Trump Has Always Been A Russian Agent-- Now The Entire GOP Is
Michael McCaul is no moderate RINO. He's a very conservative Texas Republican. He's also the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee. Yesterday, Julia Ioffee reported that he told her that he thinks “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” He didn't blame Trump-- at least not on the record to Ioffee. He’s certainly aware that former FBI Director Andrew McCabe wasn't the only national security official who believed that Trump, either witting or unwitting, was “a Russian asset.” For one, Yuri Shvets, a former high-ranking Russian spy posted to DC, told author Craig Unger that Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset for over 40 years and “proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow.”
When I started working on this post yesterday, the market was ripping— just an hour in and the Dow was already up over 155 points. But not all stocks were headed in that direction. DJT, the Trump Media andTechnology Group was down another 5%, trading below $46 from a high of $80. CNBC reported that it’s “now far and away the most expensive U.S. stock to sell short... But plenty of people are still willing to pay those steep costs, based on their belief that Trump Media’s share price is bound to fall dramatically from its Wednesday closing of $48.81.” [Free Howie suggestion: as with all things Trump, stay as far away as you can.] Keep in mind that Señor T owns about 60% of shares, and the crooked company executives he’s hired also own a lot of the stock.
Still, many professional traders are betting millions that DJT will go the way of so many Trump ventures, from Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump: The Game, Trump Shuttle and Trump University to Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts and Trump Plaza Hotel— down the toilet. Joe Rennison reported that since the stock started collapsing “the appetite to bet against the stock has grown even more ravenous.” From the high ’til now, around $2 billion of idiotically purported market value has disappeared. Short sellers (who bet the share price will fall) have made it the most shorted stock in America, despite the high cost of shorting it. “The demand to short Trump Media,” wrote Rennison, “the parent company of the social media platform Truth Social, is so great that stock lenders can charge enormous fees, making it hard for short-sellers to turn a profit unless the shares fall significantly. Still, there is a lot of interest in taking the bet. [Again, from yours truly: stay away.]
I expected it to drop a lot more yesterday because of the quick revelation that, like all Trump ventures with no exceptions, it is steeped in criminality from top to bottom. The Kremlin appears to have been propping Trump up financially through the stock and yesterday two shady Kremlin-adjacent Canadian brothers living in Miami, Michael and Gerald Shvartsman, pleaded guilt to insider trading (securities fraud). They both face decades in prison followed by deportation. They’ll be sentenced in July.
Matthew Goldstein reported that Shvartsmen changed their pleas from not guilty to guilty and will forgo a trial. “Michael Shvartsman, according to federal prosecutors, was the mastermind of the scheme to profit from the announcement, in October 2021, that Trump Media & Technology Group planned to merge with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a shell company that had just raised $300 million in an initial public offering. The authorities charged Michael Shvartsman, 53, a Miami financier, with making $18.2 million in illicit trading profits; and his brother, 46, who owns an outdoor furnishing store in Miami, with raking in $4.6 million. Michael Shvartsman, who ran a venture investment firm called Rocket One, used some of the proceeds from the scheme to buy a $14 million luxury yacht that he named Provocateur. The brothers each face prison sentences of up to 20 years. Their plea agreements with the government recommend a sentence of roughly four to five years for Michael Shvartsman; and three to four years for Gerald Shvartsman.”
And that brings us to the Kremlin connection because… well, with the Trump criminal world there’s always a Kremlin connection. This one is Anton Postolnikov, who kept Trump Media afloat before the merger. Postolnikov is the nephew of a former Russian deputy minister of Justice, Aleksandr Smirnov, a Putin crony. Postolnikov has been under criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Tracing money from the Kremlin to Trump is never easy and straight-forward, of course, but in this case it seems to have gone though a shady entity calling itself the ES Family Trust (a Postolnikov shell company) that operated through an equally shady bank in Dominica, Paxum Bank, best known as the off-shore bank of the porn industry.
Trump Media struggled to get financing because traditional banks were reluctant to lend millions to Trump’s social media company in the wake of the January 6 Capitol attack, Wilkerson said.
Trump Media eventually found some lenders, including ES Family Trust, but the sequence of events was curious.
ES Family Trust was established on 18 May 2021, its creation papers show. Postolnikov’s “user” access to the account was “verified” on 30 November 2021 by a Paxum Bank manager in Dominica. The trust was funded for the first time on 2 December 2021.
Trump Media then received the loans from ES Family Trust: $2m on 23 December 2021, and $6m on 17 February 2022.
The loans came in the form of convertible promissory notes, meaning ES Family Trust would gain a major stake in Trump Media because it was offering the money in exchange for Trump Media agreeing to convert the loan principal into “shares of Company Stock.”
Oddly, the notes were never signed. But the investment in Trump Media proved to be huge: while precise figures can only be known by Trump Media, ES Family Trust’s stake in Trump Media is worth between $20m and $40m even after the sharp decline of the company’s share price in the wake of a poor earnings report.
The ES Family Trust account also appears to have benefited Postolnikov personally. As the criminal investigation into the Trump Media deal intensified towards the end of last year, the trust recorded several transfers to Postolnikov with the subject line “Partial Loan Return”.
In total, the documents showed that the trust transferred $4.8m to Postolnikov’s account, although $3m was inexplicably “reversed.”
…Last month, federal prosecutors charged Michael Shvartsman, a close associate of Postolnikov, with money laundering in a superseding indictment after previously charging him and two others in July with insider-trading Digital World shares. Shvartsman and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty.
At least part of the evidence against Shvartsman came from a confidential informant for the DHS, court filings show: in one March 2023 meeting with the informant and an associate, Shvartsman mentioned a friend who owned a bank in Dominica and made bridge loans to Trump Media.
“[Shvartsman] stated that a friend of his owns a bank in the island of Dominica and would be able to provide banking services to Russian and Ukraine Nationals if the [confidential informant] had other clients in need of that service,” the DHS report said.
“[Shvartsman’s associate] told the [confidential informant] that he does not think the SEC would be able to go after [Shvartsman] for his part in the investment but mentioned that [Shvartsman] essentially provided ‘bridge financing’ for the firm behind the Truth Social media platform,” it said.
The unredacted parts of the DHS report do not specify whether the “friend” was Postolnikov and what the “bridge financing” referred to— but the report left open the possibility that Shvartsman also had a role with the trust.
