https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-have-all-the-funding-we-need-out-of-russia “We Have All the Funding We Need Out of Russia.” Now, this is quite interesting. In many respects, it simply confirms what Donald Trump Jr. told a group of real estate investors at a conference in 2008: that a ton of the money funding the Trump Organization came from Russia. Here it’s Eric Trump explaining back in 2014 that it didn’t matter that American banks wouldn’t loan Trump money. They had all the money they needed from Russia. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-have-all-the-funding-we-need-out-of-russia 2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here’s a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration … Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” 3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump’s largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that’s not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it, “Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.” Another suit alleged the project “occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia.”
It's not news that money funding Trump real estate came from Russian banks; this has been well known for a while -- and totally legal. It does not mean that Russia in any way funded Trump's political campaigns.
Donations to the Clinton foundation were legal.Chelsea,her husband and campaign manager weren't meeting with Russians for promises of dirt on Trump though.
That business of passing major, major campaign funds off to your attorney and then letting them go off and subcontract is scam both from a legal ethics point of view and from an election law point of view. They do that to protect their clients so that they can assert attorney-client privilege when it comes time to trying to investigate and to get around having to do detailed campaign finance reporting on those expenditures. Completely bogus. The law firm was working as the central operative in the whole scheme, not just a legal advisor/confident to Hillary and Obama. The Intel Committee was able to get around that a bit by doing direct subpoenas on to the fusion and other recipients of the case, including bank records but they had to go through a long court process- and in the end Hillary is still protected from disclosing the content of interactions with the law firm. That was not the intent of the campaign finance law, ie that you can just give a few million to your law firm and then bill it as "legal services." Hillary knows the game. Cheryl Mills was not her personal attorney. She was an operational/staff assistant with operational and administrative duties on the government payroll. Suddenly, when the FBI tried to interview her and to ask Hillary questions about her interactions with her, Hillary declared that she was her personal attorney. Bogus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/...&gwh=0D58D3FCD3667641D1505EDBE38005C3&gwt=pay "Mueller Subpoenas Trump Organization, Demanding Documents About Russia"