Was This West Virginia Coal Executive the Person from “WV” Allegedly Working to Connect Trump and Putin in June 2016?

Richard Allen
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

CNN reports this evening that congressional investigators have learned that

Rick Dearborn… now President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, sent a brief email to [Trump] campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with Putin…

The person was only identified in the email as being from “WV,” which one source said was a reference to West Virginia. It’s unclear who the individual is, what he or she was seeking, or whether Dearborn even acted on the request. One source said that the individual was believed to have had political connections in West Virginia, but details about the request and who initiated it remain vague.

Here’s a lead I already identified:

In late June 2016, coal magnate Robert Murray organized a private fundraiser for Trump in Wheeling, West Virginia.

In June 2016, seven people from West Virginia donated the maximum $2,700 to Trump’s campaign — when stacked with additional PAC and party donations, this is usually a sign of attendance at a private fundraiser.

These people included David L. Shanks, who on June 30 donated $5,000 in total to Trump and his joint fundraising committee, Trump Victory. Shanks listed his employment as “COO” of “Somersett [sic] Coal Intl.”

Circa 2014, Shanks was the CEO and President of a company called PBS Coals Inc., which was owned by Russian steel conglomerate OAO Severstal until the summer of 2014, when Severstal sold it to Corsa Coal, a Canadian company.

Surprisingly, the sale price of $140 million was reported as being “just 14% of the total $1 billion the Moscow producer shelled out for the group in 2008.”

Alexey Mordashov,” from the project “The 100 World’s Richest People Painting 2017” by artist Danor Shtruzman

Russian billionaire Alexei Mordashov, who is a member of Putin’s circle of oligarchs, is Severstal’s majority shareholder and was, until 2015, its CEO. In 2016 he was reportedly Russia’s richest man.

As of 2011, Severstal had significant American business interests, including selling steel to Ford and General Motors and even receiving approval (later withdrawn) for a $730 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Wall Street Journal called them “one of the biggest Russian investors in American industry.” Yet Severstal reportedly lost “over $2.5 billion in just three years” on American steel investments made between 2008 and 2011. In the summer of 2014, less than three years later, Severstal exited the U.S. market entirely, selling the remainder of its U.S. holdings, including PBS, for approximately $3 billion — just as United States and EU sanctions against Kremlin-connected Russian oligarchs were going into effect.

For information about another as-yet-unexamined connection between U.S. political donors, Russia, and the Trump campaign, read “Was Veselnitskaya’s Trump Intel About DNC Donations by a Spam Tycoon With Russia Ties?

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