Republicans in Congress and elsewhere allied with the president can whine as much as they like about the supposed overreach of the Russia inquiry led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but he is continuing on with his mission of untangling the webs ensnaring the president’s team anyway.
This Friday, The New York Times has a new report out detailing one of the steps the special counsel’s team took earlier this year in their ongoing effort to make sense of the Trump team’s Russia ties.
According to the publication, Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg was stopped and questioned by agents working with Mueller’s team when he stepped off of a private plane at a New York airport earlier this year. CNN has, in fact, previously reported that Mueller’s team questioned a Russian billionaire under such circumstances earlier this year; there was no name available, however, until now.
Vekselberg was in attendance at Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, and he was also among the Russian interests targeted by the sanctions the Trump administration finally got around to imposing last month in response to Russian election interference.
When stopped earlier this year, The Times reports that agents sought to search his electronic devices in addition to their questioning.
Interestingly, underscoring the close proximity to Russian interests in which the Trump team has operated, Vekselberg has loose ties to not just one, but two individuals who at one point served in the Trump administration. He attended the 2015 dinner hosted by Russian news outlet RT where the president’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn sat literally right next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he also invested heavily in the Bank of Cyprus at the same time that the president’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was the institution’s vice chairman.
Those connections are in addition to his attendance of the president’s inauguration. Vekselberg’s cousin, American businessman Andrew Intrater, donated a quarter of a million dollars to the Trump inaugural committee; it’s through him that Vekselberg got his ticket.
The special counsel’s team has questioned Intrater in addition to their questioning of Vekselberg; however, as The Times notes, there is no solid indication that either of the two men in question are facing any suspicion of wrongdoing from Mueller’s team. Exactly why the special counsel sought to speak with the two men is not immediately clear; it’s not as though Mueller is broadcasting his every move, no matter how many Republicans wish to see the whole investigation go up in flames.
Ironically, Vekselberg’s ties to the Russia investigation don’t even end there. Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney who faced a thirty day jail sentence for lying to the FBI earlier this year, is the son-in-law of his business partner German Khan.
Khan himself is not exactly a bright and shiny figure, having reportedly brought a chrome-plated pistol along with him to a dinner with a BP executive, a get together where Khan told the executive that he considered the film The Godfather a “manual for life.”
As for Mueller, he has so far brought charges against four former associates of the president, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Trump ally and lawyer Rudy Giuliani can try and downplay Manafort’s crimes all he wants, but carrying on with a vast money laundering scheme connected to work for pro-Russia interests overseas is not exactly a minor offense.
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