Revealed: Jared Kushner's Private Channel With Putin's Money Man

[steve2470]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jared-kushners-private-channel-with-putins-money-man-kirill-dmitriev

(behind paywall)

On a late afternoon in March, a large military aircraft bearing the Russian Federation insignia descended into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Its mission: to deliver personal protective equipment and ventilators to nearby hospitals scrambling to treat patients during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had pleaded for weeks with the federal government for additional resources, particularly ventilators, to treat the thousands of COVID-19 patients across the state. Yet news of the Russian delivery surprised those in the governor’s office working to obtain additional medical equipment. They’d thought the ventilator support would come from the U.S. stockpile or from an American company.

<snip>

Kushner held the details of the New York shipment closely and accelerated the order by leaning on his personal relationship with Dmitriev, a confidant of President Vladimir Putin who’d been dispatched to make inroads with the inexperienced 2016 Trump transition team.

Dmitriev was one of the main participants in the infamous January 2017 Seychelles meeting with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, in which the two discussed a roadmap for U.S.-Russia cooperation in the new administration. In the years since, Kushner and Dmitriev have communicated—often at a distance, and at times through intermediaries—about ways the U.S. and Russia could work together. The conversations have touched on everything from creating a joint business council to increase investment, to working on a Middle East peace deal, to helping lead negotiations on a recent OPEC deal, to delivering those medical supplies, according to multiple senior officials.

More than a dozen Trump administration officials, current and former, described Kushner’s relationship with Dmitriev as a byproduct of President Trump’s deep-rooted beliefs that he was unfairly punished for beating Hillary Clinton and that the sprawling investigation into his campaign’s Russia contacts was a hoax. Trump distrusted the national security and intelligence communities and saw the officials operating in that apparatus as harboring “Deep State” actors whose goal it was to remove him from office.

[abqtommy]

1. Thanks, tRUMP, for corrupting all levels of our govenment and society... NOT!