Why No Tariff for Russia?
Gee. Coincidence?
Russia not on Trump's tariff list
by Vitaliy Shevchenko
Russia editor, BBC Monitoring, April 3, 2025
One country that did not feature on Donald Trump's list of tariffs on US trade partners was Russia.
US outlet Axios quoted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as saying this was because existing US sanctions on Russia "preclude any meaningful trade" and noting that Cuba, Belarus and North Korea were also not included.
However, nations with even less trade with the US - such as Syria, which exported $11m of products last year according to UN data quoted by Trading Economics - were on the list.
The US imposed large-scale sanctions on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Trump has generally taken a friendlier approach to Russia since his return to the White House.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjl3k1we8vo
Background: Donald J Trump represents the most successful spy operation of all time. And thanks to Just-us John Roberts redefining the meaning of "Insurrection" and the very words of the Constitution of the United States of America, an active Russian agent has been allowed to return to the Oval Office to again "serve" as the pee-resident.
Normally, I'd say: "Think about that!" But, destroying truth is what tyrants do. It's why they hate a free press.
It's why trumpf is doing all he can to sue anyone who ever wrote anything bad about him. Now he has the DoJ doing his dirty work and handing the legal bill to the U.S. taxpayer.
The photo of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and dip above was taken by TASS, the official Russian news agency. The US media were not informed about the 2017 visit. We learned about it because the Unstable Moron himself spread the pic proudly on social media.
How many people do you know who’ve seen that picture or the one below, taken on an earlier date in the Oval Office? Again, very few.
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”
"I'm not under investigation," he added.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5
And this is the man leading the "restructuring of American government" today winking at Putin at a diplomatic affair during his first madministration.
No wonder Putin, the Kremlin and the GRU and whatever the KGB is called these days call him "America's Gorbachev." Gorby sped up the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Now Putin returns the favor through Trump and his destruction of America's economy, hailed just before the 2024 election by The Economist as "The Envy of the World."
= new reply since forum marked as read
Eric Utay was correct. Semion Mogilevich has all the receipts.
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian
by David Smith
The Guardian, January 29, 2021
Excerpt…
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.
Continues…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
"Who, ol' Dinsie? Wouldn't say a word against 'im!"
Or the look of one who owes a lot of money for...everything.
The Most Dangerous Mobster in the World
In 1998 the Voice reported on the enigmatic leader of the Red Mafia — a shadowy figure known as the ''Brainy Don''
by Robert I. Friedman
The Village Voice, May 26, 1998
Excerpt...
The enigmatic leader of the Red Mafia is a 52-year-old Ukrainian-born Jew named Semion Mogilevich. He is a shadowy figure known as the “Brainy Don” — he holds an economics degree from the University of Lvov — and until now, he has never been exposed by the media. But the Voice has obtained hundreds of pages of classified FBI and Israeli intelligence documents from August 1996, and these documents — as well as recent interviews with a key criminal associate and with dozens of law enforcement sources here and abroad — describe him as someone who has become a grave threat to the stability of Israel and Eastern Europe.
“He’s the most powerful mobster in the world,” crows Monya Elson, who is listed in classified documents as one of Mogilevich’s closest associates and partners in prostitution and money laundering rings. The Brighton Beachbased Elson, who once led a pack of thugs and killers known as Monya’s Brigada, is currently in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan awaiting trial for three murders and numerous extortions.
In July 1993, after Elson was grievously wounded by rival mobsters in a bloody shoot-out outside his Brooklyn apartment building, Mogilevich spirited him out of the country. Mogilevich then set up his Russian Jewish refugee friend in an alleged massive money-laundering scheme in Fano, Italy, where he was eventually arrested and extradited back to America. Elson, an integral part of the Red Mafia, had been one of the most feared mobsters in Brighton Beach, ground zero for Russian organized crime in America, which has exploded here following perestroika.
“If I tell on Mogilevich, Interpol will give me $20 million,” boasted Elson. “I lived with him. I’m his partner, don’t forget. We are very, very close friends. I don’t mean close, I mean very, very close. He’s my best friend.” Nevertheless, after extensive interviews over the course of the last six months, Elson ultimately confirmed some of the details about Mogilevich contained in the classified FBI and Israeli documents.
Allegations of Mogilevich’s devilish array of criminal activities are extensively detailed in the reports: The FBI and Israeli intelligence assert that he traffics in nuclear materials, drugs, prostitutes, precious gems, and stolen art. His contract hit squads operate in the U.S. and Europe. He controls everything that goes in and out of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, a “smugglers’ paradise,” says Elson. Mogilevich bought a bankrupt airline in a former Central Asian Soviet republic for millions of dollars in cash so he could haul heroin out of the Golden Triangle. Most worrisome to U.S. authorities is Mogilevich’s apparently legal purchase of virtually the entire Hungarian armaments industry, jeopardizing regional security, NATO, and the war against terrorism.
Continues...
https://www.villagevoice.com/the-most-dangerous-mobster-in-the-world/
I know it's ole news to you, Blue Owl. For those new to the subject, Mogilevich and Associates are the guys Putin, his oligarchs and Agent Dimdonnie Krasnov report to.
