Wednesday a week ago, Jan 25th, Reuters ran some facts about the shady sale of Russian oil shares. Two days later, Trump announced the Muslim ban. And the Muslim ban sucked up all attention this story might otherwise have gathered.
Two days ago, the Daily Kos put up an easier readable article about the same facts. it’s probably a coincidence, but the Daily Kos article was removed today, no reason given. I got this snippet from the cached text:
I wonder if this post will be removed as well.
Probably not but if the KGB comes knocking ------- 
I have a feeling the moves were made because Trump thinks they were vital to “keeping his promises” and to firm up his base support for future battles within his own party. I don’t feel distraction played any part in it all.
It could very well serve multiple goals. But the haste with which the ban was inacted, is suspicious.
The haste and the ensuing chaos made Team Trump vulnerable to accusations of sloppy work. That is not in their advantage, and even a week advance’s warning could have prevented that.
But they chose to hurry it through so fast that chaos ensued. And chaos is good when you want to distract everyone. Chaos is bad if they would have wanted to appear to carry out campaign promises in a competent manner.
The official reason given for the haste and chaos: “we wanted the terrorists not to come in in the last two days” is barely plausible.
This conjecture is showing up in a million places on the internet.
Russia has been publicly trying to sell a 19.5% stake in Rosneft for a long time.
This Reuters article says, “The stake was sold for 10.2 billion euros to a Singapore investment vehicle that Rosneft said was a 50/50 joint venture between Qatar and the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore.”
I’m all for conspiracy theories but is the idea that Putin just gave a ten-billion euro stake in a Russian oil company to Trump? Because I can’t imagine that Trump was ever really rich enough to actually afford to buy that on his own.
While I would agree that, minus better evidence, this isn’t particularly compelling (it’s more likely that the article was pulled because they found evidence which discredited the article than because men in suits showed up and told them to pull it), I wouldn’t say that “Putin gave something away” is particularly good evidence against. Say that Putin slips $10b to Trump in exchange of dropping the sanctions and handing Gulen over to Turkey. In return, Russia gets the Ukraine, Turkey, and access to all the money they’ve been losing due to the sanctions. I’d have to do some research to figure out how much that would all be worth, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the math works out in Russia’s favor.
And, with it being Russia and all, who knows how honest they will be about giving him real numbers, or even continuing to treat his ownership percentage as valid.
It’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory. It’s ridiculous because you’re treating the immigration ban like it’s an otherwise isolated event, when it clearly isn’t. Trump killed the TPP, he signed an executive order on the ACA, he signed an executive order on infrastructure development, on border security, on lobbyists and on immigration. The reason he did these things isn’t to distract from Rosneft-gate, it’s because he just became President.