The draft law introduces comprehensive regulation of the gambling market in Ukraine
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine supported draft law No. 2285-d “On state regulation of the organization and conduct of gambling” as the basis in the first reading.
260 members of Parliament supported the document.
The draft law introduces comprehensive regulation of the gambling market in Ukraine and exclusive list of gambling activities permitted in Ukraine.
Highlights of the law about Casinos in Ukraine
The provision on the possibility of locating slot machine halls and betting shops in separate buildings is excluded. Gaming machines are allowed to be placed only in hotels.
The draft low introduces system for licensing gambling activities with a differentiated fee for licenses depending on the type of activity, location of a gambling establishment and the like; stringent requirements are established for the financial condition of gambling organizers in order to ensure their financial stability and ensure payment of winnings.
The document establishes special requirements for the compliance of gambling equipment used for gambling with generally accepted international standards; the basis is being created for introducing restrictions on the activities of operators that are not registered in Ukraine and do not have appropriate license.
It should be stressed that they plan to increase minimum age of gambler – from 18 to 21, as well as establish requirements for gamers and their identification, which will help to prevent the negative consequences of participation in gambling, in particular, persons under the age of 21, and tough financial sanctions for failure to comply with such requirements. The draft law suggests creating a register of self-restrictions of persons and of those who have other restrictions imposed. As a result, the future law makes it possible to limit participation of certain person in gambling for a period of 6 months to 3 years.
The bill provides that regulation in the field of gambling is carried out by a special body – the Commission for the Development and Regulation of Gambling, which is subordinate to the Cabinet of Ministers. The domain of competence of the commission includes licensing of gambling organizers, maintaining relevant registers, establishing requirements for certification of relevant gambling equipment.
The document introduces online monitoring system, which will allow for state control of the activities of the organizers of gambling by receiving data from the gaming equipment of the organizers of gambling, which is connected to a single system.
The document also stipulates the creation of a special Fund in the state budget to support medicine, sports and culture.
In addition, restrictions on the advertising of gambling are established; in particular, bill bans outdoor advertising, except for signage, and imposes restrictions on all other types of advertising.
Regulation of selected gambling activities
1) casino gambling establishments: limited casino operation mode is established, including locating facilities exclusively on the territory of buildings of five-star hotels with appropriate number of rooms for different territories; at this the area of such institutions should be at least 500 square meters;
2) betting and gambling online: the draft law authorizes betting activity online or in betting shops. In addition, the bill establishes special requirements for gaming equipment and its certification for betting shops;
3) gambling online, certified online system and mandatory connection to the online monitoring system, website with .UA domain and the ability of each player to set voluntary restrictions on money and time are provided;
4) slot machines: limit on the number of slot machines is established – up to 40,000. The right to place these machines is exercised through electronic auctions with reference to the corresponding territory. The bill also sets requirements for slot machine halls (only in three, four and five star hotels).
5) lotteries: the bill suggests three licenses for the issue and holding of lotteries, which is used in many countries of the European Union and other foreign countries to stimulate the development of the lottery market. Such an approach will make it possible to attract large international companies in the field of lottery activities, introduce generally accepted international standards, attract investment in the country’s economy, increase the confidence of players in the field of lottery activities, etc.;
6) poker: allowed online; the draft law sets requirements for premises and special rules for holding poker tournaments.
Now it is difficult to say exactly when casino will be allowed in 5* Hotels in Ukraine, since the bill is still being finalized. However, we can certainly hope that gambling business will again become more open and legal in Ukraine.
In 2010, Ukraine completely banned gaming activities and all casinos were closed.
Yes, if you travel to Ukraine in 2020, you can visit the casino, there are none, even in 5 star hotels. However, you can enjoy nightlife Of Ukraine:
Guide to the nightlife of Kyiv https://guideme.com.ua/tour-item/kiev-bar-crawl/ Guide to the nightlife of Lviv https://guideme.com.ua/tour-item/lviv-nightlife-tou
Source: guideme.com.ua
Gambling in Ukraine

The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).

Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United State President
The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).

Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United States President
The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).

Hello, I think about trying myself out in a card counting thus i have some questions about whether or not I'm understanding things correctly. I'll be really grateful for the answers :) After all the things I want to ask there will be some additional info about some things I want to share because some of the questions may seem a bit odd. It's (as, well, everything in this post) optional and has pretty much nothing to do with counting. So the questions are as follows:
1) Rules are as follows: 6D, 3:2, ENHC, S17, DA2, SP3, SPA3 (4 hands in total), DAS, NHSA, SURRXA, ES10 (I belive if it's ENHC it's always an early surrender? Anyway you can surrender anything except an dealer's Ace upcard). Penetration is 5:6. I belive that's are some great rules but I can't calculate the exact house edge under this specific set of rules. I belive it's around 0.2%. Is there anyway to calculate the exact house edge? I've been searching for a different calculators but didn't find any that could calculate all of the above. Also tried searching how different rules affected house edge and calculating all of this myself, but failed again.
2) Is it worth to adjust my betting strategy if I want to use the exact house edge? Just as an example: if the real house edge is 0.2% should I try to calculate all the different bet sizes for a Kelly betting? By that I mean that at TC 0 house edge is 0.2%, TC 1 -0.3%, TC 2 -0.8% and so on?
3) About betting and how I understand it. So the best way to maximize your bankroll growth rate while having the lowest risk of ruin is to use full Kelly which gives you 13.53% RoR. For a part time player I belive that's acceptable. So the absolute minimum of a bankroll I'd need will be 1k$ (min bet is 5$ and 5/0.005=1000, right?) IF I intent to play only at TC 2+ which means wonging a lot. So at TC 2 I start betting the table minimum and incrementing my bets by 5$ for each next TC. I belive that would also decrease ror but I'm not sure by how much. Also If I want to play from the start of the shoe and let's say wong out at TC -3 (using flooring for handling non integer TCs so it's more like -2 "actually") and my first raise being 10$ at TC 2 while betting only half a Kelly which would give me 1.83% ror (according to a table I've found on the internet) I'll need a 4k$ bankroll?
4) Deck estimation. I'm really bad at it and so I decided to try to implement a side count of all the cards dealt but it's really hard and Colin from BJA said in one of his videos that's it's really not worth it. After I found out that the average hand consists of 2.7 cards I've decided to keep a side count but all the hands played which means that I decrease my divisor by half a deck for every 10 hands played which gives us ~27 cards. I belive that with this method it's better to use half Kelly betting because we are worried about skyrocketing our ror by overbetting because of the varience of the shoe and how the game is going. Half a Kelly gives us 3/4 of a growth rate with under 2% ror and overbetting half a Kelly is actually going closer to betting a full Kelly which only increases our growth rate and all of that applies to a full Kelly which means that overbetting a full Kelly decreases our growth rate while making our ror even worse than 13.5%. The real question is: is this method an OK to use? Would dispersion of amount of cards per hand really affect the overbetting? It's an important question because I don't think I'll be able to try half Kelly before at least 2k$ bankroll. And for me it's a lot of money. More about all the unimportant stuff later on.
So thanks for reading all of this, now I'll tell some things that aren't really about blackjack. Feel free to skip all of this and I'd be really grateful for all the answers :)
I'm 22 and I live in Ukraine. I'm a croupier myself :) My english is kinda rusty but I belive you can forgive me for that :) In Ukraine casinos are only beginning to open because all of the gambling things were not legal till right the recent days. Minimum age to start playing is 21. In worst case 12 hours of dealer's life (1 work day) is 25$+70% of the tips that are being split. If you've read the betting strategy for a full Kelly and min bet of 5 at TC 2+ you could be surprised by the amount of EV I'm in theory generating but if it'll be worth at least 5$/hour (against 2.1$/hour as a croupier not including tips) and thinking of it as a part time thing I belive that's worth a shot. Thanks for your attention, time and (I hope) answers :) First time using reddit as well :)

Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United States President
The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).

Introduction

Over the past 10 days, we've seen Trump fully indulge his authoritarian impulses in an attempt to stamp out any inkling of facts that he dislikes - whether that be for personal, egocentric reasons or to shore up political strength. One could argue the true "start" of this no-holds-barred dictatorial spree actually stretches back to the Republican acquittal in the impeachment trial. I'd agree with that, too. But 10 days ago Congress was given its first formal warning of the dangers facing our democracy in the next nine months. That Trump launched a war on the intelligence community in response to Americans trying to protect their country from foreign influence speaks volumes to me.
Trump and the Republican party are actively abetting an attack on our nation. "To abet" is to encourage or assist (someone) to do something wrong, in particular, to commit a crime or other offense. Using the immense power given to him by willing Republicans in Congress, Trump is using his authority to hobble the ability of anyone - even America's national security leaders - to stop him and his regime from carrying out Trump's desires, however corrupt, self-serving, or insane.

10 days ago...

The briefing

Ten days ago, on Feb. 13, the intelligence community warned House Intelligence Committee members that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to try to get Donald Trump re-elected. The briefing, provided by top election security official Shelby Pierson, informed House lawmakers that Russia had “developed a preference” for Trump and would also interfere in Democratic primaries.
Trump - who learned of the briefing from the committee’s Ranking Member Devin Nunes - grew angry at acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire for providing the information to Congress. The following day, Trump “berated” Maguire for allowing it to take place. According to The New York Times, “Trump was particularly irritated that Representative Adam B. Schiff” was present because the president worried that Schiff would “weaponize” the intelligence about Russia’s support for him.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff responded to Trump’s anger at the briefing: "We count on the intelligence community to inform Congress of any threat of foreign interference in our elections. If reports are true and the President is interfering with that, he is again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling. Exactly as we warned he would do."
Side note: A Pardon for Assange
Trump is so desperate to keep Russia’s interference on his behalf a secret, that he may have supported then-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s offer of a pardon to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in exchange for denying Russian involvement in the Democratic National Committee email leak.

Lawyer Edward Fitzgerald told a court on Wednesday that a witness statement application claimed that then-California representative Dana Rohrabacher went to visit Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on the instruction of the "President." According to the statement described by Fitzgerald, Rohrabacher's mission was to offer Assange a US pardon, if he would "play ball" by saying the Russians had nothing to do with the leak -- an assertion Assange had previously made.

The White House has denied the claim and distanced itself from Rohrabacher.
The former congressman admits to making the offer to Assange - but does not state that President Trump directed him to do so.

“I spoke to Julian Assange and told him if he would provide evidence about who gave WikiLeaks the emails, I would petition the president to give him a pardon,” Rohrabacher told Yahoo News. “He knew I could get to the president.”

The purge

In retaliation for the briefing, Trump ditched considerations to nominate Maguire to be permanent DNI and quickly replaced him with loyalist Richard Grenell.

Ominous warning: William H. McRaven, a retired Navy admiral who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, wrote in The Washington Post that “if good men like Joe Maguire can’t speak the truth, we should be deeply afraid.” McRaven continues: “in this administration, good men and women don’t last long. Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs...when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

In the days that followed, two other top Intelligence officials announced their departures: (1) Grenell fired the second-highest-ranking official at the ODNI, Andrew Hallman, who had over three decades of intelligence experience; (2) the top lawyer for the ODNI, Jason Klitenic, submitted his resignation, to go into effect in early March. It is unlikely that Klitenic was pushed out, because he played a role in helping prevent the Ukraine whistleblower’s complaint from reaching Congress last year.
Within his first 48 hours, Grenell proceeded to name Kash Patel, former adviser to Rep. Devin Nunes, as a senior adviser in the office of the DNI. As Nunes’ top staffer, Patel authored a memo used to argue that the FBI and DOJ’s probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was actually a deep state plot to take down Trump. Patel also assisted Trump in his pressure campaign against Ukraine: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill testified to Congress that Patel “misrepresented” as the NSC expert on Ukraine, which was actually Vindman’s position.

Vindman also testified that he was told Patel had been circumventing normal NSC process to get negative material about Ukraine in front of the president, feeding Trump’s belief that Ukraine was brimming with corruption and had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats.
That upset Vindman, along with Hill and Bolton, he testified, because they were constantly having to counter that narrative with the president.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Patel may have coordinated the hold on aid to Ukraine to begin with:

...the 300-page impeachment report released by House Intelligence Committee Democrats Tuesday said that Patel spoke with Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, in the spring, before nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine was suspended.
According to the call records revealed in the report, Patel had a 25-minute phone conversation with Giuliani on May 10. Five minutes after their call, Giuliani spoke with an unidentified number for 17 minutes and then with associate Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American who has been accused of illegally funneling foreign money to U.S. political candidates and of aiding Giuliani in his Ukraine investigations.

Acting officials

Richard Grenell, Trump’s newest acting-DNI, has served as U.S. ambassador to Germany since 2018. By taking advantage of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, Trump has been able to maintain a cabinet full of acting officials with little Congressional oversight. If a vacancy occurs in a position that requires Senate confirmation, Trump can appoint someone from any agency who is serving in a different Senate-confirmed position, Grenell, as an ambassador, has already been confirmed by the Senate - though for an entirely different job with entirely different qualifications.
Acting officials can serve in the vacant position for 210 days. If the president submits a nomination to the Senate during that time, the acting officer can continue to perform the office’s duties while the nomination is pending, however long it takes. If the nominee is returned, the officer can work as acting for another 210 days, and then through a second entire nomination process, and a final 210 days if that second nominee is returned. Then, if time runs out, the office must remain vacant until someone is confirmed by the Senate for the job.

Note: Enforcement of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act is problematic. It is up to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to track time of acting service for each position. If the GAO finds a violation, the office must send a letter to the agency involved, to the president, and to Congress. At this point, the person’s actions have no force or effect - but someone with legal standing needs to bring a lawsuit in order to enforce the provision.

Therefore, because Maguire was serving as an acting official as well, Grenell cannot remain in the acting DNI position past March 11 unless the president formally nominates someone else for the job. The White House and Grenell have acknowledged that a search for a formal nominee is underway. The administration was reportedly considering Rep. Doug Collins for the post… until Collins turned down the job on national television.

Jan. 2019, Trump said: "I sort of like acting. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting. So we have a few that are acting. We have a great, great Cabinet." A recent analysis found that acting officials in the Trump administration have held down 22 cabinet and cabinet-level jobs for a combined 2,700 days -- about 1 out of every 9 days across those jobs.
Hypothetical: Let’s say Trump wants to keep Grenell in the position for as long as possible, without nominating him because it is unlikely Grenell would be confirmed, even by the Republican-controlled Senate (see below). As long as Trump nominates someone for the position by March 11, Grenell can serve for however long as the Senate confirmation process takes - typically, around 2 months if the nominee is uncontroversial. That puts Grenell’s end date in mid-May. But Trump could intentionally nominate someone controversial to slow the process, or possibly even instruct his Senate allies to slow-walk the process. That would push out Grenell’s end date into the summer. If the nominee is not confirmed, the 210 day clock resets, giving Grenell an additional six months to serve in his acting capacity. As the end of that six months nears, Trump could put forward a second nominee, during whose confirmation process Grenell can continue to serve in the position. If that nominee fails as well, Grenell has a final six months to be acting-DNI before the position must remain vacant.

Sunday update: A Lawfare analysis

The term of art for this process is “manipulation-by-appointment.” Rather than trying to force intelligence analysts to change their views in ways that are politically convenient, this kind of politicization works by making sure their bosses are politically pliable. Manipulation-by-appointment reduces the risk of a public scandal because politicians are less likely to come into conflict with intelligence chiefs. There is no need to strong-arm intelligence agencies to fall in line with policy if the chiefs are already on board. source

Who is Richard Grenell?

Grenell has no experience as an intelligence officer and has only served in government as a communications director for the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the George W. Bush administration. After that, Grenell ran a public affairs consultancy and appeared on Fox News. In May 2018 he was confirmed as the ambassador to Germany, where he quickly made enemies:

Grenell’s tenure as ambassador to Germany has been rocky, at least from Berlin’s perspective. He has palled around with far-right groups, spoken openly of a desire to change Angela Merkel’s government, and made statements about U.S. views that sounded like direct orders to sensitive German ears. Last spring, leaders of two German political parties called him a “brat” and a “failure” and urged his ouster.

Additionally, Grenell is an associate of none-other-than Rudy Giuliani. According to Lev Parnas, Victoria Toensing asked Grenell “for advance notice if the Department of Justice were to move to extradite an indicted Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, from whom Giuliani hoped to get compromising information. Parnas also claims Grenell said he would comply.” Firtash is a powerful ally of Vladimir Putin and has assisted the Russian president’s attempt to gain control over Ukraine’s political system and economy. In 2017, the U.S. Justice Department said Firtash was among the “upper echelon associates of Russian organized crime.”
Aside from being remarkably unqualified, it is unclear whether Grenell even has a top-level security clearance or could qualify for one. A report by ProPublica revealed that Grenell used to do consulting work for Moldovan politician Vladimir Plahotniuc, “who is now a fugitive and was recently barred from entering the U.S. under anti-corruption sanctions imposed last month by the State Department.” Grenell failed to disclose this work and did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Undisclosed work for a foreign politician would ordinarily pose a problem for anyone applying for a security clearance or a job in a U.S. intelligence agency because it could make the person susceptible to foreign influence or blackmail, according to the official policy from the office that Trump tapped Grenell to lead.
“That’s really easy, he should not have a clearance,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington-area lawyer specializing in security clearances. “If he were one of my clients and just a normal [federal employee], he would almost assuredly not have a clearance.”
McClanahan said it’s unclear how Grenell could have already gotten a clearance as an ambassador. The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the Trump administration has overruled career officials in granting security clearances to political appointees.

Aside from his appearances on Fox News, Grenell may have come to Trump’s attention through the patronage of Trump properties. The Washington Post found that the Trump International Hotel in D.C. listed Grenell as a “Gold” level member of the Trump Organization’s “Trump Card” loyalty program in 2018. Kelly Craft, the ambassador to the U.N., was also listed as a gold level member.

Russia’s bet keeps paying off

Moving back to the source of Trump’s fury: The nation knows that Russia prefers Trump to win re-election. When told this, Trump’s Republican allies on the House Intelligence Committee challenged the ODNI’s conclusion. But, as Russia expert Julia Davis points out, Russian state media has never stopped declaring the multitude of ways that Trump’s election has proven “exceedingly beneficial for the Kremlin.”

Russian state media openly gloats about the Kremlin’s influence over Trump, believing that he can endure the exposure without repercussions, and by flaunting the Kremlin’s sway with the White House, Russia further weakens U.S. democracy, which has always been one of its main pursuits.
...Every denial of Russian election interference coming out of the White House brings Putin one step closer to the fulfillment of his goals. Every election-security bill that is blocked by the GOP in the Senate gives advantage to our foreign adversaries—and they are not sick of winning.

We don’t need to rely on Russian state media to tell us that Putin prefers Trump: The Russian president has told us so himself. In 2018, at a joint press conference with Trump in Helsinki, Putin told the press that he wanted Trump to win in 2016 because he believed Trump’s policies would be more beneficial to the Kremlin. "Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal,” Putin said.
Washington Post columnist Max Boot lays out the global benefits Russia enjoys:

Putin doesn’t care about Trump’s sanctions on Iran, which indirectly help Russia by boosting the price of oil. But he does care that Trump has strengthened Russia’s longtime ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
...Trump has facilitated Russian designs not only in Syria but also in Libya, where the Russian-backed strongman Khalifa Hifter is trying to overthrow a United Nations-backed government in Tripoli. The U.S. government ostensibly supports the regime in Tripoli, but Trump called Hifter and gave him a green light for his offensive. Trump is making Russia great again in the Middle East for the first time since Egypt expelled Russian advisers in 1972.
...Far from strengthening NATO, as he now boasts, Trump has weakened it by relentlessly criticizing the alliance and portraying it as a bunch of deadbeats.

Addendum

The purge, act 2

While Trump purges officials he sees as disloyal from the intelligence community, newly-returned staffer John McEntee is busy searching out “Never Trumpers” to punish. According to Axios, “McEntee called in White House liaisons from cabinet agencies for an introductory meeting Thursday, in which he asked them to identify political appointees across the U.S. government who are believed to be anti-Trump.” Those officials “will no longer get promotions by shifting them around agencies.”

Reminder: McEntee was Trump’s personal aide throughout much of 2017 and into 2018, but was pushed out by then-Chief of Staff John Kelly over gambling debts that threatened his security clearance. Trump reportedly sees McEntee as “the ultimate loyalist” and brought him back at a time when the president “feels he’s surrounded by snakes and wants to clear out all the disloyal people.”

SUNDAY update: The Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them — according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the effort. Included in this network of conservative activists assembling purge lists is Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Meanwhile, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro is on a quest to identify and remove the author known as “Anonymous,” responsible for many anti-Trump op-eds and the book “A Warning.” Last week, it appears that Navarro has zeroed in on a potential suspect: Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates, who is being transferred to the Department of Energy. Though the official White House line doesn’t acknowledge it, The New York Times reported that Coates has been “targeted by a whisper campaign among some pro-Trump conservatives that she was Anonymous.” Allies of Coates deny the allegation.

Several officials who heard Navarro push this said they do not believe Coates is the author and several described her as loyal to the President's agenda. However, the workplace became untenable given these dynamics, so Coates began looking for an exit, officials said, which led to her move to the Energy Department on Thursday. CNN

A weakened National Security apparatus

After last year’s exodus of National Security officials, the entire system is weakened by a lack of expertise and will to stand up for the truth. The NSC has gone from 174 policy positions in October, to fewer than 115 this month. Under Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, the NSC has been co-opted to building support for Trump’s craziest whims. The New York Times reports:

When President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, convenes meetings with top National Security Council officials at the White House, he sometimes opens by distributing printouts of Mr. Trump’s latest tweets on the subject at hand.
The gesture amounts to an implicit challenge for those present. Their job is to find ways of justifying, enacting or explaining Mr. Trump’s policy, not to advise the president on what it should be.
That is the reverse of what the National Security Council was created to do at the Cold War’s dawn — to inform and advise the president on national security decisions.

Most recently, O’Brien proved his willingness to do Trump’s dirty work and weaponize intelligence for political gain. In an interview with Face the Nation, O’Brien states that he hasn’t seen any evidence of Russia seeking to help Trump. But, O’Brien says, it is plausible that Russia is seeking to help the Democrats instead.

O’Brien seized gleefully on reports about Russia and Sanders but rejected reports about Russia and Trump. Russian backing for Sanders, he said, would be “no surprise. He honeymooned in Moscow.”

New: Sunday night updates

On Sunday, Trump made a veiled threat toward House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff while claiming without evidence that the Democrat had leaked information from the Russia briefing on Feb. 13: “Somebody please tell incompetent (thanks for my high poll numbers) & corrupt politician Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff to stop leaking Classified information or, even worse, made up information, to the Fake News Media. Someday he will be caught, & that will be a very unpleasant experience!” tweet
Later, while speaking to reporters, Trump called for an investigation into the leak - more concerned about the public learning of the briefing than he is about Russia’s repeated interference in U.S. elections. “They leaked it, Adam Schiff and his group. They leaked it to the papers and - as usual - they ought to investigate Adam Schiff for leaking that information,” Trump said.
Schiff responded: “Nice deflection, Mr. President. But your false claims fool no one. You welcomed Russian help in 2016, tried to coerce Ukraine’s help in 2019, and won’t protect our elections in 2020.”

Originally written for tomorrow's Lost in the Sauce. As such, I tried to keep it as brief as possible... didn't turn out very brief, however, which is why I posted it separately. The scary part is that it could be much longer! It's not exhaustive. For instance, I'll be covering Trump's pardons in the Sauce newsletter tomorrow even though it would fit in this post, too. As The New Yorker summed up: "The point of authoritarianism is to concentrate power in the ruler, so the world knows that all actions, good and bad, harsh and generous, come from a single source."

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Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United States President

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Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United States President

Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United States President

Trump’s war on the intelligence community: 10 days under an authoritarian administration

Introduction

10 days ago...

The briefing

The purge

Acting officials

Sunday update: A Lawfare analysis

Who is Richard Grenell?

Russia’s bet keeps paying off

Addendum

The purge, act 2

A weakened National Security apparatus

New: Sunday night updates

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