Trump's Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime [View all]

[MelissaB]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by DonViejo (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: The Atlantic

Some of President Trump’s favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

Natasha Bertrand
6:14 PM ET

... snip

Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Incidentally, another Manafort associate, the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, admitted he only managed to be in business because Mogilevich allowed him to be, according to a leaked 2008 State Department cable.) Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate. Nearly a decade later, Ohr and the FBI sought Deripaska’s help in taking down overseas criminal syndicates.

And then there’s Andy McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI who spent over a decade investigating Russian organized crime and served as a supervisory special agent of a task force that scrutinized Eurasian crime syndicates. McCabe is a 21-year FBI veteran who handled aspects of the Russia investigation until Mueller was appointed last May, an appointment McCabe says he pushed for. He was fired in March, just two days short of being eligible to receive his pension and other benefits from the bureau. The official reason was that he had lacked candor when describing his interactions with the press to the Inspector General’s office. But Trump and his allies’ relentless attacks on McCabe on Twitter and cable news made it difficult for many to believe that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to fire him was completely devoid of political considerations.

One member of Mueller’s team, meanwhile, has provoked more ire from the president’s allies than others: Andrew Weissmann, a seasoned prosecutor who oversaw cases against high-ranking organized criminals on Wall Street in the early 1990s and, later, against 30 people implicated in the Enron fraud scandal. Trump has also villainized former Mueller team member Lisa Page, a trial attorney in the Justice Department's organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering. She has been targeted by the president and his allies for mocking Trump in text messages she exchanged with Peter Strzok, a Russian counterintelligence expert in the FBI, during a period in which both briefly worked on the Mueller investigation. Strzok was fired earlier this month for writing similarly caustic messages. Trump says the texts showed outrageous bias and has cited them as evidence that Muller is out to get him.

Mueller’s probe is first and foremost a counterintelligence investigation, and Trump famously declared last year that any examination of his personal finances would cross a “red line.” But Russia’s criminal syndicates have become increasingly intertwined with its intelligence services, blurring the line between mafia dons and spies. (As Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in his book “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia,” Putin’s Kremlin has consolidated power by “not simply taming, but absorbing, the underworld.”)

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/

---

I think it's a BFD that a journalist used "Trump" and "organized crime" in the headline.