Paul John Manafort Jr.
Paul John Manafort Jr. (born April 1, 1949) is an American lobbyist, political consultant, and convicted felon. A Republican, he joined Donald Trump's presidential campaign team in March 2016, and was campaign chairman from June to August 2016. Formerly an attorney, he forfeited his license to practice in January 2019.
Manafort was an adviser to the U.S. presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In 1980, he co-founded the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr., and Roger J. Stone, joined by Peter G. Kelly in 1984. Manafort often lobbied on behalf of foreign leaders such as former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, former dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko, and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Lobbying to serve the interests of foreign governments requires registration with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); on June 27, 2017, he retroactively registered as a foreign agent.
On October 27, 2017, Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates were indicted by a District of Columbia grand jury on multiple charges arising from his consulting work for the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine before Yanukovych's overthrow in 2014. The indictment had been requested by Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation. In June 2018, additional charges were filed against Manafort for obstruction of justice and witness tampering that are alleged to have occurred while he was under house arrest, and he was ordered to jail.
In the Eastern District of Virginia, in August 2018, Manafort was convicted on eight charges of tax and bank fraud. A mistrial was declared on ten other charges. In the District of Columbia, Manafort pleaded guilty to two charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. On November 26, 2018, Robert Mueller reported that Manafort violated his plea deal by repeatedly lying to investigators, and on February 13, 2019, DC District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson concurred, voiding the plea deal.
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Jeff Sessions
Sessions was an early supporter of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and was nominated by Trump for the post of U.S. Attorney General. He was confirmed on February 8, 2017, with a 52–47 vote in the Senate, and was sworn in on February 9, 2017.
In his Attorney General confirmation hearings, Sessions stated, while under oath, that he did not have contact with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign and that he was unaware of any contacts between Trump campaign members and Russian officials. However, in March 2017, news reports revealed that Sessions had twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in 2016. Sessions subsequently recused himself from any investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, while some Democratic lawmakers called for his resignation. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017, Carter Page declared that he had notified Sessions about his contacts with Kremlin officials in July 2016, contradicting Sessions's earlier denials.
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George Demetrios Papadopoulos
George Demetrios Papadopoulos is a former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.-Russia relations and the Donald Trump presidential campaign. He has served time in federal prison and is currently on a 12-month supervised release.
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Felix Sater
Felix Henry Sater (born Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky; Russian: Фе́ликс Миха́йлович Шеферовский; March 2, 1966) is an American former mobster, real estate developer and former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate conglomerate based out of Trump Tower in New York City. Sater has been an advisor to many corporations, including The Trump Organization, Rixos Hotels and Resorts, Sembol Construction, Potok (formerly the Mirax Group), and TxOil.
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to his involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian Mafia, and became an informant for the FBI and federal prosecutors, assisting with organized crime investigations. In 2017, Sater agreed to cooperate with investigators into international money laundering schemes.
Sater joined Bayrock Group as a senior advisor in 2003 at the behest of the company's owner and founder, Tevfik Arif. As a senior advisor, he assisted with several projects, including executive decisions in the Trump SoHo project.
Trump SoHo
Felix Sater was a managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, as well as a senior advisor to Donald Trump and The Trump Organization when construction of the Trump SoHo began in 2006.
He played a major role throughout the process of the building's construction, and remained managing director of Bayrock Group when the Trump SoHo project was completed in 2010. The building is a $450 million, 46-story, 391-unit hotel condominium located at 246 Spring Street in SoHo, New York City. The project was a collaboration between The Trump Organization, Bayrock Group LLC and Tamir Sapir.
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Yuri Milner
Yuri Milner, a Russian businessman who was a major investor in Facebook. Mr. Milner had received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Russian government, which he invested in Facebook and Twitter. He has also invested in a real-estate investment company run by Jared Kushner.
On June 29, Facebook revealed to congressional investigators that it granted Mail.ru, a Russian internet company with close ties to the Kremlin, a special extension of the Facebook policy that allowed thousands of application developers access to massive amounts of user data.
Mail.ru ran applications on Facebook for years before 2015, allowing it to delve into Facebook profiles and activity from millions of users around the world. This was standard Facebook policy. Thousands of companies that built applications on the Facebook platform had access to potentially millions of users’ information.
Mail.ru, a Russian company was founded by Yuri Milner. While Americans have been justifiably appalled that an obscure political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, had rich behavioral data on at least 87 million voters, we should be more concerned that companies like Mail.ru had access to the same data.
Sergei Millian
Sergei Millian arrived in the early 2000s as a young, single professional in Atlanta, which has a large Russian-speaking community. Friends there said he worked in real estate, and, according to one résumé posted online, he opened a translating business whose clients included the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Friends said that Millian founded the Russian American Chamber of Commerce as a way to forge business ties between the United States and Russia and as a personal networking opportunity.
Papadopoulos is approached via LinkedIn by American-Belarussian Sergei Millian of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. They meet repeatedly in Manhattan. Millian offers to start an energy business together, to be financed by Russian billionaires "who are not under sanctions". Millian also claims that one Russian billionaire would consider the possibility of opening a Trump hotel in Moscow.
Sergei Millian shared some tantalizing claims about Donald Trump.
Trump had a long-standing relationship with Russian officials, Millian told an associate, and those officials were now feeding Trump damaging information about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Millian said that the information provided to Trump had been “very helpful.”
Unbeknownst to Millian, however, his conversation was not confidential. His associate passed on what he had heard to a former British intelligence officer who had been hired by Trump’s political opponents to gather information about the Republican’s ties to Russia.
The allegations by Millian — whose role was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and has been confirmed by The Washington Post — were central to the dossier compiled by the former spy, Christopher Steele. While the dossier has not been verified and its claims have been denied by Trump, Steele’s document said that Millian’s assertions had been corroborated by other sources, including in the Russian government and former intelligence sources.
Millian told several people that during the campaign and presidential transition he was in touch with George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy adviser, according to a person familiar with the matter. Millian is among Papadopoulos’s nearly 240 Facebook friends.
Trump aides vehemently reject Millian’s claims to have had close contact with Trump or high-level access to the president’s company.
Millian did not answer a list of detailed questions about his interactions with Trump and his role in the Steele dossier, instead responding by email with lengthy general defenses of Trump’s election as “God’s will” and complaining that inquiries about his role are evidence of a “witch hunt” and “McCarthyism.”
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Additional Source: https://themoscowproject.org/players/sergeimillian/
Michael Thomas Flynn
Michael Thomas Flynn (born December 24, 1958) is a retired United States Army Lieutenant General and was National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump.
Flynn's military career included a key role in shaping U.S. counterterrorism strategy and dismantling insurgent networks in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he was given numerous combat arms, conventional, and special operations senior intelligence assignments. He served as the 18th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, serving from July 2012 until his forced retirement from the military in August 2014. After leaving the military, he established Flynn Intel Group, which provided intelligence services for businesses and governments, including ones in Turkey. He became a senior advisor to Trump during his presidential campaign and served as the National Security Advisor from January 23 to February 13, 2017. He resigned after information surfaced that he had misled the FBI and Vice President Mike Pence about the nature and content of his communications with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
On April 27, 2017, the Pentagon inspector general announced an investigation into whether Flynn had accepted money from foreign governments without the required approval. The New York Times reported on May 18, 2018, that a longtime FBI/CIA informant had met Flynn at an intelligence seminar in Britain six months earlier and became alarmed by Flynn's closeness to a Russian woman there; this concern prompted another individual to alert American authorities that Flynn may have been compromised by Russian intelligence. Flynn initially refused to hand over subpoenaed documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee, pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, but a compromise with the committee was worked out. On December 1, 2017, Flynn appeared in federal court to formalize a deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to plead guilty to a single felony count of "willfully and knowingly" making "false, fictitious and fraudulent statements" to the FBI. He confirmed his intention to cooperate with the Special Counsel's investigation.
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