So Much For Don Junior’s “Transparency”

Ken AshfordL'Affaire Russe, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

Whatever position you take on the Trump-Russia Collusion Scandal, one thing is hard to argue with: the crisis management team at the White House is ineffective and probably non-existent.

The first rule of crisis management is to avoid the drip-drip-drip of damaging evidence. Get out in front of the stories, explain everything — EVERYTHING — there is to explain and then move on.  Because drip-drip-drip keeps things in the headlines.

The Trump plan is to deny deny deny and attack the media.  It’s not working.  That plan fails when the media has you dead-to-rights, as the New York Times did last weekend when it had emails from Donald Trump Jr. setting up a June 9 meeting with Russians to get Hillary dirt — what many would call “collusion with Russia” if not a willingness to collude.

Back against the wall, Trump Jr released the emails and did a tell-all (albeit softball) interview with Sean Hannity. The President praised his son for his transparency.

Except Trump Jr omitted that there was one, and possibly two, more people in that meeting:

Rinat Akhmetshin told the Associated Press on Friday he accompanied Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya to the June 9, 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. Trump’s attorney confirmed Akhmetshin’s attendance in a statement.

Akhmetshin’s presence at Trump Tower that day adds another layer of controversy to an episode that already provides the clearest indication of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In the run-up to that rendezvous, Donald Trump Jr. was promised “very high level and sensitive information” on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Who is Rinet Akmetshin?

On one level, he is a Russian-born American lobbyist who served in the Soviet military and emigrated to the U.S., where he holds dual citizenship.

Or, you could say he is a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence.

Or, you could say he is a former Soviet counterintelligence officer previously accused in federal and state courts of orchestrating an international hacking conspiracy:

In court papers filed with New York Supreme Court in November 2015, Akhmetshin was described as “a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer” by lawyers for International Mineral Resources (IMR), a Russian mining company who alleged that they had been hacked.

Those documents accuse Akhmetshin of hacking into two computer systems and stolen sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black ops smear campaign against IMR. The allegations were later withdrawn.

The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. was told in July 2015 that Akhmetshin had arranged the hacking of a mining company’s private records—stealing internal documents and then disseminating them. The corporate espionage case was brought by IMR, who alleged that Akhmetshin was hired by Russian oligarch Andrey Melinchenko, an industrialist worth around $12 billion.

A New York law firm paid Akhmetshin $140,000, including expenses, to organize a public relations campaign targeting IMR. Shortly after he began that work, IMR suffered a sophisticated and systematic breach of its computers, and gigabytes of data allegedly stolen in the breach wound up the hands of journalists and human rights groups critical of the mining company. IMR accused Akhmetshin of paying Russian hackers to carry out the hack attack.

IMR went so far as to hire a private investigator to follow Akhmetshin on a trip to London. That private eye, Akis Phanartzis, wrote in a sworn declaration to the court that he eavesdropped on Akhmetshin in a London coffee shop and heard Akhmetshin boast that “he organized the hacking of IMR’s computer systems” on behalf of Melinchenko’s fertilizer producer Eurochem. “Mr. Akhmetshin [noted] that he was hired because there were certain things that the law firm could not do,” Phanartzis said.

Akhmetshin denied the accusation, but admitted passing around a “hard drive” filled with data on IMR’s owners. He said the information was all open source material  that he’d gotten from the former prime minister of Kazakhstan, Akezhan Kazhegeldin.  The private investigator, through, said he recovered a copy of the data on a thumb drive provided by an anonymous source, and found it consisted of gigabytes of private files stolen in the computer intrusion. A computer forensics expert examined the thumb drive and found metadata indicating some of the files had last been opened by a user with the initials “RA.”

Lawyers acting for Akhmetshin deny that he allegedly confessed to hacking. They did not deny that he had bragged about his investigatory techniques in a public place, but claimed that his methods did not involve computer intrusion.

These court disputes came after IMR had originally filed an application in the U.S. in April 2014 requesting that Akhmetshin, a resident of Washington, D.C., give a deposition and share documents with the company as part of discovery for a case being heard in the Dutch courts. That case was won in the Netherlands without needing evidence from Akhmetshin.

That changed a year later, when the verdict was appealed and an American judge granted IMR’s request for a subpoena to be issued. During Akhmetshin’s deposition, he refused to answer a number of questions and declined to produce the 261 requested documents, citing attorney-client privilege and non-testifying expert witness privilege.

MR successfully argued that his claim of privilege should be reviewed by a judge—out of the courtroom, in the judge’s private chambers—because there was no such protection in a “crime-fraud” case.

In 2015, citing emails and records it obtained in the federal case, International Mineral Resources filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court directly accusing Akhmetshin of hacking the company. But early last year the company abruptly withdrew “all allegations made by it against Defendants in the Complaint,” according to a court document. The withdrawal included “allegations therein that Defendants […] have engaged in any unlawful or improper acts against IMR, including but not limited to hacking any information from IMR’s computer systems, disseminating any information as part of a smear campaign against IMR.” The lead attorney in the case  did not return a phone call from The Daily Beast about the lawsuit.

So, yeah…… him.

And the long-term fallout isn’t Don Jr.  It’s Jared Kushner, who was at the meeting.  He’s amended his security clearance form so many times now.  13 times, by one count.  Democrats on the hill are calling for his security clearance to be removed.

UPDATE:  Oh for the love of….

They can’t ALL be translators!

UPDATE #2: This is great…