THREAD: for those asking where liar George Santos got the money to run a campaign, a sizable portion of it came from a man named Intrater. That name will sound familiar to folks who listened to the OG Mueller, She Wrote podcast. 1/
Intrater’s cousin is a guy named Vekselberg, who pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into Michael Cohen’s “Essential Consulting” from a company called Columbus Nova, and the two traded hundreds of phone calls and text messages. 2/
Intrater, Vekselberg, and Cohen attended the Trump inauguration together. Intrater paid $250K to the trump inaugural. In April of this year, the DoJ accused Vekselberg of fraud and money laundering and seized is $90M yacht. 3/
In 1996, Vekselberg partnered with another oligarch named Blavatnik to go in on Rusal - an aluminum company owned by Oleg Deripaska - who funneled nearly $4M into GOP coffers including McConnell’s. McConnell tried to cut a deal to build an aluminum plant in KY with their help. 4/
McConnell lobbied to lift sanctions on Deripaska so he could help fund the project. All of these guys were sanctioned for interference in the 2016 election, by the way. 5/
And Mnuchin, who protected trump from mandatory presidential tax audits, was a partner with Blavatnik in his movie production company. He sold his shares to Blavatnik when he was nominated as Treasury Secretary, and Blavatnik funneled $1M into Donald’s inaugural. 6/
So no one in my house is surprised that a straw candidate was partly funded by sanctioned Russian oligarchs tied to trump. END/ (sources to follow)
Source nytimes.com/2018/05/22/us/…
CORRECTION: Intrater was the CEO of Columbus Nova, not Vekselberg. Vekselberg was an investor in Columbus Nova.
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