From Stormy Daniels to Ice Cube… the investigation in Trump administration corruption takes yet another surreal turn

OK, I’m not quite sure I have a firm grasp on this, but here goes… It looks as though we’ve finally moved on from porn stars and playmates. The most recent chapter in the ever-unfolding Trump saga involves rapper turned family-friendly actor Ice Cube.

Apparently, Ice Cube, whose real name is O’Shea Jackson, along with his business partner Jeff Kwatinetz, started a three-on-three basketball league called BIG3. And, somewhere along the line, they brought Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon in on the action. Well, it would appear that, at some point in the narrative, an investment firm tied to ruling family of Qatar, in an effort to curry favor with Bannon, came forward to finance the deal through a company that they set up called Sports Trinity.

Sports Trinity, however, never made good on their promise to Jackson and Kwatinetz, investing only $7.5 million of the $20.5 million they’d promised. And this, in turn, led to a damages claim against Sports Trinity and Qatar Investments in federal court in the amount of $1.2 billion. Well, while the suit against Qatar Investments, the $100 billion fund operated by the Qatar Investment Authority, has yet to be decided, court filings have been made public, and they’re quite interesting… Take, for instance, this excerpt from the sworn testimony, in which Kwatinetz says, “Mr. Al Rumaihi (a former Qatari diplomat who presently heads the nation’s investment fund) requested I set up a meeting between him, the Qatari government, and Steven Bannon, and to tell Steve Bannon that Qatar would underwrite all of his political efforts in return for his support.”

[note: If you’d like to read more of the court filings against Qatari Investments, all of the documents can be found here.]

If Kwatinetz can be believed, he refused to set up the meeting with Bannon, calling it a “bribe.” Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, according to Kwatinetz, then responded by saying that Kwatinetz was naive, and that White House national security advisor Michael Flynn had already taken their money. Here’s the exact quote from Kwatinetz… “Mr Al Rumahi laughed and then stated to me that I shouldn’t be naive, that so many Washington politicians take our money, and stated ‘do you think Flynn turned down our money?'”

And that’s where things stood as of yesterday afternoon, when Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti posted the following to Twitter.

The bald man in the background, according to Avenatti’s subsequent tweet, was none than Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, who was visiting Trump Tower on December 12, 2016, alongside Michael Flynn and Trump fixer Michael Cohen.

So, if Kwatinetz can be believed, Rumaihi, who was trying to bribe Bannon by way of an investment in BIG3, admitted to him that they’d already successfully bribed Michale Flynn, and, now, thanks to Avenatti, we have images from December, 2016, which appear to show Rumaihi at Trump Tower, flanked by Cohen and Flynn. Seems worth looking into, right?

And here’s where it really gets interesting. Do you remember, in the Steele dossier, when former MI6 agent Christopher Steele talked about how the Russians were selling 19% of the state oil company Rosneft, and how Trump was set to get a piece of the deal in exchange for lifting U.S. sanctions against Russian oligarchs? Well, it was Rumaihi who bought that 19% on behalf of Qatar Investments, and this visit of his to Trump Tower took place just 48 hours after the deal closed. [Assuming Trump got .5% of the deal, his cut would have been $282 million.] And, as Seth Abramson just noted on Twitter, it gets even weirder than that. “According to the NYT,” Abramson writes, “the day after Trump and/or two of his top aides secretly met with the Rosneft buyer at Trump Tower, two top Trump aides—and for all we know Trump himself—secretly met Putin’s banker Sergey Gorkov at Trump Tower.”

It would appear, my friends, that all the threads are finally coming together to form a pretty significant net.

Oh, and Qatar, by the way, recently bought a $6.5 million apartment in Trump World Tower in New York City.