Senate Investigators May Have Found a Missing Piece in the Russia Probe

[herding cats]

Source: The Atlantic

An ex-congressman has attracted scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee, as it continues to investigate whether President Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow to sway the 2016 presidential election.

Curt Weldon, a Republican and former Pennsylvania congressman, lost his re-election campaign more than a decade ago following an FBI probe into his ties to two Russian companies. He has “connections to both Russia and the Trump campaign” that are raising suspicions among senators, a spokeswoman for Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said. Feinstein is the committee’s ranking member, and wants to interview Weldon, the spokeswoman said.

The reasons for the committee’s interest in Weldon are murky, but his ties to Russia are significant. Members of Congress believe, for example, that Weldon may lead to answers about why the Trump administration sought to lift sanctions on Russia in the aftermath of the 2016 election despite a public statement by intelligence agencies that the Kremlin tried to help Trump win. Weldon may also have information about the role a Russian oligarch may have played in trying to influence the Trump administration—though Weldon denied this when I asked him about it.

Additionally, Weldon appears to have knowledge of a key instance in which a foreign national sought to influence the president through one of his closest advisers—a central theme of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russia’s election interference.



Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/562343/?__twitter_impression=true

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Celebrate a true Republican - read the bio!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Weldon

co-chair of the Duma-Congress Study Group, the official inter-parliamentary relationship between the United States and Russia.

After graduation, Weldon was subject to the draft, with the Vietnam War ongoing. In November 2000, his office said he used student and teaching deferments during the Vietnam era, and had a low number when the draft lottery was reinstated.[2] In July 2006, a Weldon spokesman said that Weldon "wanted to serve, but the military would not take him because of his extremely poor eyesight."[3]

Hidden weapons of mass destruction

Dave Gaubatz, a former Air Force special investigator who was as a civilian employee in Iraq in 2003, says that while in Iraq, he acquired what he considered reliable information about WMD caches in four locations that had gas and chemical weapons that were recently produced. He could not get U.S. military officials to look into the matter, so he eventually contacted Weldon and Representative Peter Hoekstra, head of the House Intelligence Committee, to share his information and to try to get them to pressure the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to do the WMD searches in four locales.

Instead, Gaubatz said, Weldon discussed a Hoekstra-Weldon trip to Iraq, under the guise of visiting the troops, that would detour to one of the locales. Once there, Gaubatz said, the congressmen planned to persuade the U.S. military commander to lend them the equipment and men to go digging for the cache. He said that Weldon made it clear he didn't want word leaked to the Pentagon, to intelligence officials, or to Democratic congressmen.

Gaubatz said that "They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out." After a May 4, 2006 meeting, according to Gaubatz, he called a reporter at the Washington Times, who called Weldon's office to get confirmation. That inquiry, Gaubatz said, scuttled the project.

A spokesman for Hoekstra denied that Hoekstra intended to take an expedition to Iraq. Weldon's office refused to comment.[31]

[saidsimplesimon]

2. Nunes has been off the radar for a while.

Has he found another surrogate hiding beneath the outhouse?

[certainot]

3. a decade ago? wow. that's about when limbaugh started working for the putin and the teabags

vs the GOP establishment

like when he withheld his support for mccain until the last minute - until mccain picked palin to satisfy him

the announcement was made minutes before the limbaugh show started the friday before the gop convention - it would have been a disaster and limbaugh immediately got behind mccain and saved the convention

forcing palin on mccain to sabotage him seems like something the kremlin might like to do and limbaugh was key

everything he's done since then has been kremlin friendly, from creating "climategate" from a russian hack, to trying to get US to default, to selling trump

[SergeStorms]

4. The amount of work required of the Mueller investigation....

seems to grow exponentially with every layer of corruption and criminality they peel back. There is so much crooked crap being exposed about the Trump campaign and the entire Republican party! He may never finish until every Republican in the White House and Congress are forced to resign or are indicted. What a shame that would be.

[blue-wave]

5. I have been suspecting since

the whole Russia/Trump scandal started escalating, this goes back decades and goes deep into the republicon party. Putin certainly has been patient and smart, organizing his revenge since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You can find this documentary on YouTube.

[BumRushDaShow]

6. Wow wow. Weldon was the stalwart in the former PA-7

-the same district that became the gerrymandered joke of the U.S. and was finally redrawn by the PA Supreme Court this past spring.

Weldon lost his seat to Adm. Joe Sestak back in 2006 during the last blue wave (and Sestak won a 2nd term in 2008). However Sestak decided to resign the seat and run against Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate (after Specter switched parties during the summer of 2009). Specter ended up winning the primary but ultimately lost to teabagger Toomey in the general in 2010.

Never realized (or connected, but now do in retrospect) that he was basically another Rohrabacher - or apparently, the PRECURSOR to Rohrabacher.

OMFG -

Patrick Simpson
Nov 5, 2017

Dana Rohrabacher may be known now as Putin’s favorite Congressman but he got there by learning from Putin’s first Congressman, Representative Curt Weldon.

Curt Weldon was the first graduate in Russian studies from West Chester University, the resting place for his congressional archives.

In the late 70’s, Curt Weldon fought the Pagans motorcycle gang as mayor of Marcus Hook, and then he chaired the Delaware County council before running for and winning his House spot in 1986. He was a member of the National Security Caucus and created or co-chaired the Congressional Caucuses for most of the former Soviet States.

While in the House of Representatives, he spent most of time focusing on building a better relationship with Russia. All of the think tanks and all the major politicos of that time ran there after the Soviet Union fell.

https://medium.com/@trumpwatchdog/who-is-curt-weldon-695d0116ad29

(Link that works to the above link for DU due to the "@" not being recognized - https://bit.ly/2Ly6Bhm)

He (and Rohrabacher) is even mentioned in a Russian Propaganda article from 16 years ago!

Love and Infatuation at Russia Forum

By Matt Bivens
May. 13 2002 00:00

WASHINGTON -- When it comes to expressing knowledge of and admiration for Russia, few in the U.S. Congress outdo Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican. But at a talkfest here celebrating American-Russian relations, surfer dude Dana Rohrabacher, Republican congressman from California, did his best. The World Russian Forum has for years been organized by Eduard Lozansky, a Soviet-era dissident and emigre who now lobbies Washington for better relations with Russia. In past, it has been a woozily organized affair. But these days, Lozanksy is the new U.S. publisher of the Russia Journal (yes, the same Russia Journal that competes with The Moscow Times) and he says that has breathed new life into his work.

<...>

It's the sort of event the 54-year-old Weldon ought to dominate. He speaks passable Russian, was a Russian studies major in college and is an old friend of Lozansky's. He is the founder of the Duma-Congress Study Group, which organizes visits between the two parliaments. And Weldon had a lot to talk about: He recently put together a document that outlines all sorts of ways to bring us closer -- from getting more Russian-language instruction in American high schools to exploring for oil together in Timan Pechora. (You can find it at www.fita.org/prbc/index.html).

Enter Rohrbacher, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the only 54-year-old congressman whose home page features a photo of him in a wetsuit, surfing. He may not have invested the years or done the homework of a Curt Weldon, but he sure can enthuse. "I wanna tell ya, Russia is terrific," Rohrbacher told the conference. "We [Russia and America] are going to be best friends. We're not best friends with Europe. I'm sorry fellas. That's history." "They're out for themselves [in Europe.] They do not have the ideals we Americans hold dear. They are manipulative."

So, we should shut down NATO and replace it with a Space-Alliance Treaty Organization, for cooperation in space exploration. (SATO?) To help Russia's economy, the West should write off Soviet-era debts, as the risk of doing business with an Evil Empire. For Rohrbacher, it's an added plus that the debt is mostly held by manipulative Europeans: "The German bankers to whom this debt is owed, well, you know what they can do with their debt." And when we take out Saddam Hussein, Rohrbacher said, we should make it worth Russia's while -- after all, they've got Iraqi business interests to watch over and old Soviet loans to collect on.

http://old.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2002/5/article/love-and-infatuation-at-russia-forum/246616.html

The above article mentioned Richard Lugar being there at that conference. Lugar is still around (he had been booted by a teabagger in the 2012 primary election in IN) and may be another to look at.