11/14/2023 0 Comments Contents of trump dossier![]() Perhaps most telling, though, was Trump’s decision to repeatedly ignore and deflect questions about whether members of his campaign had made contact with Russian officials during the election-contact that has since been confirmed by intelligence officials and reported by The New York Times. In the immediate aftermath, Trump dismissed the dossier as “crap” and outright refused to answer questions from outlets that published and retransmitted the dossier’s contents. When BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier in January, the media was naturally drawn to the salacious details (hotels! hookers! golden showers!), but beyond the juicy bits there were also stories of backroom meetings between powerful figures in Russian politics and business. (It should be noted that White House cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, also counts Rosneft among its clients.) Needless to say, crude barons like Tillerson and Sechin both stand to do gangbusters, whether directly or indirectly, from the lifting of economic sanctions. Exxon and Rosneft had arranged for a $500 billion offshore-drilling venture as recently as 2012, but Obama’s 2014 sanctions during the Ukraine crisis clamped down on business dealings with Russia, effectively kneecapping the deal and costing Exxon $1 billion in the process. In the past, Rosneft has held extensive business ties with ExxonMobil-the very same ExxonMobil that until recently was headed up by now Secretary of State (and recipient of Putin’s Order of Friendship) Rex Tillerson. He has a hostile relationship with the press and has sued multiple outlets for publishing stories about his lifestyle. One of Vladimir Putin’s closest deputies, Sechin is ostensibly an oil tsar whose salary has afforded him a tremendous amount of clout. My entire newsfeed was awash with posts bemoaning people's distrust and frustration with the mainstream media. My classmates, friends, teachers, and I, it seemed, had fallen victim to the fake-news epidemic. Moreover, in one final act of defiance against Obama, Putin announced that he would hold off on any and all negotiations until then–President-elect Trump took office. Then something unusual happened: The very next day, the Kremlin came forward saying that it had no such plans. official had told CNN that Putin planned on responding by shutting down the Anglo-American School of Moscow. That same day, a high school friend sent me a CNN Breaking News tweet reporting that an unnamed U.S. Historically, any diplomatic action or expulsion has warranted an equal and opposite tit-for-tat response. On December 29, 2016, Barack Obama announced that he would be ramping up sanctions and kicking 35 Russian diplomats out of the United States in response to reports of Russian interference and meddling in the 2016 election. Eventually, my parents moved me from Russian public school #1239 to the Anglo-American School of Moscow, an internationally facing school operated in tandem by the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. ![]() ![]() But growing up an American in Russia also meant that I was an expat, an immigrant, a third-culture kid-the Other. Growing up as an American in Russia means that I get asked a lot of questions about my upbringing: “Do Russians really drink that much vodka?” (Yes, if not more.) “Were there bears on the streets?” (None that I saw.) “Is it dangerous?” (Well, it depends.) I attended a Russian public school for most of my formative years, meaning I was immersed in the local language, society, and culture from a young age. ![]()
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