Thread by @craigunger

@tina_nguyen Yes. To be clear, as I reported in #HouseofTrump, House of Putin, if you want to #FollowtheMoney, this should be a key focal point.
The Mystery of Donald Jr.’s Blocked Calls—Revealed? twitter.com/share?text=The…

2/One of the key people in question was Vadim Rabinovich, who, just a month before Trump's '96 Moscow trip, had attended a meeting in Tel Aviv, in which Semion #Mogilevich, the RU Mafia financial whiz, was ceded a huge part of lucrative Ukraine energy trade.

3/For many years afterwards, #Mogilevich operated thru series of "opaque intermediaries" in the Ukraine energy trade that skimmed about 3/4 of $1 billion per year.

4/ #Mogilevich's partner who was the public face in some of these transactions was Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry #Firtash.

5/ This was Putin's Mafia state--skimming billions in natural resources. Keeping these lucrative arrangements in place required political power in Ukraine as well. For yrs, he had relied on President Viktor #Yanukovych, a reliable Putin puppet.

6/ Yanukovych had been widely discredited as thuggish and corrupt, but Putin couldn't find a good replacement. Yanukovych need a complete makeover. What you gonna do? Enter Paul Manafort.