbi at the Chabad House at Harvard, where Jared was a member.[79]

Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, was a real-estate titan and one of the most important Democratic donors in the country. He was arrested on charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign donations, and witness tampering in 2004 and was eventually convicted on all charges and sentenced to two years in federal prison.[80] In 2004, Charles Kushner was investigated for hiding violations of federal limits on campaign contributions. He then hired a prostitute in order to blackmail one of the case’s key witnesses, whose wife then informed investigators of his attempts at obstructing justice.[81]

As Director of the United States National Economic Council, Trump appointed Gary Cohn, who is currently the president and COO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank for which Trump took Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz to task for their connections. On January 27, 2017, the Kushners invited Cohn, Department of the Treasury appointee Steve Mnuchin and several members of the President’s cabinet for a Shabbat meal, along with Rabbi Levi Shemtov, from the local Chabad-Lubavitch house, which is only a few blocks away from their home. Also attending were Department of Commerce pick Wilbur Ross and his wife Hilary Geary Ross, and Strategic Communications Director Hope Hicks.[82]

Shemtov heads the Central Committee of Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbis. Shemtov serves the daily governmental and diplomatic needs of the international Chabad-Lubavitch movement, flying to Buenos Aires, Moscow and other capitals. Shemtov is often at the White House, Pentagon, United States Department of State and other venues in official Washington, and maintains close relationships with numerous members of the US Congress, senior Administration officials and leaders in the international community, including a number of heads of state and government.[83]

Steve Mnuchin Second-generation Goldman Sachs alumnus and Skull and Bones member. Cohn and Mnuchin, who have known each other for fifteen years, worked together on building deals years earlier. After leaving Goldman Sachs, Mnuchin invested in Hollywood blockbusters and worked at hedge funds including that of George Soros, who Trump ads have attacked. Mnuchin’s business partner, Australian billionaire James Packer, is a close friend and confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose gifts to the Netanyahu family were being investigated by the Israel Police.[84] Mnuchin told the New York Times in May 2016: “I was there at the beginning when he decided to run for president, and I’ve been a supporter and quiet adviser behind the scenes to him.”[85]

Kushner has acted as a liaison with dozens of influential figures, including Henry Kissinger, Paul Ryan, Rupert Murdoch, and, until recently, Roger Ailes, founder and former Chairman and CEO of Fox News.[86] Jared and Ivanka are close friends with Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendi Deng, who was rumored to be dating Putin.[87] They are also friends with the wife of Abramovich, Dasha Zhukova, who Ivanka invited to Trump’s inauguration.[88] All of them were guests in August 2016 on medial mogul David Geffen’s Geffen’s $200 million yacht off the coast of Croatia, and a few weeks later at the US Open.[89]

Messiah

Russia, reported the BBC, “has, for the time being, supplanted the United States as a key player in crisis management in Syria.”[90] On 19 October 2015, Putin and Netanyahu agreed to allow Gazprom to develop the Leviathan gas fields with major concessions from Israel.[91] “We discussed the continued coordination between our two militaries in the region, which already works quite well,” Netanyahu told reporters at a joint press conference in the Kremlin with Putin after they met again in June 2016. “We talked about the challenges to all civilized countries such as terrorism and radical Islam,” Netanyahu added. According to an English translation of Putin’s words by the Tass News Agency, the Russian leader stated: “We spoke about the necessity to pool efforts to counter international terrorism. Israel knows only too well what it means and it is fighting against terrorism. In this sense, we are unconditional allies.”[92]

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Putin is popular amongst the Russian Jewish community, who see him as a force for stability. In 2016, Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, also praised Putin for making Russia “a country where Jews are welcome.”[93] Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, of the Chabad-Lubavitcher, said Putin “paid great attention to the needs of our community and related to us with a deep respect.”[94] As noted by Joshua Keating, “One of the more intriguing aspects of contemporary Russian Jewish life is the close relationship between the Kremlin and Chabad, also known as Lubavitch.”[95] In 1992, Lazar became acquainted with Putin confidant Lev Leviev, who introduced him to Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich. Putin set up a Kremlin-affiliated Jewish structure called the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. In 1999, Putin’s ally Leviev established the new organization, which was chaired by Abramovich. Lazar, an American citizen and a native of Milan, Italy, was quickly granted Russian citizenship and appointed chief rabbi of the new federation.[96]

Lazar is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rabbi,” appears frequently at Putin’s side at public events, and is the leader of the Federation of Jewish Communities (known by its Russian acronym FEOR). Chabad members are a small fraction of Russia’s small Jewish community. Adolf Shayevech, a prominent figure in the Jewsh community since the late Soviet period, was considered chief rabbi until 2000, and still claims the title. The Russian Jewish Congress, the country’s largest secular Jewish organization, also recognizes Shayevech. However, FEOR had received government support, which has restored dozens of synagogues and built Jewish community centers throughout the country. “Eighty percent of all synagogues, the rabbis are Chabad,” said Rabbi Alexander Boroda, the organization’s chief spokesman.[97] Jason Greenblatt, a former Trump Organization lawyer and now a special representative for international negotiations at the White House, met with Lazar in the summer of 2016.[98]

At the 2006 International Conference of Shluchim, attended by Alan Dershowitz, Lazar told the story supposedly related to by Putin, that when he was a young child, he grew up in a very poor family, but his next neighbours who were Hassidic Jews were extremely kind to him. “He realized,” recounts Lazar that, “not only were they kind to a child that wasn’t Jewish, but they were kind to a child in a time and place when it was dangerous to do that.” In a 2014 meeting with Lazar and chief rabbis from Israel, Europe and Russia, Putin said he “supports the struggle of Israel,” was noted as a “true friend” and ally of Benjamin Netanyahu, and pledged to combat anti-Semitism and “Holocaust denial” in Russia. During the meeting the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yitzhak Yosef, said of Putin’s rule in Russia: “according to the Jewish tradition, your leadership is decided by the kingdom of G-d, King of the world, and therefore we bless you: Blessed is the One who gave of His glory to flesh and blood.”[99]

Rabbi Hillel Weiss, the spokesman for the nascent Sanhedrin, which is composed of right-wing Zionists, claimed that the American media, “tried to create a man-made reality in which Trump could not win. In the end, it did not work. Hashem is moving us towards a greater Jerusalem, and anyone who goes against that, is destined to fail.” Rabbi Yosef Berger, who oversees the final resting place of King David on Mount Zion, told Breaking Israel News. “The gematria (numerology) of his name is Moshiach (Messiah). He is connected to the Messianic process which is happening right now. When he promised to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, he attached himself to the power of Moshiach, which gave him the boost he needed. If you separate from Jerusalem, disaster will follow.” Rabbi Berger added, “As the spiritual descendant of the Biblical nation of Edom, America has a very important role to play in the Messiah. But in order to be suited for that role, America had to be humbled.”[100]

Orthodox scholars and rabbinic authorities generally believe that rebuilding of the Third Temple of Jerusalem, should occur in the era of the Messiah. The revived Sanhedrin contacted Trump, who has promised to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and Putin who expressed desire for the same, to join forces and fulfill their Biblically-mandated roles by rebuilding the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The revived Sanhedrin, also known as the Nascent Sanhedrin, was established in 2004. It represents the sixth attempt in recent history, after Rabbi Jacob Berab in 1538, Rabbi Yisroel of Shklov in 1830, Rabbi Aharon Mendel haCohen in 1901, Rabbi Zvi Kovsker in 1940 and Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon in 1949. The Nascent Sanhedrin regards itself as a provisional body awaiting integration into the Israeli government as both a supreme court and an upper house of the Knesset, while the Israeli secular press regards it as an illegitimate fundamentalist organization of rabbis.

The current Nasi of the Sanhedrin is Chabad-Lubavitcher Adin Steinsaltz, who has been hailed by Time magazine as a “once-in-a-millennium scholar.”[101] Its long-term aims are to build the third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. The most immediate and obvious obstacle to realization of these goals is the fact that two historic Islamic structures which are thirteen centuries old, namely the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, are built on top of the Temple Mount. Al Aqsa is the third holiest site in Sunni Islam. Muslims believe that Muhammad was transported from the Sacred Mosque in Mecca to al-Aqsa during the Night Journey, known as the Isra and Mi’raj.

During Putin’s third official trip to Jerusalem in 2012, an Israeli bystander called out in Russian, “Welcome, President Putin.” Putin approached the man, who explained the importance of the Temple Mount and the Jewish Temple. Chadrei Charedim, an Orthodox Hebrew news site, reported that Putin responded, “That’s exactly the reason I came here – to pray for the Temple to be built again.”[102] The Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed in Congress in 1995, initiated the move of the embassy, but has been vetoed by every American president since. The Sanhedrin calls on Trump to withhold the veto after he takes office. “We are poised to rebuild the Temple. The political conditions today, in which the two most important national leaders in the world support the Jewish right to Jerusalem as their spiritual inheritance, is historically unprecedented,” Rabbi Weiss told Breaking Israel News.[103]

Further Reading:

Grant Stern. “A Russian Mobster Built Trump SoHo Into Putin’s Money Laundering Racket.” Medium (July 8, 2017).

Timothy L. O’Brien. “Trump, Russia and a Shadowy Business Partnership.” Bloomberg (June 21, 2017).