Secret October Trump Tower Meet Linked To Russia In New Report, Psy Group Records Show Mysterious Money Trail
Last month, the New York Times revealed that Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., held a second secret meeting in Trump Tower with representatives of a foreign government offering to help the elder Trump win the 2016 presidential election. But unlike the now-infamous June 9, 2016, meeting with a group of Russians, including one who later admitted to being a Russian “informant,” as the Inquisitr reported, the second meeting involved an Israeli firm and an emissary for the United Arab Emirates — as well as the notorious founder of a mercenary army who is also a prominent Trump supporter and brother of Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos.
But now, new reporting on business records of that Israeli firm, Psy Group, by an independent journalist shows that the second Trump Tower meeting also appears to have links to Russia. Freelance investigative reporter Scott Stedman obtained “financial, business, and credit documents” showing a mysterious and convoluted ownership structure for the Israeli company.
Psy Group offered “services included infiltrating target audiences with elaborately crafted social-media personas and spreading misleading information through websites meant to mimic news portals,” Bloomberg News reported. In other words, services similar to what the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency carried out during the 2016 campaign, according to indictments filed by Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and reported by the Inquisitr.
Read Stedman’s full report on the Russian money links to the Israel Psy Group firm on Medium.
Present at the October Trump Tower meeting, along with Trump, Jr., were Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary army Blackwater and DeVos’s brother; Elliot Broidy, a major Republican fundraiser, who is also head of a security firm with Middle East contracts and who has been the subject of an earlier Inquisitr report; and George Nader, a Lebanese-American business man who had acted as an emissary of the UAE and is also Broidy’s business partner, in addition to being a convicted pedophile as the Inquisitr has also reported.
Joel Zamel, the founder of Psy Group, attended the meeting, according to media reports, and Zamel is now being investigated by Mueller, according to the Wall Street Journal.
According to Stedman’s reporting, Psy Group is also known as Invop Limited, a company incorporated in Israel, as reported by the Times of Israel, but owned by a Cyprus-based firm, IOCO Limited. But it doesn’t stop there, according to Stedman’s reporting. IOCO is itself owned by Protexer Limited, a company based in the British Virgin Islands. But Protexer has a subsidiary that does a large portion of its business with Russian interests — and IOCO is managed by a company run by two businessmen closely affiliated with two state-owned Russian banks, Stedman found. Two of the six directors of Protexer are based in Russia, he also reported.
Mueller has now made Psy Group part of his investigation into connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, according to the online magazine the Daily Beast. “(Mueller’s) team of investigators have obtained a nine-slide presentation created by the Israeli firm, Psy Group, which claims to have links to Israeli intelligence agencies,” the Beast reported in May.
The Trump Tower Psy Group meeting, which was set up by Erik Prince, according to the Times, took place on August 3, 2016. According to earlier reporting by Stedman, for the Medium, that was just 24 hours after a private jet owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska landed at Newark Airport in New Jersey, just outside of New York City. Deripaska is the Russian billionaire who employed Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who is under multiple indictments by Mueller for a series of alleged financial crimes, as well as attempted witness tampering.
