Dmitry Rybolovlev didn’t fly into North Carolina to meet Donald Trump. It was the other way around.

| 10:38 pm EDT March 31, 2017
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For months, everyone has been asking the same question: why did Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev fly into the fairly small town of Concord, North Carolina just a few days before the election, at the same time Donald Trump was in town for a last minute campaign rally? But it turns out we’ve all been asking the question backwards, because Rybolovlev had a legitimate reason to be there – and Trump did not.

McClatchy is now reporting (link) that Dmitry Rybolovlev had flown into the town of Concord on his infamous M-KATE private plane because he was making preparations to open a business there. This is very a much a real thing; the company is called Alevo and it makes high tech batteries. Rybolovlev flew into the town in early November because he was working on getting his business off the ground. But now that we know Rybolovlev was in town for a legitimate reason, it means it was Trump who altered his schedule to make sure they met up.

Sure, let’s allow for the possibility that Donald Trump just happened to schedule a campaign rally in the same exact smaller sized town where his longtime Russian business associate just happened to be visiting at the time. But the odds of this being random happenstance are what, one in a thousand? One in a million? So the reality is that Trump set up his campaign schedule to coincide with the travel schedule of that of Rybolovlev, so they would cross paths. But why?

Thus far we already know that Rybolovlev bought a house from Trump a few years ago for more than twice what it was worth and then decided to tear it down. The transaction looked a lot like a Putin-controlled Russian oligarch funneling fifty million dollars into Trump’s pocket. And the Rybolovlev family trust previously owned a 9.9% stake in Bank of Cyprus (source), which Deutsche Bank was recently caught using to launder billions of dollars from Russia into clients in New York City (source). A representative for Mr. Rybolovlev has informed Palmer Report that his Bank of Cyprus stake was mostly wiped out by the 2013 bailout.

And so now we know that it wasn’t Dmitry Rybolovlev flying into Concord to meet with Donald Trump, it was Donald Trump flying into Concord to met with Dmitry Rybolovlev. Why did the two meet up? What did they need to discuss in person? As of now, only they know. But it was important enough for Trump to at least marginally alter his campaign schedule to make sure he crossed paths with Rybolovlev just a few days before the election. Contribute to Palmer Report