People may recall the Pied Piper strategy of the Clinton campaign - the suggestion they should encourage the media to promote candidacies of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carsons in the Republican primary.
Glenn Simpson in his testimony to the Senate intelligence committee gave some interesting hints
8 A. It was either September or October of 2015. I recall being in London on other business and hearing somebody wanted for us to take a look at it.
And what can you tell us about who engaged you initially to do that work?
MR. LEVY: The answer to that question might implicate privilege.
So it has been publicly reported that the initial engagement of September to October 2015 was by someone with ties -- with Republican ties. Can you confirm whether that is accurate or not?
MR. LEVY: We're not going to talk about the identity of clients.
So with regard to this engagement in September -- that began initially in September or 1 October 2015, what were you asked specifically to do by the client?
A. I don't have specific recollection of there being a specific tasking. I believe it was why don't you take a look at Donald Trump, it looks like he may, you know, be more successful than people think, something -- there was some level of insight that he had a better shot than people were giving him at the time, but it was on open-ended request like most of the things that we get.
Simpson avoids identifying who the person in London who gave him the project was - even if he/she had Republican sympathies - but does claim he/she was an American citizen - or to be exact "domestic clients".
The first thing Glenn Simpson did in September/October 2015 was investigate the connection with Felix Sater:
So I can tell you, you know, as the person that was, you know, running the project, you know, I had my fingers in various things, but there were also the things that I was directly focused on. In the early -- the very first weekend that I started boning up on Donald Trump, you know, I found various references to him having connections to Italian organized crime and later to a Russian organized crime figure named Felix Sater, S-A-T-E-R.
Well coincidence or not, a month or so after Glenn Simpson starts investigating the Felix Sater/Trump connection, Felix Sater starts writing to Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen
On November 3, 2015, he wrote to Cohen: I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know that no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.
While I don't suppose it was literally Glenn Simpson pulling Felix Sater's strings, Sater's out-of-the-blue communication, I suspect, has more to do with Glenn Simpson's anonymous client(s) than Vladimir Putin
The full correspondence has only been very selectively released, but it seems that Michael Cohen took the bait, but was the less than impressed with Felix Sater's bona-fides
In what appears to have been frustration, Michael Cohen emailed Putin's press secretary Dmitri Peskov in mid January
Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City. Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled. As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon.
Dmitry Peskov did not reply. Felix Sater's claim to be a middle-man between the Kremlin and the Trump organization was apparently news to the Kremlin.
When we turn to the product of another Glenn Simpson's subcontracts: the Steele dossier, we get the following:
The Kremlin's cultivation operation on Trump also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, Trump had not taken up any of these.
In fact the record shows the exact opposite - the Trump organisation swallowed the bait offered up by Felix Sater, only to met by deafening silence by the Kremlin. Trump would have taken up the offers - had they ever existed in the first place.
And Felix Sater only began his campaign of offering Trump fantasy development opportunities a few weeks after being researched by Glenn Simpson.
Once again the Mueller investigation seems to be solemnly following the tracks deliberately laid down by Glenn Simpson and his mysterious clients and sub-contractors
Submitted February 01, 2018 at 01:41AM by mystic_teal http://ift.tt/2DQ7rT6