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Sunday’s Forum
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5 responses to “Sunday’s Forum”
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Latest on early voting in Texas. After six days of early voting (5 more to go).
Harris County where I live: about 21% have voted early. Weather has been really great.
Statewide: about 20%.
As far as comparison with previous mid-term election years, early voting is surpassing 2018 (the Ted Cruz/Beto O’Rourke fight) in both numbers and percentages.
I don’t have a good feel on what the electoral is thinking. Polls and prediction markets still have Talarico up by a little.
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This is a really big story that is not getting the attention it deserves:
https://newrepublic.com/post/216985/jared-kushner-phone-hack-middle-east-dictators
The significance is discussed here:
There is other stuff also at the Malcolm Nance link, but it includes extensive discussion of the Kushner exploit – including the likelihood that Kushner is not the only Trumpworld figure whose cellphone is being continuously monitored by the FSB/GRU Russian intelligence.
ETA: The TNR piece gives the impression it was the Dutch that hacked the Kushner cellphone. Actually it was the Russians, the Dutch flipped a Russian intelligence guy who gave them the ability to see what the Russians were seeing.
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In intelligence work, a cutout is an intermediary who separates a principal from an intended recipient. The cutout can handle money, information, or favors while giving both sides plausible deniability. The value can arrive as an investment from a friendly third country, an unusually favorable acquisition, access to capital, or a commercial opportunity whose connection to the original sponsor is difficult to prove.
Meet Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and one of the world’s most powerful investors. There is no concrete evidence that Tahnoon has knowingly served as a cutout for the Kremlin and there is no verified money trail showing that funds originating with Russia passed through Tahnoon-controlled entities into the businesses of Donald Trump or Jared Kushner.
But Tahnoon and the United Arab Emirates keep popping up whenever Trump and Putin strike deals and whenever members of the Trump family stand to make money. The relevant question is whether Putin could use the UAE and Tahnoon’s extraordinary combination of intelligence access, financial power, and relationship with Trump’s family and cronies as an intermediary through which to deliver value while concealing its Russian origin. Based on available evidence, that possibility is credible enough to demand serious scrutiny.
[…]
An excerpt from Matthew Cole’s forthcoming book, published in Vanity Fair, alleges that Russian military intelligence compromised Kushner’s telephone and stored screenshots on a server run by the GRU, Russia’s fearsome military intelligence. According to Cole, Dutch military intelligence recruited and flipped a Russian operative, who gave the Dutch access to the material. The Dutch then watched Kushner log into an account at First Abu Dhabi Bank that received $750 million from Saudi and Emirati sources.
The money’s immediate, visible source was an unnamed, apparently government-linked bank in Azerbaijan, which sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the First Abu Dhabi Bank account but, according to Cole, the underlying money came from the UAE and Saudi Arabia — specifically from funds provided early in Trump’s first term by UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. It claims that Azerbaijani banks served as way stations for Saudi and Emirati currency, which was deposited there, converted to dollars for a fee, and then transferred to Abu Dhabi, obscuring the original sender.
The excerpt alleges that Kushner was a signatory on the First Abu Dhabi account and that Tahnoon, as the bank’s chairman, helped oversee the arrangement. Cole describes additional accounts linked to Kushner’s private diplomacy and claims that the combined sums reached at least $2 billion, much of which was apparently earmarked for Kushner’s personal use. (Kushner categorically denies the claims but has notably not yet sued for defamation or to stop the publication of Cole’s book.)
Still, even in its most conservative interpretation, the story raises a devastating counterintelligence possibility. If Russian intelligence obtained images of Kushner accessing an undisclosed Emirati account (or even material that merely appeared to show such access), the Kremlin may have acquired compromising information about a man who is now one of Washington’s principal Putin interlocutors, tasked with negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine. This raises further questions about why he has been so eager to sell out the Ukrainians in exchange for a different, lucrative deal that will greatly benefit Tahnoon. More on that in a moment.
Whatever happened with the accounts Cole writes about, the publicly documented financial relationship between Tahnoon’s network and the Trump-Kushners is enormous. Even if Tahnoon never set up a slush fund for Kushner’s personal use, the established facts are already damning.
Lots more at the link
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