Trump Admin. Demanded Dems Strip Ukraine Aid Protection From Spending Bill | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Jeremy Bash reacts to reporting from The Washington Post that the Trump administration threatened a veto and government shutdown over language protecting future aid to Ukraine in a spending bill. Aired on 12/20/19.
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Trump Admin. Demanded Dems Strip Ukraine Aid Protection From Spending Bill | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

45 comments

    1. Dont worry Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey will still support T-Rump 100 % , as does every republicans senator coming up for re-election in 2020 .

    2. This may be one of the reasons Pelosi is holding up the impeachment articles. They may need to add more evidence to the abuse of power article. Trump is the gift that keeps on giving!

    1. ss Putin only needs chaos from the Right he,s getting this from a group of people to ignorant to realize their supporting a traitor working for Russia.

  1. This MF’er never learns. He should face charges of treason when he leaves office. Maybe the World Court will charge him with crimes against humanity.
    Trump is Putin’s finger puppet. I’ll let your imagination figure out how that works.

  2. For decades,  Traitor Trump has laundered billions of dollars for Russian organized crime figures and other oligarchs.  Ultimately, Trump’s involvement with Russia’s criminal underworld created an opening for Putin and his agents to manipulate and control him.

    Trump has had contacts with the Russian mafia for 35 years. His properties have laundered money for them. The Russian mafia are connected to Russian intelligence. They were and still are, living and have  working in Trump’s buildings. Trump has even partnered with them. There are many ways in which he’s compromised..

    After the fall of the Soviet Union, you suddenly have trillions of dollars that have to be laundered. It opened the floodgates for the Russian mafia and for the oligarchs. A good way to launder that money is through real estate. Trump made it clear he was ready, willing and able to do that without asking any questions. Trump was $4 billion in debt after his casinos failed in Atlantic City. He came back thanks to the Russians.

    The Republicans are also implicated. The Russians didn’t just go after Trump: They went after the entire Republican Party. There is Russian money going into the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, the NRA, and then to Republican officials and candidates directly.

    When Trump first visited Russia in 1987, he immediately came back and took out full page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Washington Post. These ads were very anti-NATO, anti-Western alliance, and that was exactly what the Russians want, even today.

    Back in 1984, Trump had started laundering money for the Russian mafia. In ‘92, the Russian mafia had people like Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, who was one of the key figures under the mob boss Mogilevich. The FBI was looking all over for him but he was actually in Trump Tower. A lot of the Russian mobsters were going to Trump Tower to launder money as well. Trump was completely overextended in Atlantic City. He ended up $4 billion in debt. He had no future at all until the Russians came to his aid.

    Russian Oligarchs made Trump an offer that he could not refuse. Suddenly Trump started dealing with cash, and he couldn’t get bank loans except some from Deutsche Bank. He was so bankrupt that almost no Western bank could loan him a dime.

    There were ways of laundering money that Trump had. The financing of building projects that involved $400 million or $500 million to build a skyscraper. Once the building was built, they could sell the condos through the shell companies, and limited liability corporations. This was done anonymously in all cash transactions with the Russian oligarchs and other people affiliated with the Russian mafia. They owned Trump before he ever met Putin. Trump became close with the oligarchs who were in turn close to Putin.

    1. Less a boy, more a ‘conduit’ – These are classic Russian moves. They’re being relayed through someone/people to him and he responds accordingly

  3. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties…

    Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part…

    Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. Trump was 4 billion dollars in debt, and American banks had stopped loaning him money after multiple bankruptcies. Trump was financially ruined until the Russians bailed him out. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s….

    For two years, ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of Trump Tower. In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States.

    The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment and arrest of at least 29 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. Known as the “Little Taiwanese,” he was the only target to slip away. Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest during the FBI raid on Trump Tower. Today, he remains a fugitive from American justice.

    Tokhtakhounov’s whereabouts remained unknown for the next seven months after the raid on Trump Tower.  The Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump.

    “He is a major player,” said Mike Gaeta, the agent who led the 2013 FBI investigation of Tokhtakhounov and his alleged mafia money-laundering and gambling ring, in a 2014 interview with ABC News.

    1. David J. Thanks that saves checking out Wikipedia for this info. Those red ruskie names are tough to type with such a small querty keyboard. 👍

  4. Why is anyone surprised? -Trump directly said on camera after releasing the aid that he did it and will do it again.
    -I’m not kidding; He said he’ll hold up aid to Ukraine again, on TV…
    It’s amazing how we can forget things in the corruptnado that is this ‘presidency’

    1. Or the fact he also said on National television that he would like assistance from foreign governments to get dirt on political rivals TWICE. And even directly asked specific hostile foreign powers to do it on tv, TWICE.

  5. i can’t believe how this guys got a job in the WH higher than the janitor, seriously people its like overtime at kindergarten

  6. In other words “The extortion got exposed, so now, Trump and the GOP are going throught with it anyway, completely in the open”

    They aren’t even trying to hide what kind of crooks they are anymore.

  7. By doing so, if Dems okayed it, it would nullify 1 of the articles. Trump asking Pelosi for gasoline to keep the fire going, when he’s dwindled to a small flame above ashes.

  8. Now you see DrUMPf handing a hostile neighbor of Ukraine another gift.
    Strange how much a certain Eastern European country is on the receiving end of his foreign policies?
    Buttwhtaboutthat Eastern European state financial institution that has his brand and loyalties leveraged?
    Why does the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave squatter adamantly contest the transparency of who leverages him?
    Must be something to hide?
    Why would he be so generous to Vlad?

    Was that would or wouldn’t?

  9. Just as Putin would have wanted. There is no Trump action in Ukraine that is NOT at the behest of PUTIN.
    #PutinApproves

  10. If I am not mistaken, this is the bill that said the Pentagon would freeze it’s spending if President Trump froze aid to Ukraine, it sure seems like President Trump wants to weaken President Zelensky’s bargaining power as he begins talks with Putin, just another “coincidence” that ends up benefiting Putin.

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