phands
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You couldn't make this stuff up. The tangerine shitgibbon has "strong links" to a crime family in Khazakstan called, yes.....The Khrapunovs. How utterly appurtenant. And now the senile old fart Giuliani is complicit....
Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.
On Thursday, a court in Kazakhstan began considering a sprawling corruption case against Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of the city of Almaty, and his wife Leila. The couple, who fled to Switzerland, are being tried in absentia for “a wide array of crimes, including money laundering, embezzlement, abuse of office, fraud and the creation of an organized crime group, according to Newsweek.
As you might have guessed, the Khrapunovs have “deep ties to the Trump Organization.” They were in business with the Bayrock group, which had been run by former Trump advisor Felix Sater. Sater is a childhood friend of Michael Cohen who’s linked to Russian mobsters and is now reportedly cooperating with investigators. He “has a history of channeling money from prominent families in the Eastern bloc into Trump properties,” according to Think Progress, and “this could pose problems for Trump, given Sater’s history of outing former close associates in exchange for immunity.”
The Khrapunovs were also in business with Rudy Giuliani’s old law firm, which “opened an office in Kazakhstan in 2007, the same year the pair moved to Switzerland. The law firm was allegedly used to raise funds for Guliani’s 2008 run for president.”
The Khrapunovs’ son, Ilyas, is also wanted by Ukrainian authorities “for allegedly orchestrating a hack of the computer systems of a law firm representing the Kazakh bank BTA Bank.” Ilyas’s father-in-law is accused of embezzling billions from that same bank, and that “money was subsequently laundered through Trump towers, in addition to other U.S. properties.”
We bring up this story because it was such a small item in this week’s flood of revelations about the Trump crime family that we almost missed it entirely. While everyone is pretending that there’s really a question about whether infamous micro-manager Donald Trump signed off on that meeting in the Trump Tower, it’s useful to keep in mind that multiple investigations are underway and it’s almost certain that we will, at some point, come to a full reckoning of the depths of the Manchurian Pumpkin’s corruption.