The saga of Donald Trump and Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev just got even more suspicious

| 4:43 pm EDT August 20, 2017
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Awhile back, Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a mansion from Donald Trump for twice what it was worth, then tore it down without ever having lived in it. Then in 2016, just a few days before election day, Rybolovlev happened to arrive in the tiny town of Concord, North Carolina at the same time Trump was campaigning there. Rybolovlev later asserted that he was not meeting with Trump, but that instead he was visiting a tech company he’d heavily invested in. Now that company has mysteriously gone bankrupt.

The simultaneous arrival of Trump and Rybolovlev in Concord in early November of 2016 became the stuff of legend – particularly after Dmitry Rybolovlev later arrived in South Florida at the same time Donald Trump was vacationing at Mar-a-Lago. Rybolovlev always asserted that this was mere coincidence, and that he’s never even met Trump in person. When that didn’t satisfy onlookers, Rybolovlev revealed that he’d been in Concord because he’d invested in a battery company called Alevo. But according to the Charlotte Observer newspaper, Alevo filed for bankruptcy yesterday and laid off hundreds of people (link). This raises even more questions.

Why did Dmitry Rybolovlev, one of the most savvy and successful businessmen in Russia, make such an obscure and poorly chosen investment in a small company in the United States, when it was in bad enough shape to go bankrupt just nine months later? Why did he feel compelled to travel to the U.S. to visit this company at the exact same time Donald Trump was in that same tiny town, just days before the election? What are the odds that this was all one big coincidence?

Internet skeptics will now surely suggest that Dmitry Rybolovlev only made an investment in a company in Concord as an excuse to travel there while Trump was in town, in case he ever needed to explain it all away. There is no evidence to support that theory, of course. But as this story continues to look more suspicious, questions will continue to be asked.