Crooked Donald Trump tied to mobster who sold nukes to Al Qaeda. Sad!

Sorry I have been away. Yes, I've been attuned to every hemi-demi-semiquaver of the Trump/Russia connection; yes, I've followed the twitter streams of people like Christo Grozev and Louise Mensch. I don't have time right now for a long piece about all of that.

The Keith Olbermann video embedded above suggests that he has developed sources within the intelligence community. Good. However, I suggest caution: I see an increasing number of indicators that there is an Alt Right faction lurking within spookdom.

When the Sater connection hits big, Trump is going to deny knowing the man. Evidence like this will prove important, as will AP stories like this and WP stories like this.

“Anybody can come in and build a tower,” Sater told potential investors, according to testimony in a 2008 court case. “I can build a Trump Tower, because of my relationship with Trump.”

But Sater is not the only one. It's long past time for this blog to discuss another Russian mobster with a difficult-to-spell Russian name: Semyon Mogilevich. Although his heyday may be in the past, we still need to understand his history.

This story from 2004 speaks of a link between Mogilevich and none other than Osama Bin Laden.

The October 2001 issue of the Russian magazine "Top Secret," relying on sources in Russia's security services, claimed there was a connection between Osama bin Laden and the Russian mafia. According to the magazine's "Black September" article the chief of the largest and most dangerous Russian crime syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, has met bin Laden's associates in Marbella Spain.

Mogilevich, known as "the brainy don," is said to be the world's most intelligent criminal. He is also very dangerous. When journalist Robert Friedman wrote about Mogilevich's career in a book titled Red Mafiya, Mogilevich allegedly put out a $100,000 contract on Friedman's life. According to Friedman, "hundreds of pages of classified FBI, British and Israeli intelligence documents ... describe him as a malevolent figure who has become a grave threat to the stability of Israel, Eastern Europe, and North America." According to his closest associates, Mogilevich employs Ph.D's on his staff, has penetrated countless banks, owns military and defense industries in more than one country, controls the flow of contraband through Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport and maintains close relations with "former" communist structures and personnel. Friedman states: "He is protected by a web of relationships with high-ranking officials of international security services, high flying financiers, and politicians."

Of course he's in deep with Putin. But it gets better. The following ties in with the preceding post about Russian-linked prostitution rings...

According to Friedman, "Mogilevich's lieutenants are trained in intelligence operations and countersurveillance, and provide warnings of impending police actions...." They are experts at compromising Western security services, especially by making secret agreements to provide information on rival crime groups. Mogilevich's organization blends East Bloc intelligence professionalism with arms smuggling, money laundering, extortion, prostitution, drug trafficking and murder. Meanwhile, Mogilevich's "former" East bloc intelligence professionals are teaching al Qaeda how to set up safe houses and smuggle weapons. (The pay is excellent and the work familiar.)

Now we come to the nuclear connection. As you know, I have predicted that there will soon be a terror event involving a "small" nuclear weapon. Well, guess what?

According to sources near the action, East European mobsters (including Mogilevich's Red Mafiya) are helping al Qaeda to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological materials.

The idea that a police state (Russia) run by a police statesman (Putin) cannot cope with gangsters who steal nuclear, biological and chemical materials is not credible. Vladimir Putin is perfectly comfortable using gangster methods against his political opponents, including "oligarchs" and journalists. Why can't he use these methods against criminals who steal WMDs from Russia's vast arsenal of mass destruction?

Is it possible that "thefts" of Russian WMD materials are somehow useful to Vladimir Putin? After all, the stolen weapons are smuggled by Russian gangsters and "former" intelligence operatives for use against Western countries. If you think about it, Russia's WMDs were built with Western countries in mind.

It has been said that Putin had Litvinenko killed specifically because he (Litvinenko) revealed Putin's links to Mogilevich.

By this point, you are probably asking yourself: Yeah, but where's the Trump connection? Here it is. Felix Sater is part of Mogilivich's organization. John Schindler (referenced by Olbermann, above) says

Sater = Mogilevich...both of them have ties to Putin and to Russian security services. Well known to Western intel.

Sater works for Mogilevich, who supplied WMDs to Al Qaeda and other terror groups. Sater also "got out of jail free" by revealing certain things to the FBI and CIA. It seems pretty obvious that Sater's big revelations had to do with the nukes and CBWs sold to the terrorists.

John Schindler has a lot more to say about Trump and Mogilevich in a series of tweets captured for posterity here. I have arranged the tweets in a more conventionally readable fashion....

You need to understand real estate finance, and Russian organized crime AND Russian intelligence...if you do, the picture is quite clear. Mogilevich is the biggest mob boss in Russia -- maybe the world -- and his capos+footprints are all over the Trump Org since early 1990s.

Mogilevich launders money in the West, including the USA, on a gargantuan scale; he is clever and good at this. FBI knows all about it.

In 1992, Mogilevich sent a capo to NYC to run his US show. That was Yaponchik AKA Vyacheslav Ivankov, who was murdered in Moscow in 2009. Yaponchik/Ivankov -- for 3 years until the FBI caught up with him -- was dividing his time between Trump Tower & Don's Taj Mahal Casino. There are literally dozens of Russian OC scams, some gargantuan, that we know were based at Trump properties -- quite a coincidence.

The real issue is how Mogilevich made the Trump Org one of his overseas subsidiaries, de facto, back in the 1990s. FBI knows this too.

Also, Mogilevich has a very cozy relationship with Putin & his special services, going back to KGB days. They help each other non-stop. Not long after Sasha Litvinenko told reporters about Putin's close links to Mogilevich, FSB gave him atomic tea. Another coincidence. There's an old IC joke about Russian organized crime: "Who do you think organized them?"

Trump being in bed with ROC = in bed with FSB

For more, you may want to check out an online book called Deep Capture. The chapter at the other end of the link includes the eye-opening revelation that Mogilevich was represented by former FBI Director William Sessions, even though the FBI had the Russian on its "Ten Most Wanted" list!

Say what you will about J. Edgar, he never would have sunk that low.

That chapter has some good background on Mogilevich's connections to a $7 billion money laundering scandal involving the Bank of New York -- a scandal which few now recall, though it was big news at the time. I can find nothing online linking Donald Trump to that business; if you know of a link, please shre with the rest of the class. (The scandal did involve another flashy real estate developer named Gene Phillips.)

The chapter also has more on Sater, Bayrock and Tevfik Arif. Now we are undeniably in Deep Trump Territory.

In later years, Felix co-founded a real estate and mortgage outfit called Bayrock. As we will see in later chapters, Bayrock played a role in the larger “bust out” of the mortgage markets, but for the purposes of this chapter, I will note that Bayrock’s former CFO, Jody Kriss, has alleged that Bayrock is a massive money laundering operation. In 2009, Kriss filed a lawsuit to this effect, and noted that Felix had once threatened to have him (Kriss) tortured and then murdered.

There simply is no credible way for Trump to claim that he had nothing to do with Bayrock.

One of Bayrock’s co-founders was Tevfik Arif. In 2011, Arif was arrested in Turkey after Turkish commandos raided a party that Arif was holding on a yacht that had once belonged to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founding president. Arif, a native of Kazakhstan, was arrested along with a small harem of prostitutes and some unnamed government officials from Central Asia. (It is unclear why the commandos raided the yacht; the media has reported that Arif was charged only with illegally hiring prostitutes, a crime that does not usually result in commando raids).

As we've seen below, the Israeli press reported that the prostitutes were underaged girls from Russia, who were being used to acquire blackmail on VIPs; they were working for Arif. This ties in with what we know about Mogilevich, who is said to run a large-scale prostitution ring, and who obtains kompromat on important people around the world.

It also inevitably reminds us of Trump's old pal Jeffrey Epstein, who also surrounded himself with underaged Russian girls. According to Virginia Roberts, these girls were also used to acquire kompromat on VIPs.

Since the source of Epstein's money remains mysterious, it is fair to speculate as to whether he has had financial dealings with Mogilevich's criminal empire. For all of his personal failings, Epstein is a brilliant man -- and the same can be said of Mogilevich. The two men would seem a natural fit for each other.

I'm not the first person to so speculate. As much as I hate to admit it, a commenter named Rattlesnake, writing in to Infowars -- yes, freakin' Infowars -- got there first, back in 2015. At the time, Alex Jones had no idea that he was publishing material that might one day tarnish his beloved Donald Trump.

Also see this story on Paul Manafort (always a key member of Team Trump, as well as a partner to Roger Stone) and his dealings with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash. In what follows, Tymoshenko refers, of course, to the former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who brought a suit against Paul Manafort.

Tymoshenko claimed that CMZ and other Manafort-run firms were backed not just by Firtash but also by Semion Mogilevich, a Ukrainian national deeply involved in Russian organized crime. Tymoshenko’s lawsuit referred to Mogilevich as a “silent partner” in Group DF.

Mogilevich is “involved in weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale,” according to the FBI.

In a meeting with the American ambassador to Ukraine in late 2008, Firtash “acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich's approval to get into business in the first place,” according to a State Department cable released by Wikileaks.

Trump's people keep associating with Mogilevich and his people. Yet Trump wants us to believe that these associations were glancing or accidental.

The Mogilevich factor is one reason why I think we should be a bit wary of the information we are now getting from the American intelligence community. Remember, this is a guy who brought former FBI Director William Sessions on board. He specializes in forming relationships with people from various intelligence services, not just the FSB.