u.s. sanctions law. but when it came to the deadline, came time to push publish the list, it never arrived. steve mnuchin s treasury department put out a list of rich russians they copied from the forbe s magazine billionaires list and a directory of people that work in the kremlin. putin s government had been terrified about the actual corrupt putin connected list that the united states was about to put out. they expected to have global consequences in terms of the ability of the putin regime and it s enable lrs in russia to maintain the wealth. they were shaking in their boots about that list. and again, we have reason to believe that such a list was created by the u.s. government but somewhere before the deadline it got submarined and replaced instead with this list that was a joke. forbes magazine list and the kremlin phone directory, ha.
so much for the corruption, closeness to putin, all that out the window. give them a list of rich people and forget it. mike flynn has been gone for a year as of today. trump campaign chairman and deputy campaign chairman were both arrested in october. and are facing multiple felonies. the white house even today right now is an escalating turmoil over the mishandling of classified information and elevation of seriously flawed white house personnel to senior positions. congress is waking up to the fact the next elections are less than a year ago and no clear sense from the intelligence agencies we re defending ourselves against russia doing again what they did to us in 2016. but what they did to us in 2016 more than anything appears to have been motivated by sanctions. by russia s desire to get relief from sanctions. the trump administration is in charge of that and the trump administration is behaving
state department that handles sanctions. just before the state of the union a couple weeks ago, another legal deadline arrived for sanctions, they instead declared that there would be no new punishment for anybody buying russian military equipment, which had been the original idea behind those sanctions. state department announced that the existence of a u.s. law in this subject in their estimation, it was deterrence enough. those sanctions were not meant to detour russian behavior. they were meant to be punishment for past russian behavior for them attacking our election. but the state department decided to let it slide. trump administration was also required by law to produce by the end of january a detailed report identifying quote the most significant senior foreign political figures in russia. the way this list was supposed to be put together it was supposed to take into account high net worth so very, very
rich russian individuals and supposed to consider their closeness to the russian regime. it was supposed to consider their specific relationship to vladimir putin or members of the russian ruling elite and crucially, to put together that list, u.s. government officials were supposed to determine quote any corruption with respect to any of those individuals. they were supposed to come with this oligarch list. the u.s. government was going to use the resources to compile a list of russians that became millionaires because of putin s regime through ill gotten means, right? there are credible reports such a list was actually produced by specialists career employees within the u.s. government. that was first reported by the atlantic counsel. we were able to confirm it with a person who had knowledge of the process by which that list was created. we believe such a list was generated as a u.s. government work product as required by that
occurred. there were a lot of isolated incidents then it turned out but they started with mike flynn leaving the white house a year ago today. it has since been a remarkable series of revelations about trump campaign contacts with the russian government, but it s also been an incredible time in terms of trump administration people flunking out, people resigning or getting fired or otherwise having to leave high-ranking government service. this is our on going list that we are struggling mightily can we make that any bigger? i don t think it s legible. yes, boom! thank you. that s why you guys get paid the big bucks. well done. front got bigger. we have been struggling mightily to find the right font to try to keep this thing update in terms of senior administration officials who have quit, been fired or left. in the past five days, we had to squeeze in a third white house