Trump, Putin and the mob: #BudapestBridge and the Hungarian connection to Trump (Part 2)
Trump, Putin and the mob. Research collection. Part 2: #BudapestBridge and the Hungarian connection to Trump
Part 1 :::: Part 2 :::: Part 3 :::: Part 4 :::: Part 5 :::: Part 6
It’s important to note that Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is Vladimir Putin’s puppet within the EU and NATO.
Source 1: ‘Why Putin needs Orban’
Source 2: ‘Vladimir Putin’s Little Helper’
Hungary may not seem like an important country to most Americans (and that’s on us), but Viktor Orban is an important tool in Putin’s disinformation campaign against the west. (Related thread here.)
I have tagged many of my posts on Twitter related to Arthur Finkelstein and Hungary as #BudapestBridge. If you want to know more, I recommend you search for #BudapestBridge there.
Let’s dig in to the research
In my last piece, I touched on why I believe Arthur Finkelstein had a large (albeit behind the scenes) role in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. While much of the evidence is circumstantial, the amount of circumstantial evidence is significant enough to warrant further investigation.
I consider these efforts in a similar light to how the intelligence community looks at ascribing blame to various hacker groups. Can the DNC hack be traced to the Kremlin through open source materials? No, almost certainly not, but that’s the entire point, isn’t it? The Kremlin can maintain plausible deniability about any of their hacking efforts because they don’t sign off on official documents, and the hackers they hire aren’t official government employees. That doesn’t change what the Five Eyes intelligence community knows with absolute certainty — Kremlin agents hacked the DNC servers and interfered in the US election on a massive scale.
So, let’s look some more at the evidence linking the Trump campaign, through Arthur Finkelstein and Paul Manafort, to pro-Kremlin groups.
I’ll start with the Trump campaign and Hungary
Jeff Sessions said, under oath, he was the chair of Donald Trump’s foreign policy team. (This hasn’t been a debated point in the past, but just so there’s no ambiguity going forward.)
Who was Jeff Sessions’s second in command on his foreign policy team? J.D. Gordon, who traveled to Hungary six times during the Trump campaign. The same JD Gordon who said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban aims to ‘Make Hungary Great Again’. (Here’s my related thread.)
The same JD Gordon who was on a panel with former RT journalist Liz Wahl.
Just, for reference, remember that RT is a Russian propaganda outlet. There aren’t many people alive who know the ‘Russian talking points on Ukraine and Syria’ better than an RT journalist (former or not.)
Who else was part of Trump’s foreign policy team? Carter Page, who visited Budapest, Hungary in September of 2016 for what he claims was vacation. Was it really that? I can’t prove it was anything else, yet, but Page went on to claim that he was spied on while he was there.
Also notable, Carter Page visited Moscow in July of 2016, and the visit was approved by the Trump campaign. Only a few weeks later, Carter Page, JD Gordon and Jeff Sessions were all in the room at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland for the now infamous conversation with Sergey Kislyak. (Related thread.)
Jeff Sessions and JD Gordon have both changed their official story (i.e. lied) about their meeting with Sergey Kislyak multiple times.
What was discussed during that meeting again? The official GOP platform on arming the Ukrainian government in their war against Putin. (And yes, it’s a war. It is NOT a civil war, as Putin’s propaganda outlets would have you believe. Related thread.)
Hungary and Ukraine share a border with one another, and there are roughly 150,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Ukraine. So, there is a natural shared interest between these two countries, and Hungary’s pro-Putin leanings have caused plenty of friction in Ukraine over the years. (Related thread.)
Back to Hungary
One of the advisors for Sebastian Gorka’s fake PhD (and yes, it is definitely fake) was Andras Lanczi. According to Foreign Policy, “Gorka submitted his thesis in 2007 and defended it in 2008. He received his doctorate from Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary. His dissertation advisor, Andras Lanczi, has no academic expertise in terrorism or national security issues — but is, for the record, a strong supporter of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.”
Andras Lanczi’s son, Tamas Lanczi, was an employee of Arthur Finkelstein.
Tamas Lanczi is the director of Szazadveg Economic Institute’s Center for Political Analysis in Budapest, and he uses Kremlin talking points to advance Viktor Orban’s shared agenda with Vladimir Putin.
Guess who else works for the Szazadveg Foundation? Arthur Finkelstein’s longtime client/partner Connie Mack IV, and he is paid $5 million a year to lie for them using Kremlin propaganda. That’s how Mack IV became known as Viktor Orban’s man in Washington. Also, according to Politico, “Mack is paid directly by Orban’s office, not the Hungarian Embassy in Washington.”
Related thread on Connie Mack IV, Dana Rohrabacher and one of Finkelstein’s protégés, Larry Weitzner. Weitzner is the CEO of Jamestown Associates, a company specializing in political attack ads. Jamestown Associates was paid $8.8 million by Trump’s campaign.
Now, when Connie Mack IV ran for Congress in 2006 and 2008, guess which company was paid the most by his campaign both times? Jamestown Associates, and Arthur Finkelstein ran all of Mack IV’s campaigns.
If there’s nothing untoward going on with these men, why was Connie Mack IV so hesitant to discuss his work with Arthur Finkelstein in Hungary? Why did Tamas Lanczi flat out refuse to explain his work for Finkelstein during an interview?
Maybe Connie Mack IV doesn’t want anybody to know about his lobbying efforts with “paid by Putin” California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, which were reportedly brought together by Arthur Finkelstein. (Source for picture below.)
Some information worth keeping in mind:
Arthur Finkelstein’s protégé Roger Stone admitted he had a back channel to Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks.
Arthur Finkelstein’s company he founded with another one of Viktor Orban’s advisors, Arpad Habony, has offices located near WikiLeaks in London. (Source for the picture below is here.)
As I discussed last time (at the end of the piece), Roger Stone knows Aaron Nevins, the GOP consultant in Florida who received materials from Guccifer 2.0.
Roger Stone has also admitted to having a private conversation with Guccifer 2.0.
Finkelstein’s business partner in Hungary, Arpad Habony, is also paid by the Kremlin directly as part of Viktor Orban’s residency bond program. Essentially, Russian and Middle Eastern businessmen purchase these from the Hungarian government for easier travel through the EU and likely the rest of the world. (Related thread here.)
Back to that meeting in Trump Tower during the campaign
You’ll recall that in Part 1 I discussed the June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower extensively. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were there on behalf of the Trump campaign. In addition to anti-Magnitsky Act, pro-Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya one of the other attendees was “ex”-GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) hacker Rinat Akhmetshin. (Related thread.)
I’ll let Putin’s own words from 2004 explain: “There is no such thing as a former KGB man.” An attorney who has hired Akhmetshin in the past told The Guardian, “He is a former GRU person for sure, but he once said there is no such thing as former.”
Knowing all this, then, it seems extremely relevant that Rinat Akhmetshin met with Dana Rohrabacher on May 17, 2016. (Thread here.)
(Here’s a semi-related thread related to Spestnaz/GRU, the Syrian War and Trump’s Florida properties. I warned you about this being convoluted!)
(Here’s another thread related to one of Dana Rohrabacher’s recent dinner guests, former Kazakh PM Akezhan Kazhegeldin. It’s relevant because Akezhan Kazhegeldin has been linked with Rinat Akhmetshin in the past.)
Also noteworthy, “Mr. Akhmetshin told journalists that he was a longtime acquaintance of Paul J. Manafort.” (Source here.)
One last thing: this article, which is titled ‘Moscow spooks return to Hungary, raising NATO hackles’ should stick out. “In April, online news portal 444.hu reported that the government’s national consultation website — where Hungarians were asked to answer a series of questions on their personal views — used a tracking code belonging to Russian firm Yandex, which forwarded Hungarians’ data to a server in Russia.”
Now, how does something like that happen without direct coordination between Budapest and Moscow?
(Related thread.)
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Unorganized, but additional related information that I think is worth looking at.
*Finkelstein also did work to undermine the Magnitsky Act. It relates to Finkelstein’s client, Stephen Harper, the former Canadian Prime Minister. Thread here.
*Stephen Harper, Arthur Finkelstein and Trump mega-donor Sheldon Adelson had dinner together in April of 2016. Thread here.
*Duna TV & MTVA call themselves public service broadcasters, but they are pro-Fidesz, pro-Orban, pro-Putin “propaganda machine” working in Hungary. Thread here.
Next time, I plan on following the rabbit hole to Hungary’s border and into Ukraine. We’ll look at Paul Manafort’s 10+ years of work there with pro-Kremlin candidates and see what it can tell us.
Stay tuned.
Source: https://medium.com/@JamesFourM/trump-putin-and-the-mob-df30729957da