Trump’s Connection To Harvey Weinstein Uncovered – Republicans Are Dead Silent

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The “point” of the Trump administration has long seemed to revolve around one man — Donald Trump. His aides rush around trying to pick up the pieces after whatever the latest round may be of the endless lies and nonsense that he spews. He himself refuses to operate according to the norms of government, instead having brought his freewheeling, questionably ethical business practices right into the White House.

It’s against that backdrop that the president’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, spoke secretly with the now former Russian Ambassador to the United States in an effort to undercut the effectiveness of Obama administration sanctions.

That’s bad enough in of itself, but it gets darker.

Reports have come out this week of the Trump administration employing private investigators to dig up “dirt” on key Obama officials associated with the Iran nuclear deal. The president has expressed opposition to the deal on numerous occasions in the past, and its fate is still up in the air.

In the meantime, he and his team have reportedly resorted to dirty tricks reminiscent of what might happen surrounding a corrupt overseas real estate deal — which is a fitting metaphor, considering the president’s own past.

Now, journalist Ronan Farrow is among those explaining that such isn’t even where the story ends. Reportedly, the Trump team utilized the services of the same Israeli intelligence firm that disgraced film executive Harvey Weinstein used to try and silence the victims of his decades of sexual harassment and assault.

That firm is called Black Cube and is well connected in Israel. For example, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, claiming innocence of the man’s true intentions, has stated that he’s the one who introduced Weinstein to Black Cube’s leadership in the first place.

The methods used by Black Cube in the operations supporting Weinstein and the Trump administration mirror each other. In both cases, the firm used fake identities to seek to set up meetings with targets in which they would aim to unearth potentially damaging information.

For example, Rebecca Kahl, wife to former Obama aide Colin Kahl, received an email from a woman claiming to be named Adriana Gavrilo in early 2017. “Gavrilo” claimed to represent Reuben Capital Partners, a company supposedly dedicated to wealth management that wanted to rope the school the Kahls’ daughter attended into a new education supporting program. Kahl tried to get “Gavrilo” to talk to school administrators, but she wouldn’t talk to anyone but her, and Kahl never actually met with the supposedly London-based Gavrilo.

In similar fashion, a woman claiming to be named Eva Novak emailed Ann Norris, wife to former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, and asked her to consult on a supposedly in-production film sporting a plot taken right from the process that led to the Iran nuclear deal itself. Norris “never responded” to “Novak.”

Ronan Farrow, writing in The New Yorker, explains that LinkedIn pages tagged as belonging to the individuals who contacted Kahl and Norris had the apparently same image on them, and in similarly suspicious fashion, the websites for the companies the people who contacted the former Obama officials’ wives have since been taken off the web. According to Farrow, they were never more than “bare bones” creations in the first place, made with an Israel-based popular website builder.

Unsurprisingly, Black Cube has denied the allegations of cooperation with the Trump team; it’s not exactly as though one would expect a private intelligence firm to be forthcoming about their operations. Their denial could be more fitting if their operations went through some entity associated with the Trump administration and not through the White House itself.

What is clear in the meantime is that the current president continues to ignore standards of conduct for the individual occupying the Oval Office.

Featured Image via T.J. Kirkpatrick/Bloomberg via Getty Images