Title : Trump prepares for Putin summit despite calls to cancel over election meddling indictments
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Trump prepares for Putin summit despite calls to cancel over election meddling indictments
Trump prepares for his showdown with Putin: President is set for summit in Helsinki despite calls to cancel after the indictment of 12 Russian hackers
- President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin will meet on Monday
- The summit, to take place in Finland, has been heavily protested this weekend
- On Friday, 12 Russian agents were indicted for stealing and leaking documents
- It is alleged the group leaked to help Trump's 2016 campaign and hurt Hillary's
- Despite this, Trump says he will still meet with Putin, but will ask about charges
US President Donald Trump's summit with Russia's Vladimir Putin caps decades of efforts by the New York property tycoon to establish top-level relations in Moscow.
Back in Washington, however, investigators are trying to discover whether Trump, his family and advisors already had a surreptitious working relationship with Russians when he ran for and won the presidency in 2016.
Following Friday's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents, Democrats and Republican Representative John McCain have called on the President to cancel the meeting - or at least confront Putin about the charges.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has confirmed the meeting will go ahead despite the backlash, and Trump says he will 'absolutely' be speaking with the Russian leader about the indictment.
President Donald Trump (right) and Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) will meet in Finland on Monday
Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence agents on charges of election meddling on Friday
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Russian meddling on Trump's behalf in 2016, has already indicted 31 people - including 12 Russian intelligence agents on Friday - for hacking Democratic computer networks.
The agents allegedly hacked into Democratic email accounts during the 2016 presidential election and released stolen and damaging conversations.
The group are also accused of stealing information on 500,000 US voters after hacking a state US election board.
Mueller now wants to know if a series of campaign contacts with Russian and Russia-linked persons adds up to more - possibly a conspiracy to illegally skew the presidential race.
Here is what Mueller is investigating:
- The Ukraine link -
Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort spent years working for Moscow-supported billionaire Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych.
Manafort also worked with tycoon Dmitry Firtash, who has close ties to the Kremlin, and Konstantin Kilimnik, a political operative in Ukraine believed tied to Russian intelligence. Manafort was in touch with both during the campaign.
Manafort is facing a raft of federal charges.
- London connection -
Investigators are trying to discover whether US President Donald Trump, his family and advisors had a surreptitious working relationship with Russians when he ran for and won the presidency in 2016
Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos tried to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2016
George Papadopoulos, a young, previously unknown foreign affairs advisor on the Trump campaign, worked Russian contacts in London with the aim of setting up a Trump trip to Moscow or a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
He also told the campaign that Moscow had damaging information on Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Nothing ever came of his efforts, but they were approved by senior campaign officials.
He has pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI.
- Spy contacts -
Another foreign policy advisor, former investment banker Carter Page, was investigated by US counterintelligence over meetings he held over several years through 2016 with Russian officials and other contacts either part of or linked to Russian intelligence.
- The Trump Tower meeting -
Investigators want to know if a June 9, 2016 meeting between Donald Trump's campaign staff and a Russian lawyer in New York's Trump Tower was about colluding on the election
Top campaign officials Manafort, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and son Donald Trump Jr. met in New York on June 9, 2016 with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was offering dirt from the Russian government on Clinton.
Helping arrange the meeting was an Azeri-Russian tycoon close to Putin who was a former Trump business partner in Moscow.
But Veselnitskaya apparently arrived empty-handed, wanting to discuss other issues.
Questions remain over what Trump himself knew about the meeting, and why members of Trump's team tried to hide it.
- Leaks of hacked Democratic documents -
An indictment released Friday of 12 Russian spies for hacking Democratic documents during the campaign makes clear Mueller is examining whether Trump staff and allies colluded with the leaks.
Trump advisor Roger Stone, Don Jr., and others were in contact with leak channels WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, which the indictment said were used by Russian spies to disseminate the documents.
- The Kislyak connection -
Before and after the election, then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak had several encounters with campaign officials, and multiple communications with Kushner and national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Before the campaign, Flynn, a former Pentagon intelligence chief, had been paid tens of thousands of dollars to appear at events hosted by Russian companies, at one sitting next to Putin.
In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russian officials during Trump's presidential transition.
- St Petersburg troll farm -
Mueller has indicted 13 people involved with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm responsible for much of the social media manipulation that boosted Trump's campaign.
Records show that some lower-level campaign staffers had contact with the group, though they possibly did not know they were Russians.
Two Twitter accounts, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, which leaked documents stolen from the Democratic campaign that would damage Clinton's camp and boost Trump's, were allegedly run by Russian agents.
Both accounts were suspended by Twitter just hours after the indictment was released
'Guccifer 2.0' and 'DCleaks' were allegedly fronts for a Russian intelligence operation, brazenly announcing when their hacked materials would be going online and sending readers to WikiLeaks to find some of what they stole. The accounts were closed hours after the indictment was released
- Business ties -
Mueller is reportedly studying Trump's business relations with Russians. For decades, Trump sought to develop real estate in Moscow.
In 2013, he took his Miss Universe pageant to the Russian capital, where he sought but failed to meet Putin.
Afterwards, and reportedly well into the 2016 campaign, aides including Trump fixer Michael Cohen continued to pursue a possible major development deal in Moscow.
Since the early 2000s, the Trump organization has made numerous property sales to wealthy Russians, raising questions of whether it was enabling money laundering with those deals.
They included Trump's 2008 sale of a Palm Beach property to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million - $54 million more than Trump paid for it four years earlier.
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