Kushner/Flynn/Russia Timeline: The Russian Oil Mega-deal

As the details of Kushner’s and Flynn’s activities emerge, I’ve been reading about a key event that has gone unnoticed that connects the dots: “The Largest Oil Deal in Russian History,” a deal risked by the West’s sanctions on Russia, and which occurred in the middle of the key Kushner/Flynn/Russia events (right in between Kushner’s potential espionage proposal for a secret direct link to the Kremlin through the Russia embassy and Kushner’s meeting with Putin’s banker/confidant). A timeline connects the dots below, including the possibility that this “19% of Rosneftgaz” deal in December is actually the same “19% of Rosneftgaz” deal that the MI6 agent’s dossier alleges was part of a Russian deal with Carter Page, and it may be getting transferred through shady channels to unknown new stakeholders…

Here are links to the stories on this shady megadeal between Qatar and Russia on Dec. 9:

“Russian state holding company Rosneftegaz on Saturday signed a deal with the Qatar Investment Authority and commodities trader Glencore to sell a 19.5 percent stake in state-owned oil major Rosneft, Rosneft said. The privatization deal, which Rosneft Chief Executive Igor Sechin called the largest in Russia’s history, was announced by Rosneft in a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. Its success suggests the lure of taking a share in one of the world’s biggest oil companies outweighs the risks associated with Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine. Rosneft had been under pressure to secure a sale of the 19.5 percent stake to help replenish state coffers, hit by an economic slowdown driven by weak oil prices and exacerbated by sanctions.”

More recent reports have focused on the shadiness of the deal and its subsequent transactions: “More than a month after Russia announced one of its biggest privatizations since the 1990s, selling a 19.5 percent stake in its giant oil company Rosneft, it still isn’t possible to determine from public records the full identities of those who bought it. The stake was sold for €10.2 billion to a Singapore investment vehicle that Rosneft said was a 50/50 joint venture between Qatar and the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore.”

The Dec. 9th deal falls in the middle of the shadiest events in the Kushner/Flynn/Kislyak timeline, which connects the dots on a mix of known illegal non-disclosures, corruption, potential espionage, and Logan Act violations. They certainly explain why Kushner advised Trump to fire Comey (obstruction of justice).

Dec. 1: Just 8 days before this oil mega-deal, Flynn & Kushner met Ambassador Kislyak at Trump Tower, and proposed secret communication link with the Kremlin through the Russian Embassy. The parties admit that the idea was to avoid any detection of these communications by U.S. authorities.

Dec. 9: The Largest Oil Deal in Russian History

Dec. 13: At Kislyak’s urging, Kushner meets Gorkov, who chairs Russia’s government-owned VE Bank and is Putin’s close confidante. Journalists describe VE Bank (VEB) as Putin’s slushfund, a source of money independent from official Russia budgeting. VE Bank is under strict US sanctions.  Here is good commentary on these events.

Dec. 14: Gorkov immediately flies to Japan to meet with Putin.

Dec. 29, Obama orders new Russian sanctions for election hacking and interference. On the same day: Flynn calls Kislyak five times about Russian sanctions. Trump tweets to Putin, calling him “very smart” for not responding, effectively saying, “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.”

Jan. 4: Flynn reveals to Don McGahn, chief attorney for the transition effort, that he’s under FBI investigation. (He is still appointed and receives security clearance, and he resigns on Feb. 13, long after Sally Yates reveals incriminating details about Flynn on Jan. 26-30).

Jan. 9: Trump transition team announces that Kushner will join the administration as a senior adviser.

Jan. 15: Pence denies that Flynn and Kislyak discussed sanctions.

Jan. 18: Kushner applies for top-secret security clearance, omitting many meetings with foreign officials, including the relevant ones with Kislyak and Gorkov in December. Those omissions are potentially criminal, from my reading of security experts.

I add two more stories for context. The first is from the alleged MI6 dossier on Trump, with the caveat that the dossier has not been verified:

“A dossier with unverified claims about President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia contained allegations that Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia’s state oil company, offered former Trump ally Carter Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Russia.”

I’m reading more about how the two Rosneft sales may have been related. Was there an initial negotiation with the Trump campaign for the Rosneft stake, as the dossier claims? It just happened to be 19% in the alleged dossier, the same number in the December deal (19.5%!).  And did that turn into the December Qatar deal, which in turn was laundered into a deal for Trump Associates, through a Singapore firm? Was Kushner negotiating that deal? Lots of shell companies and the Cayman Islands are involved, perhaps as a way to hide the beneficiaries.

And everyone should listed to this TrumpCast (Slate’s chair and host Jacob Weisberg) interviewing Tim O’Brien of Bloomber Business News. O’Brien explains how, 10 years ago, a 26-year-old Jared Kushner made a terrible bet on Manhattan real estate. His father had just been released from prison, and Jared had taken over the family real estate business. He was looking to make a big splash, so he sold off his family’s holdings in New Jersey in order to purchase a huge building in midtown Manhattan (666 5th Ave., I am not making that up) for $1.8 billion. It was 2007, the peak before the crash. Suddenly, Jared had a financial disaster on his hands. He negotiated a deal to save the project from bankruptcy with a 10-year loan, but the creditors were set to call in their debts in 2017 or 2018.  About a year ago, Kushner had a deal with a Chinese bank in place to re-structure the deal with a huge windfall of $500 million, but journalists at Bloomberg found out, and their story blew the deal (because it was a corrupt deal). And once again, Kushner’s real estate business is heading towards disaster… unless he can find another authoritarian state bank to bail him out.

Guess what happens next? O’Brien explains that Kislyak arranged this December meeting between Kushner and Gorkov (the chair of the Putin-affiliated Russia bank VEB).

Here is Josh Marshall’s view (and chart) from last week, without taking note the oil mega-deal:

“This chart, let me be clear, is not a statement of fact. It is an effort to illustrate a series of patterns which are the subject, the subtext, of many of the reports about the Trump/Russia story and indeed the investigation. It looks at what each side wants, what each side seems to be getting. President Trump’s efforts to destabilize NATO and the EU are the most clear. These things are happening. The election hacking and subversion did happen. We know the Trump Organization has taken vast sums of money from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union over the last twenty years. Whether there’s any explicit quid quo pro today is what we don’t know. When people talk about collusion, this is the pattern of actions they’re looking at and trying to confirm.”

Update:

Today, Bloomberg reports that the Kushners are buried in debt to Chinese lenders on a New Jersey deal. I had no idea about this other financial crisis. Like father, like father-in-law, like son. The Kushners and Trumps are all criminal fraudster/bankruptcy artists, just looking desperately to sell out the US for billlions in return for personal millions.

And NBC is following up on this story on the linke between Kushner’s 666 5th Ave. real estate disaster and potentially using the “backchannel” to find a Russian banker to bail him out.

Let me add a point/counterpoint. A friend pointed out that the 19.5% in both the dossier’s Russia/Carter Page deal and the Qatar Dec.9 deal might not be directly connected, because there may be a 20% legal threshold rule for reporting financing and investors. But the fact that each of these deals is under that 20% threshold suggests that the dealmakers are unusually focused on secrecy, so that it dictates the scope of the deal.