Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔐) BREAKING NEWS: DOJ Investigating Ties Between the FBI and the Kremlin Agent Behind 2016 Trump-Russia Collusion; Jared Kushner May Also Be Implicated

This relates to everything I wrote about in the NYT bestselling Proof trilogy. I hope you’ll RETWEET. sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-new…

1/ I don’t think I’ve ever started a PROOF report with a disclaimer like this one has. I had to clarify that the issues in play here are so complicated they were the subject of 2,500 pages of bestselling nonfiction (with 10,000+ major-media citations). So this is all streamlined.

2/ IOW I’m earnestly trying to make this digestible—summarizing in a few thousand words a story that’s already taken many hundreds of thousands of published words to unpack. The main thing is to underscore why Kushner, Deripaska, the NYC FBI field office, and Brookfield *matter*.

3/ None of this is idle talk. This report covers a DOJ investigation—and a series of complex financial transactions that’ve been the subject of hundreds of major-media reports and at least one running investigative timeline at the nation’s top NatSec media outlet (Just Security).

4/ I can’t summarize this news, so I’ll do the next-best thing: summarize its backdrop. First, understand that Paul Manafort wasn’t leading Trump-Russia collusion for Trump, as he was employed at the time by the man running Trump-Russia collusion for the *Kremlin*—Oleg Deripaska.

5/ Nor was Cohen running Trump-Russia collusion. He was running Trump’s pursuit of the most lucrative deal of his life with the Kremlin—a secret course of negotiation he lied to voters about—for the entirety of his 2016 POTUS run.

*Kushner* ran Trump-Russia collusion for Trump.

6/ So understand that *any* news that links Kushner and Deripaska—let alone news like *this*, which also involves Deripaska’s co-lead on Trump-Russia collusion, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, *and* the unit of the FBI that helped Trump gain election in 2016—is historic.

7/ But this news... *this* news... is even more next-level, as it also implicates a series of financial transactions by Jared Kushner that have been at the heart of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation since (if you can believe it) the Steele Dossier dropped in January 2017.

8/ This thread won’t rehash the systematic disinformation the Right has spread about the Dossier, which at this point is 1/3rd accurate, 1/3 inaccurate, and 1/3 unproven—with the final third trending toward accurate (echoing Steele’s own 70%-accurate estimate for his raw intel).

9/ The most controversial claim in the Dossier was never the pee-tape claim, as (a) all the evidence suggests something uncouth 100% happened at the Ritz Moscow in November 2013, but (b) even if it did occur, it didn’t involve Trump having sex and wouldn’t really prove collusion.

10/ Rather, the most controversial claim in the Dossier was that Trump in some fashion stood to gain from the December 2016 sale of a portion of the Kremlin-owned oil giant Rosneft. I still have trolls who know nothing about the Trump-Russia scandal trolling me over this in 2022.

11/ Almost no one actually writes about the Rosneft deal component of Trump-Russia collusion because it is so damn confusing. And it is so damn confusing in part because of disinformation about it and in part because the identities of the buyers remained hidden for a long time.

12/ But it suffices to say the following: nothing in the Dossier ever said Trump was going to be paid directly from the deal, and it would have been moronic to interpret the Dossier’s raw, unprocessed intel that way. The idea was that Trump would financially benefit *indirectly*.

13/ IOW, one of the buyers of a portion of Rosneft would thereafter—and sometime soon, within a year or two—do a positively jaw-droppingly opaque deal with someone close to Trump that would in essence act as a transfer of funds to a location Trump could access/benefit from them.

14/ And that happened.

I don’t know what else to say. It *inarguably* happened.

And to this day, grotesque scoundrels like Nicholas Grossman of ArcDigi try to convince their readers that it never did—and for the life of me I’ve no idea why they’re committed to lying about this.

15/ In December 2016, the Qatari Investment Authority was a buyer in the Rosneft deal, and within a few months it had become a business partner... of Jared Kushner.

Then, in August 2018, it executed perhaps the biggest and most inexplicable bailout in U.S. history.

Of Kushner.

16/ I can’t articulate how much more complicated this is than I’ve made it here.

Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019) is a 600-page book that devotes an entire chapter to just one component of this scandal: a Saudi blockade of Qatar that Trump and Kushner secretly orchestrated.

17/ But the upshot—for the purposes of this kinda-brief thread—is that a QIA-backed company called Brookfield gave Kushner a ten-figure bailout in August 2018, as the Kushners were about to lose everything on a historically bad deal the historically business-clueless Kushner did.

18/ And now we’ve learned that one of the leading FBI investigators of Kushner in 2016, 2017, and 2018 jumped to a lucrative position at Brookfield right as it bailed out Kushner—and while in that role seems to have coordinated with the Kremlin lead on 2016 collusion, Deripaska.

19/ It’s all *worse* than I just made it sound—but I think we can agree it’s horrific? This is the opposite of a Durham bombshell; rather than proof that the FBI was anti-Trump when it repeatedly did him solids from 2015 to 2018, this is evidence of possible pro-Trump misconduct.

20/ Hopefully this gives everyone a good sense of where this breaking news report at PROOF is headed, as well as the excellent work now being done by Insider that is mentioned in the subhed of the article and is linked to therein. See PROOF for the rest: sethabramson.substack.com

(PS) As ever, anyone who prefers to tip (in any amount) for threads here rather than subscribe ($5/mo or $50/yr) to the PROOF Substack can do so via my Venmo account, which is [@]SethAbramsonTwitter, or my PayPal, which can be found and easily accessed at sethabramson.net/pp.