March 2, 2017, "Trump business associate led double life as FBI informant — and more, he says," LA Times, Joseph Tanfani, David S. Cloud
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| Felix Sater, 2014, you tube |
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to a federal charge of racketeering for his role in a Mafia-linked $40-million stock fraud scheme. He quickly cut a deal, agreeing to become a secret FBI informant in hopes of getting a lenient sentence.
Court records were sealed to protect Sater’s identity, so his role in the fraud case stayed secret for a decade [through 2008] while he was at Bayrock. After a court hearing in 2009, he was fined $25,000 but was not sent to prison or ordered to pay restitution.
At his sentencing hearing, several FBI officials vouched for Sater's help. He got his biggest endorsement in January 2015 when Loretta Lynch was asked at her Senate confirmation hearing for U.S. attorney general why court records had been sealed in the fraud case.
Sater had secretly worked with federal prosecutors and the FBI for more than 10 years, “providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra” — the Mafia — according to Lynch, who had served as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District in New York.
Sater’s lawyer, Robert W. Wolf, gives his client more credit, saying he worked with “numerous U.S. national security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” Sater says he helped hunt “America’s greatest enemies” in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
There is no independent verification of those assertions.
Former CIA officials who worked in counter-terrorism and Russian affairs said they never heard of Sater and doubt his cloak-and-dagger claims of chasing down terrorists.
“We should not take this guy’s statements at face value,” said Glenn Carle, a former CIA operations officer who retired in 2007. “There are all sorts of people who seek protection by wrapping themselves in the American and CIA flags.”
A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.
Sater’s business history with Trump is well documented, however.
In their first deal, in November 2003, the Trump Organization and Bayrock announced plans to build a 19-story condominium tower and hotel complex in Phoenix.
Residents who objected that the project was too large forced a citywide referendum to block construction, however. Trump pulled out in 2005, and the project was never built.
The following year, Bayrock licensed Trump’s name and began construction of a 24-story hotel and condominium complex in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The project ran out of money and was hit by lawsuits and claims of fraud by buyers. Trump was dropped from the lawsuits after asserting he was not the developer and was not responsible for the problems.
The Trump Organization and Bayrock developed the Trump Soho hotel in Lower Manhattan starting in 2006. Sater appeared with Trump at a launch party in September 2007.
Sater left Bayrock the following year [2008] after news stories first revealed his criminal record. He continued to work with the Trump Organization — he had business cards that called him a “special advisor” and kept his offices in Trump Tower — trying to put together real estate deals through 2010.
Sater said he had signed several development deals with Trump’s company, including one for a Trump Tower in Moscow, but none were built.
“We were looking to do deals in various capitals, in London, Paris — we had no special affinity for Moscow,” Sater said in the interview.
Sater says he was still pitching deals to the Trump Organization in 2015. A lawyer for the Trump company did not return requests for comment.
In a sworn deposition in 2013 in a civil suit, Trump said he barely knew Sater.
“If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said.
Short, the White House spokesman, declined to comment on Sater’s role as an FBI informant or on Trump’s relationship with him.
Born in Russia, Sater grew up in Brighton Beach, a gritty Brooklyn neighborhood known for its large Russian community, after his father emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972.
Sater became a licensed stock broker, but he stabbed a man with a broken margarita glass during a bar fight in 1991. He was convicted of felony assault and served about a year in prison
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During his years as an informant, Sater sometimes confided in his rabbi — who thought he was making up his exploits.
“I thought perhaps he had watched too many James Bond movies and read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” Rabbi Shalom M. Paltiel said in a 2014 speech naming Sater “man of the year” for his service to his Chabad congregation on Long Island. Paltiel said Sater then invited him to a secret thank-you ceremony at a federal building in New York.
“To my amazement I see dozens of U.S. intelligence officers, from all the various three-letter intelligence agencies of this country, including some I had never even known existed,” Paltiel said in a video posted by Sater. Their accounts were “more fantastic and more unbelievable than anything he’d been telling me.”
Several lawsuits paint a less flattering portrait of Sater, however. In one, Ernest Mennes, an investor in the Phoenix project, sued Sater and Bayrock in Arizona Superior Court in 2007, alleging that they had skimmed an unspecified amount of money and that Sater had threatened to kill Mennes if he disclosed Sater’s criminal record.
Sater angrily denied the allegation. “You think I’m doing Trump Towers [deals] and telling someone I would…cut their legs off? Are you crazy?” he said in the interview.
Bayrock settled the case for an undisclosed amount. In an interview, Mennes praised Sater, saying he “served the U.S. well” and was “a great partner.”"
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"Felix Sater - (2014) Man Of The Year: Chabad of Port Washington," You Tube. Uploaded by Felix Sater, August 8, 2014. "Felix Sater, managing partner of Bayrock Group and former senior advisor to Donald Trump, speaking at the Chabad of Port Washington [Long Isl., NY]. For more, please visit http://www.felixsater.com, http://www.felixsater.net, or http://www.felixsater.org."
2014, Pt. Washington, Long Island, NY: Chabad group gives Felix Sater man of the year award:
Begins 1:20, ends 5:58, Rabbi speaking: "One fine day two and a half years ago [2011-2012], Felix invited my to join him at a private, closed door session in the Federal Building in New York. Only his immediate family members were allowed in, and he had gotten special clearance for his Rabbi to be there as well. I get there and to my amazement, I see dozens of US intelligence officers from all of the various three letter intelligence agencies of this country, including some I had never even known existed. They're taking turns standing up one after the other, offering praise for Felix. Praising him as an American hero for his work and his assistance in the highest levels of this country's national security interests. They were speaking about Felix Sater, my Felix. They're talking about his clandestine activities to help the government and protect the country. They elaborated in great detail stuff that was more fantastic and more unbelievable than anything he had been telling me. I vividly recall one of the officers proudly stating and I quote, "Felix Sater probably saved tens of thousands of US lives, maybe even millions. Her certainly saved the lives of hundreds of not thousands of US servicemen and women through the brave work that he's done. Battling at the risk of his own life with this country's greatest enemies. Friends, I sat there open-mouthed, I was flabbergasted. Here I was listening to these stories for the past decade,...and here I am hearing them being said by federal agents about my Felix Sater. He wasn't just bragging,...and I realized that he only told me one tenth of what really went on. I'm not going to elaborate more because I'm not allowed to, probably said more than I should, but I felt it's important, that I have to say something. To tell the world, to tell you the rest of the story, to tell you the things about my dear friend Felix Sater that you won't read in the newspaper, but that I heard with my own ears along with his family and a few others sitting here tonight. Just as he stood up then and risked his life for his country, possibly the fact that we're sitting here tonight in safety as a result of his efforts. He did the same at his Chabad, this Chabad so near and dear to all of us. He didn't have to....Felix, I want to personally thank you for your service to your country."...
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Added: The NY Times wants so badly for something to be true:
Aug. 29, 2017, "More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda," Robert Parry, Consortium News
"Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream media is touting a big break in Russia-gate, emails showing an effort by Donald Trump’s associates to construct a building in Moscow. But the evidence actually undercuts the “scandal,” reports Robert Parry."
"There is an inherent danger of news organizations getting infected by “confirmation bias” when they want something to be true so badly that even if the evidence goes in the opposite direction they twist the revelation in fit their narrative. Such is how The Washington Post, The New York Times and their followers in the mainstream media are reacting to newly released emails that actually show Donald Trump’s team having little or no influence in Moscow.
On Tuesday, for instance, the Times published a front-page article designed to advance the Russia-gate narrative, stating: “A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.”
Wow, that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying together the loose and scattered threads of the Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election story. Here you have a supposed business deal in which Putin was to help Trump both make money and get elected. That is surely how a casual reader or a Russia-gate true believer would read it--and was meant to read it. But the lede is misleading.
The reality, as you would find out if you read further into the story, is that the boast from Felix Sater that somehow the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow would demonstrate Trump’s international business prowess and thus help his election was meaningless. What the incident really shows is that the Trump organization had little or no pull in Russia as Putin’s government apparently didn’t lift a finger to salvage this stillborn building project.
But highlighting that reality would not serve the Times’ endless promotion of Russia-gate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep in the story, after a reprise of the “scandal” and the Times hyping the significance of Sater’s emails from 2015 and early 2016. For good measure, the Times includes a brief and dishonest summary of the Ukraine crisis.
The Times reported: “Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow. ‘I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,’ Mr. Sater wrote.”
But the idea that Russia acted “to undermine democracy in Ukraine” is another example of the Times’ descent into outright propaganda. The reality is that the U.S. government supported – and indeed encouraged – a coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych even after he offered to move up scheduled elections so he could be voted out of office through a democratic process.
After Yanukovych’s violent ouster and after the coup regime dispatched military forces to crush resistance among anti-coup, mostly ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the east, Russia provided help to prevent their destruction from an assault spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other extreme Ukrainian nationalists. But that reality would not fit the Times’ preferred Ukraine narrative, so it gets summarized as Moscow trying “to undermine democracy in Ukraine.”
Empty Boasts
However, leaving aside the Times’ propagandistic approach to Ukraine, there is this more immediate point about Russia-gate: none of Sater’s boastful claims proved true and this incident really underscored the lack of useful connections between Trump’s people and the Kremlin. One of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen even used a general press email address in a plea for assistance from Putin’s personal spokesman.
Deeper in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts:
“There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.”
The Times added: “The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later. …The emails obtained by The Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails."
In other words, the Russia-gate narrative – that somehow Putin foresaw Trump’s election (although almost no one else did) and sought to curry favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump’s pockets with lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he could to help Trump win – is knocked down by these new disclosures, not supported by them.
Instead of clearing the way for Trump to construct the building and thus – in Sater’s view – boost Trump’s election chances, Putin and his government wouldn’t even approve permits or assist in the financing.
And, this failed building project was not the first Trump proposal in Russia to fall apart. A couple of years earlier, a Moscow hotel plan died apparently because Trump would not – or could not – put up adequate financing for his share, overvaluing the magic of the Trump brand. But one would think that if the Kremlin were grooming Trump to be its Manchurian candidate and take over the U.S. government, money would have been no obstacle.
Along the same lines, there’s the relative pittance that RT paid Gen. Michael Flynn to speak at the TV network’s tenth anniversary in Moscow in December 2015. The amount totaled $45,386 with Flynn netting $33,750 after his speakers’ bureau took its cut. Democrats and the U.S. mainstream media treated this fact as important evidence of Russia buying influence in the Trump campaign and White House, since Flynn was both a campaign adviser and briefly national security adviser.
But the actual evidence suggests something quite different. Besides Flynn’s relatively modest speaking fee, it turned out that RT negotiated Flynn’s rate downward, a fact that The Washington Post buried deep inside an article on Flynn’s Russia-connected payments. The Post wrote, “RT balked at paying Flynn’s original asking price. ‘Sorry it took us longer to get back to you but the problem is that the speaking fee is a bit too high and exceeds our budget at the moment,’ Alina Mikhaleva, RT’s head of marketing, wrote a Flynn associate about a month before the event.”
Yet, if Putin were splurging to induce Americans near Trump to betray their country, it makes no sense that Putin’s supposed flunkies at RT would be quibbling with Flynn over a relatively modest speaking fee; they’d be falling over themselves to pay him more.
So, what the evidence really indicates is that Putin, like almost everybody else in the world, didn’t anticipate Trump’s ascendance to the White House, at least not in the time frame of these events – and thus was doing nothing to buy influence with his entourage or boost his election chances by helping him construct a glittering Trump Tower in Moscow.
But that recognition of reality would undermine the much beloved story of Putin-Trump collusion, so the key facts and the clear logic are downplayed or ignored – all the better to deceive Americans who are dependent on the Times, the Post and the mainstream media."
"Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com)."
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Among comments to above article, Aug. 29, 2017, "More Misleading Russia-gate Propaganda," Robert Parry, Consortium News:
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Comment: The NY Times will not change until the US has two separate political parties. Today, the entire US political class and its media support the democrat party and happily cheer on the NY Times. Absolutely no one is on the side of the country or the American people. The entire US political class is intent on silencing ordinary Americans who under no circumstances can be allowed to choose a US president. These Americans on whom war is being waged have no political party behind them and haven't for many years. Everyone is just waiting for these Americans to die off. In the interim, they're viewed as no better than ignorant slaves. The Republican Party is by no means passive, it aggressively runs interference for its democrat partners. Thus the US is effectively a dictatorship. There are no checks and balances to protect citizens from a brute force central government and a weaponized media. The "Republicans" nearly unanimously joined Democrats in nullifying Trump's election, the votes of 63 million Americans (who still want the detente with Russia they voted for), and removed any possibility that the most meaningful foreign policy promise of the 2016 election will ever be realized. Without bothering to announce that they were changing the Constitution, Congress transferred decisions about Russia from the Executive branch to the legislature. The country has been overthrown. It was brought to the point that they (the political class) would only be stopped by violent revolution. We voted for regime change and they simply ignored us. Now it's over. Ordinary Americans will continue to be rendered mute, while being forced to pay all the bills of their slave masters. The only solution I see is for Trump to announce formation of a new political party with himself as head, an actual second party, an opposition party to the Dem-Republican UniParty. This assumes Trump retains the views of candidate Trump and not the views of the Kushners.
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Added:
Trump voters still want detente with Russia. They thought they were getting that when they voted for Trump. Unfortunately, Congress has nullified their votes:
"The point here is that the Republican support for Trump’s desire for détente with Russia has not eroded one jot, whereas the “concern” of the Independents and even among Democrats is eroding somewhat....America’s ability to pursue or even to have a foreign policy is non-existent in the face of its internal civil war."..."Executive powers have been transferred to Congress:"
8/6/17, "Playing Politics with the World’s Future," Alastair Crooke, Consortium News
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And:
8/26/17, "How the Deep State Ties Down Trump," Alastair Crooke, Consortium News
Trump "now has been rendered “helpless”: in respect to détente with Russia...spitefully, by his own party, working with the Democrats, to empty Trump's constitutional prerogatives in policy--and to seize them for Congress."...
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