Exclusive: Jeffrey Epstein’s investment in an Israeli start-up reveals a myriad of links to Donald Trump and Israeli spies.

It’s been thirty-two years since the “Pollard Affair” pierced the seemingly impenetrable facade of U.S.-Israeli relations. Now, two suspected Israeli agents are in jail – indicted on separate charges of sex trafficking of minors.

Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6 and charged with trafficking minors across state lines. George Nader – a key witness for Robert Mueller – was arrested last month for possession of child porn and transporting a minor for sex from Europe.

Epstein and Nader share a personal network that includes Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Erik Prince, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and his UAE counterpart, Mohamed Bin Zayed.

But their association goes further than powerful friends and proclivities for teenage boys and girls. Epstein and Nader are believed to be agents for Israeli Intelligence. Narativ has independently confirmed with two separate sources who were in a position to know that Epstein worked for Israeli military intelligence.

Both men also have ties to a burgeoning Israeli tech sector which is bringing Mossad-style military intelligence to the private sector and endangering the global balance of power.

The Haaretz newspaper has previously reported that Epstein, who was Donald Trump’s friend through the ’80s and ’90s, partnered in an Israeli start-up alongside former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Barak is seeking to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister in the upcoming re-run elections scheduled for September. Since 2015, he has been the front-man for Carbyne, an Israeli start-up which purports to be a high-tech solution for 911 emergency call centers, but the platform’s architecture and investors raise serious privacy concerns.

Narativ undertook an extensive investigation into Carbyne, and can now reveal a myriad of troubling connections between the start-up and people connected to Donald Trump.

The Michael Cohen Connection

In addition to Epstein and Barak, Russian oligarchs Viktor Vekselberg and Andrew Intrater bought 24% of Carbyne’s Class A-1 shares through Intrater’s Columbus Nova Technology Partners (CNTP) in September 2017. Vekselberg and Intrater are under U.S. sanctions because of Russia’s malign activities. Ukrainian-born Vekselberg is close to Vladimir Putin and was interviewed by prosecutors from Robert Mueller’s office.

While still employed as Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen consulted for Columbus Nova until August 2017 under a $1 million agreement to his company, “Essential Consulting.” Cohen used the same company to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels, who had an affair with Trump.

Between election day and July 14, 2017, Intrater and Cohen exchanged 230 phone calls and 950 text messages.

Carbyne is a plug-in for 911 call centers and an app for consumers. It provides unprecedented access to a caller’s camera and GPS, providing the dispatcher with a live video feed.

The system also automatically cross-references your identity with criminal or other records added to the database. At least two U.S. counties have implemented Carbyne, with many others considering it.

Epstein is a sex offender and known pedophile. He was brought in as an investor by Barak, his close friend of 17 years. Epstein invested $1.5 million in a company (SUM) with Barak in 2014. All of that money went into Carbyne in 2015. Barak has since been a front-man for the company appearing on Fox News to pitch the product. Barak has life-long ties to Israel’s spy services.

CEO Amir Elichai served in Israel’s elite military intelligence group. Pinchas Berkus, a former Brigadier of the elite 8200 unit, is a company director. Lital Leshem, a co-founder, still serves as a reservist in the Israeli Defence Force. Alex Dizengof, the CTO, worked in cybersecurity for Israel’s Prime Minister’s office.

The American Connection

Carbyne also has deep roots in the Military-Industrial complex of the U.S.

Michael Chertoff, who ran Homeland Security under George Bush, serves on Carbyne’s advisory board. Chertoff wrote the Patriot Act, which authorized digital surveillance of Americans.

Peter Thiel, who founded Facebook and Palantir, is also a Carbyne investor. Thiel is an outspoken supporter of Trump and invests heavily in companies with military and intelligence applications. According to Bloomberg, Thiel’s Palantir uses “war on terror tools to track American citizens.”

Trae Stephens, another Palantir alum, serves on Carbyne’s advisory board. Stephens was also chair of Trump’s Department of Defense transition team. Eliot Tawil, a real-estate developer and a major Trump donor also advises the company despite having no background this space.

None of the members of the board of directors or the advisory board appear to have any experience in emergency response. Almost all have ties to Israel and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

The China Connection

Carbyne has ties to China through Co-founder Lital Leshem. Leshem, who remains a shareholder at Carbyne, now works alongside Erik Prince at Frontier Resources Group (FRG). FRG is based in the UAE and is a subsidiary of Prince’s Frontier Services Group (FSG).

Prince sold a majority stake in FSG to the Chinese in 2013. His boss is now Chang Xhenming, who is very close to President Xi Jinping. Chang is also chair of China’s massive Citic Group.

Prince is a former U.S. Navy Seal and a founder of Blackwater, a mercenary contractor. FSG is one of the companies helping to build “re-training” camps for ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim communities in China’s Xinjiang province. China detains 1 million people in those camps and keeps 13 million people under surveillance.

In May, Human Rights Watch revealed Chinese authorities use a platform not unlike Carbyne to illegally surveil Uyghurs. China’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform brings in a much bigger data-set and sources of video, which includes an app on people’s phones. Like Carbyne, the platform was designed to report emergencies. Chinese authorities have turned it into a tool of mass surveillance.

Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered the app. The group discovered the app automatically profiles a user under 36 “person types” including “followers of Six Lines” which is the term used to identify Uyghurs. Another term refers to “Hajj,” the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca.

The app monitors every aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user’s movement. “Did the family say something religious? Did they exit through the front door or the back door? (Going through the back door is presumably more suspicious),” Human Rights Watch says.

Nader, Israeli Intelligence and Trump

U.S. authorities are currently holding George Nader on child porn and trafficking charges. Nader is a representative for the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and his UAE counterpart Mohamed bin Zayed.

Nader is also speculated to have ties with Israeli Intelligence. His relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu dates back to the Israeli Prime Minister’s first days in office. Nader’s work for U.S. allies could explain why he’s been able to travel freely in and out of the U.S. despite a previous child pornography arrest.

In August 2016, Nader and Erik Prince attended a meeting at Donald Trump Jr.’s office in Trump Tower in August 2016. Nader brought with him Joel Zamel, who served in Israeli Military Intelligence and is the young CEO of another Israeli start-up, Psy Group.

Zamel proposed an extensive social amplification campaign to support Trump’s 2016 campaign, and Nader is reported to have pledged the Saudis and the UAE would foot the bill. Nader would later give Zamel $2m for those services, although Zamel disputes that claim.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Zamel’s Psy Group for its involvement with the Trump campaign, which lasted a full year from early 2016 to January 2017.

In January 2017, Nader and Prince also took part in a meeting in Seychelles. The backchannel get-together discussed bringing Russia closer to the incoming Trump administration as part of an anti-Iran alliance with Israel, KSA and UAE. Erik Prince represented the Trump administration. Kiril Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, represented Putin.

Evading Justice

“I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” Alex Acosta, former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta to Trump Administration.

George Nader’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s arrests, after decades of authorities turning a blind eye to the exploitation of teenagers, suggests a shift in U.S. policy towards Israeli Intelligence. Nader and Epstein were considered untouchable until recently, possibly because of their Israeli Intelligence ties and various cooperation agreements.

There has been extensive reporting on Epstein’s charges and sentencing around the underage girls. But Epstein also entered into a cooperation agreement for his financial crimes. Of note, Epstein cooperated with prosecutors to avoid charges for his involvement in a $450 million Ponzi scheme, which he blamed entirely on co-conspirator Steven Hoffenberg amid allegations of bribery.

All told, Epstein spent only 13 months in jail for what appears to be a 38-year crime-spree. How did Epstein evade justice? The answer may lie in a gentlemen’s agreement that governs the Israel-US intelligence relationship. Basically, spies can operate with impunity, even when committing criminal acts.

Mossad For Hire

Israeli spies are renowned the world for their ability to run complex stealth operations which go undetected. As one former KGB spy told me: “A good secret service never leaves any tracks.” Now, that very skillset has entered the private sector, merged with big data operations, and is being commercialized.

Since 2009, Israel’s spy-tech sector has been booming, supported by the easy flow of capital ferried into Israel by Russian oligarchs. This includes start-ups like NSO, which makes the Pegasus spyware capable of hacking any phone; Black Cube a high tech private fixer; and Zamel’s Psy Group, a social media manipulation company.

These start-ups have influenced elections and politics around the world, including the 2016 U.S. election. Cambridge Analytica used Black Cube to set up honey traps. Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to discredit many of his accusers, and the company also tried to frame former Obama Administration figures.

Saudi Arabia uses NSO’s Pegasus hacking software to track dissidents. There is some reporting that Pegasus was used in the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Israel has been exporting these services to despots and authoritarians around the globe. The high tech spy companies packed their advisory boards with former generals, heads of Mossad and politicians, creating a thin veneer of respectability.

Beneath the surface, questionable ethics, surveillance concerns, and dubious sources of funding have turned Israel’s spy-tech sector into a real threat to global security and balance of power.

According to Newsweek, the U.S. has identified Israeli espionage as a significant and growing threat in the U.S. going back to 2013. One former congressional staffer familiar with the classified material told Newsweek the situation was “terrifying”.

Israel’s spy-tech sector is funded by sanctioned Russian oligarchs and involved with dangerous criminals like Jeffrey Epstein and George Nader. Their services enable authoritarians and represent a serious risk to U.S.-Israeli relations. The sector requires serious investigation. Our very freedoms may depend on it.

Thanks to @LincolnsBible for your invaluable help with this article.

The post Building Big Brother appeared first on Narativ.

EXCLUSIVE: The Moscow Tower had everything to do with Donald Trump’s presidential run and was negotiated with Vladimir Putin’s closest advisors. Why then did Robert Mueller find no evidence of a conspiracy? The answer could lie in the spies.

Fred C. Trump, the real estate developer and father to a future president, presided over the demolition with food, drink and “no less than six – count ’em – six bikinied beauties,” the New York Times reported. It was a September morning in 1966, and Trump came to Coney Island to cheer on the wrecking crew as they demolished the last vestiges of the iconic Steeplechase Park before city officials could declare it an historic landmark.

Trump partied as they tore down the ‘Pavilion of Fun’, and promised to build yet another bleak, brown, stark apartment building in a neighbourhood already reeling from population growth, increased crime and poverty from the blight Trump and other developers had brought to the area.

By the time nine-year-old Felix Sater arrived in America with his parents as part of a wave of immigrants from the Soviet Union in 1974, only the Cyclone stood as a reminder of the Coney Island’s happier days, and even that was slated for demolition.

The Soviet immigrants that came to Coney Island in the 70’s brought with them much more than recipes for pirozhki and borscht. They had a very different way of doing business. Felix’s father, Mikhail Sheferovsky set up shop as a crime boss, earning a living by extorting grocery stores, restaurants and medical clinics, according to the FBI.

The easy flow of dirty Russian mob money that flowed in with the immigrants was music to Fred Trump’s ears. He sucked up the dirty cash and washed it through his apartment projects – many with name like Trump Village – giving life to a Russian underworld in Brooklyn which has since swamped the world.

Felix was not all that unique. His friends’ parents were also involved in activities of varying shades of legality. His friend Laura Shusterman’s father owned a taxi company that allegedly helped Russian immigrants launder their money through taxi medallions and also through Trump properties.

Laura introduced Felix to her boyfriend Michael, the son of a wealthy doctor from a far more affluent neighbourhood up Long Island. Michael would also visit his Uncle Morty who owned the “El Caribe Country Club” a dining hall popular among Brooklyn’s Russian mob.

In those days, the term “mafia” was used almost exclusively to describe Italian crime families, but that changed when the Russians arrived. What began with laundering money through taxi medallions expanded into racketeering and protection rackets. Eventually, the Russians “rolled up” the Italians, first in New York and then down the Eastern seaboard to Florida.

Two boys from Brooklyn

On Felix and Michael’s home turf, the screech from nearby amusement rides had long been replaced by the shrill of well-fed and inebriated Russians. The boardwalk was now lined with eateries like Tatiana’s, whose tables still overflow today with impossible amounts of seafood and vodka 365-days a year while buskers and barely clothed dancers work the crowd for tips.

It’s at Tatiana’s where one of Putin’s henchmen was spotted during an American visit to tour the new Russian mob outpost. Viktor Zolotov commands Putin’s 20,000-strong elite guard and once contemplated mass murdering all of Putin’s enemies but when he saw the list, even he was forced to concede “there are too many, it’s too many to kills – even for us,” according to an account in a book by author Boris Volodarsky. Zolotov is a billionaire – not bad for a bodyguard.

It’s against this background of criminality, that Felix became a stock-trader, although that was short-lived when he lost his license after a bar brawl. Michael became a lawyer eventually becoming Trump’s fixer. Sater was indicted for a $40 million stock trading scheme “involving 19 stockbrokers and organized crime figures from four Mafia families,” according to the New York Times. Cohen got into business with Tatiana running casino cruises in Florida that were ultimately shut down by cops.

Neither Cohen or Sater could have imagined how their paths would intersect with Fred Trump’s son decades later. Sater put it this way, “Two boys from Brooklyn getting the U.S.A. president elected.”

Double crossed

Sater never served time for that $40 million tax scheme. That’s because for over two decades, Sater has been a valuable asset to the FBI and American intelligence including helping convict twenty members of La Cosa Nostra.

Sater cooperated with the FBI when he first met Donald Trump in 2002, he cooperated when he first went to work at Bayrock two floors below Donald Trump in 2003 and he was cooperating when he and Trump built Trump Soho together in 2006 – the same year he escorted Ivanka and Don, Jr. to Moscow.

Sater’s cover was publicly blown by the New York Times in 2007. Trump was undeterred and continued to work with Sater, while Sater kept working with the FBI.

Being exposed by the New York Times would ordinarily dull the effectiveness of someone cooperating with the Feds. But not Sater, who spent the years after that Times article building monuments to money laundering for Trump while delivering Osama Bin Laden’s cell phone number and almost proving the Trump Russia conspiracy.

Preet Bharara calls it the most unholy alliance in justice. “Cooperators assist cops and as a result may literally get away with murder,” the former SDNY prosecutor writes in “Doing Justice”. “They operate as double agents against the people closest to them.”

The FBI never paid Sater for his work but they did allow him to walk away with the proceeds of his criminality, which may explain why Trump would still trust Sater.

Who’s trapping whom?

Republicans and the GOP are committed to framing the Mueller Report as a trap set by dirty cops. They will most certainly question Sater’s FBI cooperation for the entire decade he worked alongside Trump and even his work with the FBI beforehand.

Republicans will no doubt point to Mueller himself and his key prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. Weissmann signed Sater’s 1998 FBI cooperation agreement for the Department of Justice. He was then an assistant US attorney. The agreement was authorized by Loretta Lynch. Mueller himself was the FBI director for most of the time Sater served as a source.

Sater also worked with other staff at the Special Counsel’s Office: FBI Special Agent William McCausland and crossed paths with Zainab Ahmad and Greg Andres.

These “entrapment” claims are of course unfounded. The FBI always starts organized crime investigations proactively. It’s possible they placed an inside man at Trump Organization a decade before Trump had even announced his candidacy because they had good reason to suspect he was committing crimes. Narativ has learned that the Southern District of New York and New York DA’s office had already initiated criminal investigations into the Trump Organization prior to 2015.

“I never forgive.”

Trump had even more swagger than usual when he took to the stage on October 28 2015 for the third Republican debate.

“I think maybe my greatest weakness is that I trust people too much. I’m too trusting,” Trump told the audience. “And when they let me down, if they let me down, I never forgive. I find it very, very hard to forgive people that deceived me,” Trump said. So I don’t know if you would call that a weakness, but my wife said: “let up.”

This vindictiveness was at odds with what should have been a celebratory day. Earlier that day, Trump had signed the letter of Intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

On its surface, the Moscow project appeared to have been a straightforward barter: Putin would wield his influence to help Trump get elected. Once elected, Trump would drop sanctions and the Moscow Tower would be green lit.

Just three weeks after inking the Letter or Intent, Putin publicly praised Trump “He is a bright and talented person without any doubt,” Putin said, adding that Trump is “an outstanding and talented personality.”

On the campaign trail, Trump ramped up the chants at his rallies “No Russia, no Russian contacts, no Russian deals…” he would say – and then minutes later would turn to Cohen to ask: “What’s going on in Russia with the Tower Project?”

Inside the Trump Organization, the “Moscow Project” was Cohen’s file. Ivanka and Don Jr. were involved but only from behind Cohen’s firewall. Sater was the go-between.

In email after email, Sater described the quid pro quo. “Putin gets on stage for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the Republican nomination,” Sater wrote in one. “Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in another. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

All told, negotiations on the Trump Tower Moscow began in mid 2015 and were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won,” Trump told Rudy Giuliani according to the New York Times. Think about that, negotiations for the Tower lasted for over a year, all predicated on Trump winning the election, running on a parallel track to the campaign yet just as they reached its stated goal, negotiations ground to a halt.

Spy v. Spy

Between 2007 and 2015 Sater travelled to Russia regularly where he repeatedly tried to set up partnerships to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. News of Sater’s cooperation with the feds had reached Moscow but he kept going back with no apparent problem. Sater is fond of reminding anyone who will listen that he is something of a “Jewish James Bond” and while the events of his life appear to be true he may not be telling the whole story.

Weeks after the letter of Intent was signed, Sater enlisted an old friend Evgeny Shmykov, a former Russian military intelligence General, to help him with the logistics of a proposed Trump trip to Moscow. It seems like overkill to hire a GRU General for something a travel agent could do.

But Sater knew Shmykov from espionage exploits that yielded valuable information about Al Qaida and North Korea for U.S. intelligence.

In 2004, Sater persuaded Shmykov to hand over the name and photographs of a North Korean military operative who was buying nuclear equipment for his country’s arsenal. Shmykov also gave Sater classified information about al-Qaida.

Shmykov would not have been able to hand over such sensitive material if he wasn’t authorized to by Putin. “If he had done it without permission, he would be in jail for a very long time,” says Yuri Felshtinsky the Russian-American author who co-wrote a book with Alexander Litvinenko.

So that leads us to ask is Sater a double agent?

Shmykov is no longer with military intelligence but remains a close advisor to Putin which suggests Putin would have had to bless Sater’s missions.

It’s not the first time Trump’s Moscow Tower aspirations have been linked to the GRU. A subsidiary of Oleg Deripaska’s company hosted the Trump family on a visit to Moscow in 2009. Deripaska has been an FSB spy since the 1990s, according Felshtinsky.

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Cashing in?

There’s an important footnote to what we know about this deal. The proposed Moscow Tower’s Russian developer Andrei Rozov has been Sater’s friend for almost two decades before they both worked at Russia’s Mirax. Sater contends that he works for himself but according to Rolling Stone, Sater was employed by Rozov.

One month after the Letter of Intent was signed Sater and Rozov unloaded a New York office building, making $8 million after only owning the building for a year. Sater won’t say why he was listed as the owner or why the office building was sold at that time, but the timing and people involved does raise questions.

Catch 22

Despite all this abundant evidence, why did Robert Mueller not find sufficient evidence to conclude a conspiracy was committed beyond reasonable doubt?

“We have seen [the conspiracy] with our own eyes, we know it happened” Felshtinsky said, before adding: “It’s not surprising Mueller couldn’t find anything conclusive. A good secret service never leaves any tracks.”

Mueller’s scope of investigation was limited to coordination between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Government. Sater didn’t work for the campaign, and his Russian contacts did not officially work for the Russian government. They were cut-outs or third-party actors designed to hide the identity of the principals – but that alone does not rule out an indictment or collusion.

Sater believes he was doing noble work for his country and seems truly invested in it for personal reasons. The FBI was keenly interested in his work for Trump as they were investigating Trump for various crimes prior to the campaign. Sater has immunity from prosecution.

At the same time, it’s possible Russian intelligence could have been receiving their own information from Sater and they too would have known Sater had immunity from prosecution.

Sater, the only person who would have had that stated immunity, was also the only person to explicitly detail the attempted collusion in e-mails to Michael Cohen.

“You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly,” Sater wrote. “That is the game changer. America’s most difficult adversary agreeing that Trump is a good guy to negotiate,” Sater wrote.

Could Sater’s immunity hinder Mueller’s ability to prosecute conspiracy surrounding the Trump Tower?

While Republicans and Trump have sought to paint the entire Mueller Report as a “trap” set by “dirty cops”, it may have also been a trap set by the GRU designed to backfire on the FBI, setting the stage for a bloodletting at the bureau. Remember some of the mobs biggest enemies have already been fired Comey, Strzok, Page, and McCabe. The rest were in Mueller’s team like Mueller himself and Weissmann.

Could this be the ultimate revenge? Setting up a Saturday night massacre like no-one could have imagined.

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The post The Spy Games appeared first on Narativ.

Special Counsel, Robert Mueller has submitted his report to the Attorney General, William Barr. Barr is expected to release the report to Congress as early as this weekend. We can’t tell you what Mueller concluded but here’s what to expect. (updated).

While it’s tempting to think of Trump-Russia as a single crime like a jewelry heist with the American Presidency substituting for priceless gems, it is not that simple. In reality, the operation was a series of interconnected, simultaneous crimes, all setting up the right conditions for the taking of the most powerful throne on the planet.

There is no crime called “Stealing the American Presidency,” so Mueller’s first task is to identify whether a crime was committed to effect the election result for the benefit of the conspirators. To continue our jewelry heist analogy, this would be akin to our jewelry thieves disrupting traffic to create a distraction so they can slip past police with the loot. Because of this, Mueller’s case will be largely circumstantial and we don’t expect a smoking gun.

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Mueller’s second task is to determine if the crime was a conspiracy. To qualify as one, Mueller needs to show two or more parties conspiring in the execution of a crime. Conspirators usually try to hide their involvement from being detected by using cut-outs or intermediaries to execute their crime. Mueller may not have any direct evidence that Putin and Trump were directly conspiring but he will likely have evidence their subordinates did.

Important note, even if the actual crime was never carried out, the very fact that two or more parties planned to execute an offense together makes it a conspiracy.

Mueller’s third task is to prove the involvement of Russia or its agents or agencies on the one hand, and the Trump campaign or its associates on the other hand, in the execution of this conspiracy and crime. That is the scope of Mueller’s mandate.

Does Mueller have the goods?

If Mueller can determine Trump-Russia was a conspiracy, he’ll need to show a coordinated operation to defraud America and its citizens during the 2016 Presidential Election. There’s an actual law called “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” (923.18 U.S.C Section 371) as defined by Hammerschmidt v. United States as:

To summarize, Mueller needs to determine if a crime was committed, whether it was a conspiracy and if it involved Russia and the Trump campaign or their delegates. Fortunately, Mueller already has a significant amount of evidence, and most of it has already been tested before grand juries and judges through various indictments and hearings.

Other countries, interest groups, politicians, organizations – criminal or otherwise – and some very wealthy people may also have been involved in the planning and execution of the conspiracy and the underlying crime or crimes. All told, we may find the number of people with direct knowledge of the crime to be in the hundreds or more, but Mueller’s primary interest is specifically Russia and the Trump Campaign.

One operation, many conspiracies.

Trump-Russia was one operation consisting of a many possible crimes, or conspiracies. These include known operations to influence the NRA, the use of stolen Facebook data to shift sentiment, an attempt to hand over dirt on HRC’s campaign and could even include the mysterious death of a GOP operative in Chicago.

Each of these operations appears to have their own conspiracies and their own crimes but one operation stands out among them as having the clearest connective tissue between the Russian state and the Trump campaign, and that is:

The DNC hack and the subsequent publication of emails by WikiLeaks is likely to be ground zero of Mueller’s report.

This operation has it all. Donald Trump himself pleading for help from Russia and WikiLeaks, an actual intrusion into the DNC servers by cyber hackers at Russia’s military intelligence, GRU, and a motley crew of Trump associates with a demonstrable timeline of contacts with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, including Roger Stone and the president’s son.

There are four known key nodes of this operation.

• The GRU hack of DNC servers. Twelve GRU officers were already indicted as part of this conspiracy.
• The publication of the contents from the hacked servers by WikiLeaks.
• Coordination between Trump associates and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange including regular contact with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
• The GRU also coordinated its activities with a troll farm in St. Petersburg which spread fake news on social media.

Mueller’s indictment of the 12 GRU officers gives us a clear indication of the many crimes that could fall under this conspiracy. “From phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton,” says the New York Times.

A note on the front page of Roger Stone’s indictment from January 24, 2019, refers to his possible inclusion in a more significant case of conspiracy. The related case number refers to the indictment of the twelve GRU officers. “The Stone indictment was a conspiracy indictment without any conspirators,” says legal analyst Glenn Kirshner.

In today’s announcement we learned that Stone’s prosecution will continue in November albeit under a different office. Another strand of prosecution into the inauguration committee will also continue.

Expect no more indictments from Mueller

Mueller let it be known today that there would be no further indictments from his office but this doesn’t preclude further indictments as a result of the remaining investigations or state investigations. Thos are still likely according Rep Adam Schiff and Senator Richard Blumenthal, who told MSNBC: “I think there’s a strong possibility of additional indictments, including the president’s family.”

We know that Paul Manafort’s deputy at the Trump Campaign, Rick Gates, has provided extensive cooperation to state investigator particularly in New York. The SDNY is also investigating campaign finance violations resulting from Michael Cohen plus other investigations.

One big question that remains unanswered is the involvement of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel in the Trump-Russia conspiracy. Mueller’s team has been investigating this thread but has obviously chosen not to indict anyone. Why he declined to prosecute will be an area of interest.

Mueller may also issue his findings on whether there was a Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice in the firing of James Comey. We will also watch with interest Michael Flynn’s involvement in an upcoming case relating to Turkey.

The investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible crimes does not end with the Mueller report, nor does it end with state or congressional investigations. Judgement on Trump will likely only be delivered at polling booths in 2020.

Will Mueller indict Donald Trump?

This is the big question. Mueller has evidence Trump was aware of the hacking, timing and context of the publication of the hacked material. This was one of the biggest revelations to emerge from Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee.

Trump also publicly conspired when he called on Russia and Wikileaks to help during the campaign. This suggests Trump could be an un-indicted co-conspirator but it seems likely he will escape exposure in the report. That does not mean he will escape indictment by the SDNY.

This has been a long road, and whatever Mueller decides, perhaps one of the most important results of the entire process is that he be allowed to complete it. It is actual proof that we still have a functioning Justice Department and that the “rule of law” still prevails in the U.S. Many challenges lie ahead, but Mueller’s decision needs to be peacefully accepted for what it is, no matter what it is.

We need to give investigators time to complete their work. Our impatience shouldn’t have any more influence over the timing of Mueller’s work than Donald Trump’s indignance. As one old proverb puts it, the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

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The post Mueller Time appeared first on Narativ.

Billionaire Oleg Deripaska is at the middle of the central crime of Trump-Russia. Is he a spy, the conspiracy’s mastermind or a double agent?

Showdown at Pikalevo

The 2009 global liquidity crisis ground Russian manufacturing to a near-halt. In Pikalevo, Russia, workers at the local aluminum refinery had gone unpaid for weeks. Oleg Deripaska, the plant’s 41-year-old owner, was inside and expecting word of a guest. Just months earlier, the oligarch had been named Russia’s richest man by Forbes – worth $28 Billion. Now he was facing financial ruin and a visit from the (then) Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Putin strode into town, media in tow, and into a meeting with the owners. He accused them of “ambition, incompetence and pure greed,” in a dramatic dressing down that was later broadcast on national TV.

“These are real people, and if you can’t [reopen the factory], we’ll do it without you,” he continued.

Putin then passed around contracts which committed the owners to pay the late salaries from their own pockets. That’s when he noticed a hold-out.

“Deripaska, have you signed?” The then 56-year-old Prime Minister stared at the oligarch.

Deripaska must have known that his boss was in no mood for negotiation. Despite the pretense of private ownership, Russia remains an oligarchy. Deripaska may be the aluminum king but like all the owners of Russia’s biggest companies, Putin exerts ultimate control over him.

Deripaska made his way to where Putin was seated at the front of the room, leaned his 6-foot frame over the table and signed using Putin’s pen, only to be further humiliated when Putin asked for his pen back.

The showdown in Pikalevo makes clear how Deripaska has survived as Putin’s closest oligarch for over two decades. His is a loyalty forged out of expediency.

Deripaska should have gone broke over this crisis, but Putin was there to facilitate a $50 Billion loan from the state bank, Vneshtorgbank (VTB). Putin uses access to money and loans from VTB as a way to control his oligarchs.

Putin’s secret agent

Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska has until recently run Russia’s global aluminum company ‘Rusal’ and the investment company ‘Basic Element.’ At 51 years old, he is still spectacularly wealthy (worth $3.5 Billion), Jewish and the father of two children. The oligarch is divorced and is dogged by rumours of a wild sex life. While his marriage didn’t fare so well, his loyalty to Putin seems unshakeable.

Deripaska is known as “Putin’s oligarch” and is often sent on state missions which exist outside the bounds of traditional diplomacy or legality – often on one of his private yachts or planes in order to ensure secrecy. “I don’t separate myself from the state,” he told the Financial Times in 2007.

The next year in 2008, Deripaska and his best friend, Nat Rothschild, were spotted on the deck of his yacht with British business secretary Lord Mandelson and shadow chancellor George Osbourne. The resulting scandal in the UK newspapers was huge and went on for years. What emerged was a pattern of buying influence through luxury vacations, which Deripaska continues until today.

The Russian magnate has a knack of turning politicians into puppets. Buying political influence abroad helps the oligarch in two ways. It gives him leverage against other oligarchs and Putin domestically, but it is mostly self-serving. In one 2012 trip with Rothschild and Lord Mandelson, Deripaska clinched a $500 million deal with Alcoa, America’s largest aluminum manufacturer.

It’s hard to tell where business ends and organized crime begins in Russia. They are one and the same thing, allowing the elite to get away with almost anything. Deripaska denies he has ties to organized crime but authorities have investigated him for money-laundering, murder, illegal wiretapping, bribery, extortion and racketeering. When the U.S. banned him from entering the country, Putin gave him a diplomatic passport to get around the travel ban. he has spent millions and lobbied the U.S. government for years to reverse the ban.

Deripaska, his companies or direct associates have been linked to intelligence operations which allegedly disrupted elections in at least four of Russia’s neighbouring states. In December, Russian intelligence agent Alekseyevich Boyarkin was linked to Deripaska in a plot to interfere in Montenegro’s 2016 election.

The oligarch is not a spy, nor does he work for Russia’s military intelligence, yet somehow wherever he goes, spies seem to follow. That could mean one of two things: He plays a role in state-run military intelligence operations or the GRU is freelancing for him. One exiled oil oligarch says both are possible if you think of the Kremlin as being run by mobsters. “The criminal gang in the Kremlin can sometimes call on the services of the GRU,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky told the BBC.

Either way, Deripaska’s involvement with the GRU and its political interference arm may have gained him inside knowledge of the operation to hack the DNC in 2016. The very crime for which Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers last July.

Deripaska’s proximity to power and his ties to military intelligence has also made him an attractive prospect for U.S. intelligence recruiting for over a decade.

Flipping Oleg

In 2014, The Justice Department began a documented two-year effort to recruit Deripaska as an informant as part of “Operation Outreach”. Intriguingly, it was former MI-6 spy Christopher Steele – the famous author of the dossier that bears his name – who approached DOJ to suggest potentially flipping Deripaska.

It wasn’t the first time Deripaska worked with the FBI. In 2009, the FBI enlisted the oligarch for an attempted rescue of Bob Levinson, the American held hostage in Iran. The mission didn’t succeed but Deripaska got enough information out of the Iranians to get what he wanted out of the deal: A legal U.S. visa.

The recent effort to flip Deripaska began in earnest in September 2015. The Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr met Deripaska to ask about Putin’s ties to organized crime. Deripaska reportedly rebuffed the advance but by the beginning of 2016, the oligarch’s rehabilitation was underway.

We know this because the FBI helped Deripaska get another U.S. visa in February 2016. The oligarch was “encouraged” by the “softening of the agency’s stance,” according to emails released by Republican lawmakers. “We reckon that the forthcoming OVD contact represents a good opportunity for the USG,” Steele texted Ohr. Deripaska’s initials are OVD.

Keep in mind, this was all happening at the same time Christopher Steele was writing his dossier. As it turns out, Steele had worked for Deripaska in 2012. While it’s unclear if the two men were in direct contact, Deripaska was sending Steele messages through his U.S. lobbyist, Adam Waldman. Was Steele working for Deripaska? No one can say for sure but FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to discuss it in an unclassified setting when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked him at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February last year.

Later in February 2016, Deripaska was the subject of a U.S. inter-agency meeting. Prior to the meeting, Steele shared sensitive documents which showed Putin was exerting pressure on the oligarchs and that “Deripaska was not a tool,” according to Steele.

Contacts between Steele, Deripaska, Waldman and Ohr, continued almost all the way up to the election. The last contact was in September 2016, when Ohr and Steele showed up unannounced at Deripaska’s New York apartment.

“We think Russia is colluding with the Trump campaign, and we think Manafort is the key guy,” a knowledgeable source told David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

According to the source, Deripaska responded: “I hate Manafort, and I’m suing him.”

That may have been true but it was also an artful dodge because we now know Deripaska was receiving regular updates from Manafort throughout 2016. It’s equally noteworthy Deripaska was in New York in September 2016, two months before the election, under a mile away from Donald Trump, his kids, Michael Cohen and Felix Sater on a visa provided to him because of the efforts of the FBI.

In Trump, Manafort saw a way out

Deripaska met Paul Manafort through Rothschild. The two billionaires hired Manafort in 2004 to help suppress a popular uprising in Ukraine. Deripaska teamed up his new American operative with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Soviet soldier with ties to the GRU. The two men worked side-by-side for the next 11 years in Ukraine, Georgia, Kryzghstan and the U.S., always with a pro-Putin agenda.

Manafort inked a lucrative a $10 million a year contract with the oligarch in 2005 to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” That work allegedly continued through 2009. Deripaska’s spokespeople deny all these contacts and allegations.

Manafort’s directive was to get a president elected who would be more inclined to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Along with Kilimnik, Manafort’s American deputy Rick Gates and pollster Tony Fabrizio, Manafort remade the image of pro-Putin Victor Yanukovich and helped engineer his election as President in 2010. Manafort and Kilimnik stayed on as Yanukovich’s advisers until he was ejected from power in 2014 by the Maidan revolution.

Barely two years later, this same cast of political tricksters would turn their attention to the US elections, and what would soon become the single biggest scandal of all time.

After the revolution, Manafort faced an uncertain future. His work in Ukraine had rendered him unemployable, and his finances were in bad shape as the result of a court fight with Deripaska over a failed investment scheme worth $16 million.

By 2015, Manafort was down and out. His wife had discovered he was cheating. He was broke and ended up in a rehab facility in Arizona. It may have been the desert air or group therapy, but Manafort left that rehab center with a clear focus: Donald Trump.

Manafort had known Trump for decades and owned an apartment in Trump Tower, yet the prevailing narrative is that he needed his friend Thomas Barack to get him in contact with the Republican candidate. Barack came through and Trump hired Manafort, for no pay.

From the start, Deripaska was tracking Manafort

Manafort had barely been on the job at the Trump campaign for two weeks when he got word to his old patron Deripaska via Konstantin Kilimnik.

“I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort asked Kilimnik.

“Absolutely,” Kilimnik replied. “Every article.”

“How do we use to get whole,” Manafort asked. “Has OVD operation seen?

“Frankly the coverage has been much better than Trump’s,” Kilimnik quipped. “In any case, it will hugely enhance your reputation no matter what happens.”

Throughout those early days, Manafort kept Deripaska abreast of what was going on via Kilimnik. At one point Manafort shared internal campaign research with the oligarch via Kilimnik and at another time offered Deripaska regular briefings on the campaign.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe, Kilimnik confirmed Trump was a regular topic of their email correspondence. “We discussed a lot of issues, from Putin to women,” Kilimnik told Radio Free Europe. “Of course we discussed Trump and everything,” he said.

Kilimnik fled Kyiv as soon as he was indicted on Obstruction of Justice charges for attempting to convince witnesses to back Manafort’s cover-up story. He now lives in a gated community north of Moscow, out of the reach of the Special Counsel.

Deripaska’s involvement in Trump-Russia is no longer just conjecture. His history with Manafort, Kilimnik and Rick Gates, combined with emails and other evidence directly implicating him, along with his history of running destabilizing influence campaigns, reveals he was not only connected to the GRU at the time the DNC was hacked, but he was also tracking every move Manafort made as Trump’s campaign chair. And now we also know he was tapped into Julian Assange as well.

Finding Julian

Deripaska’s associates visited Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at least twelve times between 2013 and 2017. Paul Manafort alone visited Assange three times in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The last visit came in March 2016, while he was working for Donald Trump and a month before the GRU successfully hacked into the DNC servers. Manafort also attempted to secure Assange’s release on a visit to Ecuador.

The other Deripaska associate to visit Assange was the oligarch’s American lobbyist Adam Waldman, who visited Assange nine times in 2017. One of those visits came just days after Waldman was spotted with Deripaska at the oligarch’s hotel Aurelio in Lech, Austria. Video of Waldman and his wife at a bar with Deripaska was shot by Deripaska’s former mistress who until recently was imprisoned in a Thai jail.

Waldman claims Assange is a client and that at the time, he was attempting to negotiate the WikiLeaks founder’s a possible release with the DOJ. Waldman – like many D.C. lobbyists – is the very definition of ‘conflict of interest’ in a town where everyone is conflicted, but having Deripaska, Assange and Manafort as clients at the same time is a feat few would attempt.

Even if Waldman were solely acting for Assange, it’s suspicious that his outreach to the WikiLeaks founder, only began after Manafort’s had ended. Mysteriously, both men tried to secure Assange’s release. Why was Deripaska so invested in this relationship? Was he worried he’d be implicated if Assange was indicted? It does appear Assange has been indicted under seal.

Mastermind, secret agent or confidential source?

No matter how you look at it, Oleg Deripaska is the central figure connecting all aspects of the main crime of Trump-Russia. The oligarch is the only known person with access to the three identified nodes of the WikiLeaks operation: the GRU, Manafort’s campaign tenure and Julian Assange, at the time of the crime.

Was Deripaska a source for Christopher Steele’s dossier? We don’t know the answer, but there can be no doubt about his loyalty to Putin.

Lat month Deripaska used a million-dollar lobbying effort to convince U.S. senators to exclude his companies from sanctions. While he placed some of his Rusal shares in trust with VTB, the moves were mostly viewed as window-dressing as he still indirectly controls the majority of shares, only without the pressure of sanction bearing down on the company’s bottom line.

Deripaska remains unindicted.

The post Deripaska appeared first on Narativ.

Jared Kushner’s tangled web of Russian contacts and business dealings may prove his undoing. It also imperils the global balance of power.

Billionaire boys were all the rage at the start of this decade. Young men with last names like Zuckerberg, Thiel, Dorsey and Kushner became instant moguls in an era of free-flowing capital, unicorn dreams and billion dollar IPOs.

Against this backdrop, in 2014, Joshua and Jared Kushner and their friend, Ryan Williams, created Cadre. Williams was the public face of the operation while the Kushner boys worked investors through their V.C. fund,  Thrive Capital Partners. They raised $18 million in an initial funding round which included tech mega-stars like Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, David Yu, George Soros and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel.

Cadre was conceived as a data-driven real estate platform. A private club whose super-wealthy members gained access to the type of premium real estate deals the rest of us would have only learned about, if we happened to drive by the construction sites.

Cadre is estimated to be worth $800 million today and is attracting the attention of Trump-Russia investigators. As with many scandals, it was the cover-up which tipped off investigators to the underlying potential crime. Jared Kushner failed to disclose his $25 million stake in Cadre on his financial disclosure forms when he was appointed White House special adviser by Donald Trump, his father-in-law.

Kushner “inadvertently” left off a total of 70 investment holdings from the forms, an act which may constitute a felony and also begs the question: Is there something about Cadre – and Kushner’s other holdings – which made him risk five years in jail by forgetting to disclose them on a mandatory form?

The Paradise Papers link Jared Kushner to Kremlin cash.

“I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector,” Kushner told reporters in July, while standing behind a White House podium placed in the driveway of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Kushner had just testified before a congressional committee denying any collusion with Russian officials in the 2016 election and dismissing any notion he had business ties to Russia.

Last month, a leaked trove of documents revealing the origins of major global investments, the Paradise Papers, put lie to Kushner’s denials. They exposed a Russian tech billionaire as an investor in Cadre. Digital Sky Technologies CEO Yuri Milner had invested $850,000 in Kushner’s company via a family trust, the Paradise Papers revealed.

DST is a Russian-owned private global investment firm with holdings in some of the world’s biggest brands in tech.  While the company’s funding origins have raised suspicion before, the Paradise Papers revealed DST was operating as an investment front for sanctioned Kremlin companies investing in U.S. firms.

In 2011, two sanctioned Russian government firms, VTB Bank and Gazprom, gave Milner’s DST $191 million to buy large stakes in Twitter and Facebook. The Facebook investment was made just before the social network went public and its value mushroomed to $1 Bn after the listing.

“It was a different time,” Milner said in an interview with The New York Times. “It never even occurred to me back then that VTB Bank was not just another investor for us.”

Milner may shrug off the investment as a remnant of a different age, but it’s given Special Counsel Robert Mueller hard evidence the Kremlin was a business partner of Facebook, Twitter and Kushner’s Cadre.

The Kushner boys’ V.C. firm, Thrive Capital Partners, is also indirectly linked to a major Russian bank with deep ties to Trump-Russia. Thrive’s investment custodian is Silicon Valley Bank which partnered with sanctioned Russian Sberbank to invest in the U.S. tech sector in 2012.

Sberbank is the same bank which sponsored Donald Trump’s 2013 Moscow Miss Universe and VTB Bank was involved in funding the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow.  There are many questions about whether the Kremlin used Sberbank to launder money through Cyprus, Trump properties and the tech sector.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller now has a financial trail linking Kushner’s businesses to Kremlin cash via DST’s Yuri Milner and Russia’s Sberbank via Silicon Valley Bank. That’s aside from Kushner’s December meeting with Sergey Gorkov of Vnesheconombank and a recently revealed campaign overture from former Russian central banker Aleksander Torshin. Jared Kushner’s denials about his business ties to Russia do not hold up.

There is also the albatross around Kushner’s neck known as 666 Fifth Avenue. He bought the Manhattan trophy building in 2007 for an inflated $1.8 Bn and is now facing a $1.2 Bn mortgage bill he cannot repay. Kushner has been seeking a bailout from anyone who’ll listen including the Qataris, Chinese and Russians.

Data is the global weapon of choice for nation states trying to tip the balance of power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows data is the future of power.  “[Artificial intelligence is] the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind,”  Putin asserted on state-funded RT recently.  “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

Cadre, Facebook and Twitter, like many data-driven tech behemoths are all cast from the same dye:  They use data to control the price and pace of commerce based on who you are, what you like, how much you’re worth and with whom you are friends.

This data becomes even more significant in an era of Artificial Intelligence. A.I. is accelerating at such a pace that it’s hard to overstate how much machine-thinking will change every aspect of our lives in the coming years.  A.I. will control your existence and whomever controls A.I., will rule the world.

In this context, Putin’s multi-year campaign to invest in the U.S. tech sector was both cunning and shrewd. He was able to use his social network investments to exploit the social media landscape and elect a president with his own compromising Russian business interests. And now we know Trump’s son-in-law is also connected to Kremlin cash.

Make no mistake though, Trump’s election was only a means to an end in Putin’s strategic game. What he really seeks is nothing less than a shift in global power.

Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia and Jared Kushner. Why global power is literally shifting beneath your feet.

In October, Saudi Arabia held a conference which many dubbed “Davos in the Desert”.  The Kingdom used the conference to announce it intends to invest its vast liquid assets from fossil fuels into the tech sector. They plan to grow their Public Investment Fund from a current $65 Bn to $400 Bn, in just two years.

Like Russia, Saudi Arabia is a country which flagrantly flouts human rights norms. Still, 3,000 delegates from around the world attended the Riyadh conference.  Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink were all there. So was Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Newly installed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, made a rare appearance at the conference with a message: ‘We are open for business’.

Prince Salman also announced the kingdom would return to “a more moderate Islam and destroy extremist ideologies.  He announced women would be allowed to drive and also made a humanoid a citizen of the kingdom.

“We want to lead normal lives, lives where our religion and our traditions translate into tolerance, so that we coexist with the world and become part of the development of the world,” Prince Salman said.

Prince Salman presents himself as a grand reformer but his actions seem to be more authoritarian than liberal. He has aggressively consolidated power and arrested Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful men in an ‘anti-corruption’ drive.  He started a massive blockade of neighboring Qatar, is committing genocide in Yemen, forced the Lebanese Prime Minister to resign and is igniting the flames of war with Iran.

And at the center of the crown prince’s draconian crackdown is none other than Jared Kushner, who has developed an intriguing friendship with Prince Salman, according to Foreign Policy Magazine:

“Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, was in Riyadh again only recently. It was his third trip to Saudi Arabia since Trump took office. He again met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom he appears to have established a close personal relationship. It should therefore come as no surprise that Trump, who shares the young crown prince’s antipathy toward Iran, has commented favorably on the recent developments in Riyadh.”

Kushner has given Prince Salman carte blanche to reshape the Middle East using any means necessary. Laura Rozen quotes a former U.S. admin official as warning the situation could turn into chaos. “There is no one who has that camaraderie with the crown prince and has the instinctive desire to find common ground that Jared does. If something happens to Jared — he gets distracted or is no longer on the scene — what happens to [their] critical relationship with the White House?”

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been U.S. allies for the better part of a century as foes of Shiite-controlled Iran. Prince Salman however, has shifted his foreign policy eastward. He recently signed a $3 Bn arms deal with the Kremlin. The deal was described by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as “an historical moment”.  Putin called it a “landmark event”.  Add to this, Russia’s military and political control over Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and it’s easy to see how Russia may have used its influence over the Trump White House as cover to shift the balance of Middle East power.

This plan appears to have originated as early as last December when Kushner, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, mercenary Erik Prince and Stephen Bannon met Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in secret in New York. Abu Dhabi is the capital of Saudi’s regional ally, United Arab Emirates.

Prince Zayed acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin since then. He met with Putin twice in 2016 and facilitated a meeting between Erik Prince and a Russian emissary in the Seychelles in December.  According to reports, the meeting revolved around isolating Iran in exchange for a dropping of U.S. sanctions.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is also investigating Kushner’s communication with Israeli officials in December to help veto a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli construction in disputed territories.  Kushner also met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and discussed a back-door communication channel with the Russians in the same month.

Does any of this connect to Kushner’s financial woes? Perhaps. In 2015 and 2016, Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated a financial bail-out of 666 Fifth Avenue with a Qatari sheikh. The $500 million deal failed in July this year.  Soon after, Saudi Arabia launched its blockade against Qatar with Trump’s support. Kushner visited Saudi Arabia three times since. Are the Saudi’s helping bail out the Kushners in exchange for looking the other way on Prince Salman’s crackdown?

Kushner’s business history shows no allegiance to conscience. He has ties to Kremlin insiders and sanctioned Russian entities, his deliberate obfuscation on his disclosure forms and an obstruction of justice investigation suggest Kushner cannot be viewed as an honest broker. He remains a singular focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and it seems evident the billionaire boy should not be trusted to handle our mid-east policy, until Mueller has completed his job.

The post The Billionaire Boys Club appeared first on Narativ.

Exclusive: Russia used Google and its advertisers to fund propaganda efforts in the 2016 election.

You’ve likely never heard of Veles. The tiny town of 55,000 people lies deep in Macedonia, a landlocked country nestled between Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Macedonia has struggled to kickstart its economy since independence in 1991. The resulting high unemployment and a teenage population with a fair command of English, made Veles an unlikely centre of production for fake news during the 2016 election.

Two years ago, a cadre of Macedonian teenage web entrepreneurs began creating and publishing pro-Trump fake news content directed at a U.S. audience. Some of the teens were recruited via gaming forums or micro-work sites but they don’t seem to have had a direct connection to the Trump campaign or Russian intelligence, except for the curious feature that only their pro-Trump fake news found an audience.

Some of the fake news websites looked very similar to the sites of the New York Times and Huffington Post and contained fake news stories with headlines like:

“JUST IN: Obama Illegally Transferred DOJ Money To Clinton Campaign!” and “BREAKING: Obama Confirms Refusal To Leave White House, He Will Stay In Power!”

Google approved and provided advertising codes to these websites so commercials from the world’s largest advertiser network appeared alongside this fake content.

The internet giant paid out thousands of dollars to the fake news creators, essentially funding a propaganda effort. One of the fake news purveyors named Boris was profiled by Wired Magazine, which claimed: “Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites.” The magazine noted the average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.

Fake news spreads in other ways on YouTube, funded by the tech giant’s advertisers.

Williams and Kalvin Johnson filled their YouTube channel with drummed up anti-Hillary Clinton videos. The two aspirant YouTubers, who hail from either Atlanta or Nigeria, routinely warned viewers Clinton, “is going to stand for the Muslim.” The channel was actually part of a Kremlin propaganda effort to infiltrate the U.S., according to the Daily Beast.

Williams and Kalvin’s content has been pulled by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter but none of these platforms revealed if the creators generated revenue from advertisers on their channel. YouTube sells ads across its network, placing them before user-generated content and splitting revenue with creators. In many cases, advertisers may not even be aware they are unwittingly funding propaganda efforts because advertising is bought based on a users’ browsing history, not the content.

Over on Russia Today’s channel on YouTube, this practice continues until now. The DOJ is forcing RT to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act but somehow Google still serves up advertising from pro-American companies to their YouTube page – money which flows directly to the Russian propaganda operation. Google included RT as part their preferred channels network which gave the Kremlin mouthpiece access to blue-chip advertisers in the U.S., until two weeks ago.

Russia also manipulated Google news algorithms so RT’s news stories would appear with higher frequency than U.S. news sites in the run up to the election. “We saw manipulation of certain algorithms, so that if you Googled certain items, you got Russia news, R.T. News, other false news,” according to Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee.

Russian agents also bought tens of thousands of dollars of ads promoting pro-Trump policies on all of Google’s products include YouTube, Google search and Gmail. If you sent an election e-mail to a friend on Gmail, Russia targeted you with specific propaganda based on your private correspondence.

“We have a set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion. We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries,” Google said in a statement, without actually admitting anything.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are slow in acknowledging their involvement in Trump-Russia.

Google has followed the same path as Facebook and Twitter in denying, obfuscating and finally confessing to some of their involvement in Trump-Russia. The Washington Post discovered Russia’s ad-buying on Google on their own. “They haven’t admitted it,” said Post reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin. “We had to find it out from our own sources…we’ve only started to chip away at the tip of the iceberg of what we’re seeing,” said Dwoskin.

One open question is what was driving up the traffic to these YouTube sites? We’ve written about a Russian propaganda machine and bot farm in St. Petersburg which operated hundreds of fake Facebook groups, ran divisive ads and incited anger. They also retweeted, liked and shared content created by the fake news factories in Macedonia, Russia Today, Infowars and Sputnik. As the Russian bot farms and Facebook groups spread the word, traffic to the fake news sites and YouTube grew, giving the content higher rankings and generating revenue from U.S. brands via Google Adsense.

The Kremlin deployed a stealth data operation on Facebook, Twitter and Google, supported by an unprecedented invasion of privacy. Russian hackers breached DNC and state voters rolls to harvest data which was used to target fake and divisive content on the internet platforms. It’s unclear if this infringed on Americans’ right to exercise their vote.

Google, Facebook and Twitter are now the targets of an investigation by congressional committees who want to know what the companies knew and when. 

Investigations aside, the tech giants owe their users a better understanding of whether they were targeted and by what content. They should also come clean on how much they profited from the influence campaign and whether they (knowingly or otherwise) funded the fake news and propaganda operation launched by the Kremlin and, they should reveal which advertisers were involved.

The post Google Cash appeared first on Narativ.

Rewriting 2013: Organized Crime, Trump and the sumptuous feast at Nobu. How Donald Trump met Russia.

Beyonce’s lip sync of the national anthem at Barack Obama’s inauguration was what passed for political scandal in 2013. There was the IRS scandal, gay marriage and Edward Snowden but it was a sheepish year for Washington’s favorite sport of bloodletting.

The historical record may need some adjusting now that we can reveal that Donald Trump not only began running for President that year, Russia was already deeply intertwined in the Trump organization even then.

Trump had flirted with a White House run for years. His most convincing effort until then was a 2011 challenge to President Barack Obama built on the back of a fake claim that Obama was not a U.S. citizen.

Obama was forced to release his birth certificate and publicly roasted Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The President took the stage to a music video flashing Obama’s birth certificate and set to the song of “I am a real American”.

“Mahalo,” the President quipped.

“Donald Trump is here tonight!,” Obama announced to a mix of laughter and applause.

“Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama told the gathered journalists, celebrities and beltway insiders.

“And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter –- like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

Donald Trump squirmed in his chair as the President persisted: “Say what you will about Mr. Trump,” Obama said. “He certainly would bring some change to the White House. The President looked up at a screen that showed the White House as a gilded Trump casino and resort.

Trump scurried out of the dinner, appearing bruised, according to the New York Times although he later proclaimed: “I loved that dinner.”

Trump was actually a leading contender in 2012 but a month after Obama’s speech, Trump announced he would sit out the 2012 election cycle.

There was another reason Trump was deterred from running in 2012. In an expose just published by the New Yorker, the Manhattan DA’s office was on the verge of indicting Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr. on felony larceny and fraud charges. The Trump siblings had allegedly inflated sell-out figures while luring buyers to the Trump-branded SOHO Tower in 2008.  The New Yorker discovered DA Cyrus Vance killed the case in August 2012 after Trump’s attorney donated $25,000 to Vance’s re-election campaign.

Obama ended 2012 by signing the Magnitsky sanctions act. Russia’s wealthiest kleptocrats were now at risk of being sanctioned and their stolen billions frozen. The move infuriated Putin. He responded by banning adoption of Russian children to the U.S., but he also set into place a secret plan to get back at Obama and end sanctions.

Donald Trump began to assemble his political forces as soon as the clock struck Midnight on New Year’s Day, 2013.

Trump reached out to his friend and political adviser, Roger Stone, on January 1 to let him know he was running.

Stone warned Trump the media would be deeply skeptical of a campaign after Trump’s previous false starts. After all, Trump had flirted with running more times than he’d been bankrupt (four) or married (three).

“That will disappear when I announce,” Trump assured Stone.

Trump’s campaign was indeed going to be different this time. He curried favor with Republican Party officials and donated to GOP groups. He also began to deepen his connections to Russian oligarchs.

Donald Trump’s properties around the world are often home to some of the world’s biggest criminals. That’s true for the Trump SOHO but even more so for Trump’s headquarters.

Donald and Melania occupy the multi-floor penthouse at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort lived in the Tower while under surveillance for crimes committed in the Ukraine and so did one of “the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov,” according to ABC News. Tokhtakhounov also goes by his mob moniker of “Little Taiwanese”.

The FBI had wiretapped Tokhtakhounov’s Trump Tower apartment for over two years and discovered it was being used as a home base for organized crime. The investigation culminated in his 2013 indictment for laundering $50 million in the U.S.. Despite being a fugitive from justice and the issuing of an Interpol warrant for his arrest, ‘Little Taiwanese’ is still a regular feature in Moscow’s social scene.

Another Russian mobster Anatoly Golubchik ran a gambling ring on the 51st floor at Trump Tower with the Little Taiwanese.

Felix Sater was another regular at the building. Sater is a convicted mobster and FBI informant and was Trump senior adviser and partner on Trump-branded towers around the world, including the Trump SOHO.

The BBC asked Trump about Sater during a TV interview on July 8, 2013. Trump was visibly angry when Sater’s name came up.

“Shouldn’t you have said: ‘Felix Sater, you’re connected with the mafia and you’re fired’?,” the interviewer asked Trump.

“Maybe you’re thick but when you have a signed contract, you can’t in this country just break it… Sometimes we’ll sign a deal and the partner isn’t as good as we’d like but that does happen, and by the way, I hate to do this but I do have that big group of people waiting so I have to leave…,” Trump said and walked out.

Trump barely admitted knowing Sater in a deposition taped later in 2013. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said.

Eric Trump bragged his father’s had access to $100 million in Russian funds while playing a round of golf with journalist James Dodson at a Trump branded golf course in North Carolina sometime in 2013.

“Eric, who’s funding?” Dodson asked. “I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course.”

“Well, we don’t rely on American banks,” Dobson recalls Eric’s answer. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia. “We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs, we just go there all the time,” Eric Trump said.

A Vegas deal and a tweet about Putin.

On June 15, Trump traveled to Vegas where he and his entourage dined with Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his family including his pop star son, Emin. They agreed to bring the Miss Universe contest to Moscow later that year.

While Trump was in Vegas, Vladimir Putin was at a five-star luxury resort on the Irish shoreline meeting with Obama and the heads of state of the G8. It would be Putin’s last G8 conference as a member of the exclusive club of industrialized nations. By the following year, Russia was disinvited by the group because of the annexation Crimea and the attack on Ukraine.

Trump mentioned the Russian leader in a tweet as Putin left the G8. “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow[?],” Trump posted. “If so, will he become my new best friend?”

Trump then went public about his intention to run. “I really don’t think it’s a popularity contest; I think they like what I’m saying,” Trump told the National Review after announcing he’d invested a million dollars into political research. “We’ll see what happens. People want to see this nation be great again.” He told ABC News ‘This Week’ he was ready to back up his talk with cash: “If I did it, I’d spend whatever it took.”

Even in those early days of pre-campaigning, Trump could not resist flattering Vladimir Putin. He heaped praise on Putin during an interview with Larry King.

“You’re an admirer of the Russian…?,” King asked.

“I think he’s done really a great job outsmarting our country,” Trump replied.

In October, David Letterman asked Trump:

“Vladimir Putin, have you ever met the guy?” Trump said, “He’s a tough guy. I met him once.”

Eighty-six women representing the world nations descended on Moscow on November 9th, along with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin insiders.

As they rehearsed for the live televised event and competed in contests from swimsuits to congeniality, Trump was feted behind the scenes by the Agalarovs and Russian officials, bankers, oligarchs and mobsters.

Putin never attended the pageant but sent gifts and reached out to Trump. “When I went to Russia with the Miss Universe pageant, he contacted me and was so nice,” Trump told Fox News. “And, you know, I mean the Russian people were so fantastic to us. I can say this. They are doing — they’re outsmarting us at many turns.”

Miss Universe Moscow was sponsored by sanctioned Russian bank, Sberbank. Its CEO Herman Gref and Agalarov hosted a feast for Trump at Moscow’s Nobu which included “top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people,” Trump later revealed.

One of the key findings of the 2016 Steele Dossier was that the Russians “had been cultivating and supporting Trump for five years.” Current and former Kremlin officials told the report’s author, Christopher Steele: “the Trump operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Journalists have been able to verify many of the claims in the Steele Dossier and the intelligence community has vouched for Steele’s credibility. Our investigation has found a long list of criminal activity linked to the two Trump Towers in Manhattan, its Russian occupants and Trump’s business partners and children. The sequence of events between June and November 2013 seems to corroborate the key finding in the Trump dossier that Russia had been cultivating Donald Trump from at least as early as 2013.

Was there more than just a crowning of a Miss Universe in Moscow in November 2013? A coronation perhaps of the man who would lead Russia’s payback for the sanctions imposed by President Obama in 2012? That is precisely what investigators want to find out.

The post The Red Coronation appeared first on Narativ.

Analysis: Vladimir Putin is using North Korea as a pawn in a real-life global chess game to rebuild the Russian empire. Here’s what you need to know.

The Twilight War.  That was what Winston Churchill called the first few months of World War Two.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army attacked Poland in a pre-dawn blitzkrieg on September 1, 1939. Two days later, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war but British troops didn’t step onto the battleground for several months.

Hitler and Josef Stalin had agreed to carve up Poland in a non-aggression pact and the two despots did just that. A month after Germany invaded Poland from the West, Russia attacked her from the East.

The Twilight War — or the Phony War as it became known – served as a prelude to actual conflict. The allies dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany to expose Hitler’s true intentions. The NAZI’s also sank the SS Athenia, a passenger ship bound from Glasgow to Montreal which they claimed was an error.

For seven months, the Germans and the West glared at each other across the front lines. On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister and the Phony War ended. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial,” Churchill later wrote. That same morning, Hitler ordered his blitzkrieg into Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. Between 40 and 50 million people died around the world in the ensuing war – the bloodiest in human history.

Seventy-eight years later and another despot with tyrannical tendencies is eyeing the rebuilding of his empire.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t hide his intention of rebuilding the destroyed Soviet Empire. He views the defeat of the Soviet Union as the single biggest tragedy to befall Russia in modern times. “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said in 2005.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2013, the world has been waging proxy wars courtesy of Putin’s imperialist strategy. Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, Russia’s genocidal support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the long U.S. war in Afghanistan have all been part of Putin’s plan to restore the Russian empire.

Russia was also an establishing force for ISIS and Putin’s hands are bloodied with a reign of terror that has gripped the West for over a decade killing innocent children at pop concerts and civilian commuters from London to Madrid.

Since Putin came to power, he’s amassed a personal fortune of $200 Billion stolen from his countrymen and Ukrainians. He’s enabled a criminal state ruled by a kleptocracy who’ve raped and pillaged Russia’s wealth. Putin’s henchmen have been allowed to “arrest, kidnap, torture and kill to take people’s properties away with impunity,” says human rights activist Bill Browder.

Putin and his merry band of thieves have laundered billions of dollars obtained through drug-trafficking, nuclear arms sales, human trafficking, large-scale criminal theft, hacking and cryptocurrency. Since 2014, U.S. sanctions have begun to threaten the oligarchs’ wealth hidden away in off-shore companies.

Last year, Russia turned from proxy wars in Syria and Afghanistan into directly engaging the U.S., albeit invisibly.

Putin’s unprecedented attack on the U.S. democracy included a multi-year financial and operational infestation of major U.S. conservative institutions like the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party and the co-opting of several leading Silicon Valley companies and billionaires.

The Kremlin employed thousands of operatives in U.S. financial, military and technology infrastructure. Data analysts, hackers and propagandists in Russia and the U.S. manipulated the minds of an electorate, stealing private information on Americans and using it against them by peddling fake news and targeted hate content to amplify deep-seated anger, prejudice and fear.

Putin targeted the downtrodden among us: immigrants, transgendered people and victims of injustice. Our research shows a track record of financial and political support dating back to 2009 for social conservative groups like the NRA, anti-gay group World Congress of Families and the exploitation of racial tensions in the U.S. from Black Lives Matter to immigration issues.

Putin has not shied away from attacking U.S. forces. Four U.S. navy carriers in the Pacific mysteriously crashed in the Pacific in what seems likely to be the hack of their steering and GPS systems. 17 U.S. servicemen were killed. The Kremlin is also suspected of launching sonic attacks which severely injured U.S. diplomats in Cuba.

Russia conspired to elect a U.S. president using known Kremlin operatives like Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.  Flynn and others in the administration also copied and stole confidential documents from a secure room at the White House.

Why Trump? Possibly because he is monetarily compromised by Russia but also because he knew Trump could be goaded into a military response in North Korea. In December, Trump adviser Erik Prince met with Putin’s envoy in the Seychelles. They discussed ways of isolating Iran in exchange for the dropping of sanctions.

There is no greater signal Putin is itching for a real war with the West than his military and financial support for North Korea.

We were first to report about suspicious military cargo being shipped from Vladivostok in Russia to North Korea. Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear missiles are powered by Soviet-era rockets. Russia has also been dodging U.S. sanctions on North Korea, providing about $1 billion in illegal trade from its Russian neighbors, along with scientific help.

As we write, North Korea is planning another nuclear test possibly targeting the vicinity of the U.S. territory of Guam and likely launched from a submarine. This is a direct attempt to engage the U.S. militarily. While Trump will have his followers believe the war will stay in the Korean Peninsula, Russia is just using North Korea as a tactic to distract the U.S. military and allow an opening for Russia’s expansion into Eastern Europe.

Russia embarked on a ten-year, $700 billion program to bolster its military in 2010. Her military budget has ballooned from $25 billion in 2006 to $90 billion in 2013. Last month, Russian forces joined Belarus in a military exercise on their Western front. Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Georgia all raised concerns the Zapad exercises were a cover for Russia’s preparation for war.

Moscow and Minsk claimed only 12,7000 troops were involved in the exercise but the real number was closer to 100,000 and could have been as high as 240,000. Ukrainian military officials say Russia only withdrew a fraction of her troops after the war-games leaving them war-ready.

The Kremlin also deployed new Iskander surface-to-surface ballistic missile, Kalibr cruise missiles, Bal coastal-defense missile and the S-400 Triumph air defense systems during the war-games. Russia is also pursuing a new class of air-independent submarines, stealth fighter planes, high-tech ground gear for her ground forces and recently tested a new missile capable of destroying satellites in space.

Elsewhere, Russia has conducted joint military exercises with China and Egypt, as well as in the Northern Fleet of the Barents Sea. In Helsinki, the Fins have been preparing an underground city in the event of war.

If North Korea draws the U.S. into war on the Korean Peninsula, Russia will seize the opportunity to invade Eastern Europe.

Any attack on a NATO member country will draw the U.S. into war there, forcing the U.S. into fighting a war on two fronts. Both on Russia’s border. “Despite Russia’s denials, we know they are seeking to redraw international borders by force, undermining the sovereign and free nations of Europe,” U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in Ukraine in August.

Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine are likely to be first targets of a Russian-NATO war. While NATO outguns Russian, NATO troops are not fully mobilized on the front. Until they are, Russia could overrun the Baltic states in as quickly as in 60 hours. With U.S. forces split between Eastern Europe and Korea, the U.S. military would be pressed to capacity.

There’s ample reason to believe China could be working in coordination with Russia. Recent war-games and China’s support for North Korea are chief among them. China bought 14% of Russia’s oil producer Rosneft. Russia stands to benefit financially from a war because global conflict drives up oil prices and oil is the one thing Russia has.

Beijing and Moscow have also opposed tougher sanctions against Pyongyang. This could be a tell-tale sign China will sit out any war waiting for Russia and the West to destroy each other. Worse, they could side with Russia and North Korea militarily, plunging us all into the worst war in history.

And if you think such war will stay confined to Europe and Asia, think again. Russia and the U.S. have each rigged each others’ power grids and infrastructure with malware able to cut off power supply to population centers. An aggravated and unpredictable North Korea could also strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear missiles. Russia and U.S. Nuclear warheads are a deterrent but history shows us they can be used when push comes to shove in global conflict.

The world stands at the precipice of war with unthinkable consequences. The result will be a world far different from the one we have now: ruled by kleptocrats, despots and enemies of truth and justice. That is not the world for which the U.S. and its allies has spent generations fighting. It’s not the world we should leave behind. We cannot be antagonized into war by North Korea and give Russia the opening it wants to rebuild its empire in Eastern Europe.

We should focus our intentions squarely on the tyrant who has led the world into this nightmare: Vladimir Putin.

The post The Precipice appeared first on Narativ.

Exposed: The many possible crimes of Paul Manafort.

Depending whom you ask, Paul Manafort is either a political genius or one of the world’s biggest criminals. He is potentially both – in the most Machiavellian sense of those combined terms.

The 63-year-old political strategist and lobbyist is the central figure in a complex criminal scheme which has disrupted global events for over a decade, culminating in his tour of duty as the campaign chairman for a Russian-engineered campaign to elect Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election.

In July, federal agents burst into Manafort’s apartment in Alexandria, Virginia in a pre-dawn raid. They ordered him and his wife, Kathleen, out of bed and searched them for weapons. Investigators hauled away business binders and copies of his computer files. They also took photos of his expensive Italian-made suits, a leaked detail which may hint at Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s potential indictment.

Prosecutors told Manafort they intend to indict him for possible tax law violations, money laundering, failing to register as foreign agent and using offshore holdings in criminal activity going back 11 years. Manafort’s phone was tapped under a FISA warrant from 2014 to early 2016 and then again before the election until after the inauguration.

Manafort worked for the Kremlin since 2006 and is alleged to have stolen millions from Ukrainians.

In June 2005, Paul Manafort met with unassuming Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. U.S. diplomatic cables at the time described Deripaska as “among the two to three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and “a more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.”

Manafort and Deripaska struck a lucrative $10 million-a-year deal to lobby for Russia beginning in 2006. Under the arrangement, Manafort would influence Russian politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics. Deripaska has since been banned from the U.S. for ties to organized crime but he’s traveled here as a Russian diplomat.

In 2007, Manafort and Deripaska partnered in an offshore company registered in the Caymen Islands. Deripaska invested $18.9 million in a Ukrainian telecom and paid Manafort’s firm $7.4 million. Deripaska later backed out of the deal and sued Manafort for the return of his Money.

It should be noted that a favorite Russian money laundering technique is for two conspiring companies to set up a joint offshore company whose only purpose is to connect two international parties via a phony transaction. One of the parties then sues the other in order to obtain a judge’s ruling which effectively “cleans” the money through a corrupt court in the country in which the offshore holding is registered.

Manafort set up a similarly suspect offshore company with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitro Firtash. They hatched a plan to buy New York’s Drake Hotel then cancelled the deal leaving employees stranded without salaries. Firtash is wanted in the U.S. on suspicion of bribery and organized criminal activity. He was arrested in Austria in 2014 and is expected to be extradited to the US soon. Firtash may provide direct evidence to implicate Manafort. Both of Manafort’s known offshore holding were exposed in the Panama Papers.

Manafort fomented political division in Ukraine resulting in the death of 100 Ukrainian protesters.

Manafort’s consulting efforts for the Kremlin officially ended in 2009 but he stayed in the Kremlin’s orbit assisting Vladimir Putin in his invasion and political disruption of Ukraine.

In 2010, he helped elect former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych is a violent convicted felon but Manafort was able to ‘rebrand him’ by fomenting divisive politics. “He used damaging techniques to divide Ukrainian society and help Putin to achieve a simple goal,” Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, told Bloomberg.

Manafort and Yanukovych became close albeit through a translator, as neither of them spoke each other’s’ language. The bromance was cemented in lengthy sauna conversations which spanned from politics to style. They became so close, “Yanukovych started to resemble Manafort in his Italian suits and carefully coiffed dark hair parted on the side,” according to Bloomberg. This could explain why prosecutors took photos of Manafort’s suits when they barged into his apartment.

Yanukovych’s party illegally paid Manafort $12.7 million for his work between 2007 and 2012. Investigators found a “black ledger” detailing the payments in Manafort’s Kiev office. One $750,000 payment Manafort received was invoiced to a Belize-registered offshore company called Neocon.

In 2014, Manafort advised Yanukovych on the final days of his Putin-backed presidency which resulted in the death of 100 protestors. Manafort’s daughter, Andrea, decried his new-found riches as “blood money” in text messages which were later published after her phone was hacked.

Yanukovych was deposed by the 2014 demonstrations and he fled to Moscow. Manafort continued to consult for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, earning another $1 million and making seventeen trips to the country.

Much of Manafort’s international offshore dealings were routed through the Bank Of Cyprus. Investigators obtained documents of Manafort’s Cypriot transactions earlier this year. The bank is widely considered a Russian laundering front. Its former Vice Chair Wilbur Ross is Trump’s Commerce Secretary, is also under investigation.

U.S. Investigators have been working with Ukrainian prosecutors as “part of a broad investigation to recover stolen Ukrainian assets,” according to the Associated Press.

Manafort brought his divisive politics to the U.S. on behalf of the Kremlin and Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Manafort has been in Republican politics since his days at Georgetown law school in the early 70’s. He later worked for the campaigns of General Ford, Ronald Reagan, the first President Bush and Bob Dole. He also served as the deputy political director for the Republican National committee.

Manafort’s big shot at political fame in the U.S. came when he joined the Trump Campaign in March last year. A month later, he was at a Trump campaign event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., also attended by Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions. It remains a mystery if the group held any formal meetings at the hotel. Manafort’s surveillance warrant was likely not in effect then though it’s widely believed Ambassador Kislyak’s phone was monitored as a matter of course.

Manafort was promoted to campaign chairman in June giving him control of its then $20 million budget, included approval on advertising and media strategy. That’s important because of suspected coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in targeted Facebook advertising began as early as June 2015.

In June 2016, Manafort took notes on his phone while at a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and several Russian operatives who had been actively working on dropping the Magnitsky sanctions against Russia. The Russians’ stated intent of the meeting was to hand over dirt on Hillary Clinton. The FBI obtained Manafort’s notes from the meeting which may lead to another criminal indictment involving espionage.

In July, Manafort engineered the selection of Mike Pence as Donald Trump’s VP pick by faking a mechanical issue with Trump’s plane, forcing the presidential nominee to overnight in Pence’s home town of Indianapolis. Pence has his own ties to Deripaska but it’s unknown if these extend to any offshore holdings.

Manafort was in charge of the campaign when Wikileaks published the first batch of Russian hacked DNC emails. A Trump Tower server linked to Russia’s Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health recorded a dramatic increase in traffic after the hack. The server was likely reconciling stolen voter data Russia had hacked with other publicly available data. Investigators were surveilling the servers as part of a FISA warrant, as first reported by Louise Mensch’s Patribotics blog and later confirmed by the BBC.

In August, Manafort was forced to resign after his “black ledger” of payments from Ukraine was exposed. He continued to advise Trump and VP Mike Pence behind the scenes.

The FBI resumed their wiretaps before the election so their surveillance likely included conversations between Manafort and Pence who spoke daily throughout the transition. Pence was instrumental in selecting Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser even after he was warned Flynn may be compromised by the Russians.

Manafort’s lobbying for ruthless dictators and ties to a suspect campaign funding operation with ties to gambling families and Trump.

Back in 1980, Manafort launched Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm with another Trump adviser Roger Stone. They represented murderous warlords and dictators from the Philippines to Angola. The firm retroactively registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

One of BMSK’s senior directors, Dennis Whitfield, is also an adviser to the Strategic Campaign Group. In May, investigators raided the SCG offices in Annapolis, Maryland.

Investigators took computers which may implicate the company in an attempt to defraud donations intended to support Republican candidates. SCG shares an address with a law firm linked to another offshore company owned by the Cordish gambling family. Reed Cordish serves as assistant to the president for intragovernmental and technology initiatives at the White House and reports directly to Jared Kushner.

The Strategic Campaign Group is also linked to Penn National Gaming, which was a partner in Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Trump’s casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year of operation resulting in a $10 million fine, according to CNN.

If Manafort is indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller it could be at the same time as others involved in his criminal scheme.

Elizabeth de la Vega spent 21 years as a Federal prosecutor, including four years as part of an organized crime strike force. She believes Mueller will indict Trump, Flynn, Manafort simultaneously to remove the possibility of a pardon. “Here, as a practical and logistical matter, Trump has no way to pardon Flynn, Manafort, Kushner and others until they are indicted,” de la Vega tweeted. “It is most likely that Mueller will indict Trump, Flynn, Manafort et al. simultaneously. At that point, Trump is out of luck,” she says.

The post Blood Money appeared first on Narativ.

Revealed: A Trump PAC founder and a Republican congressman are connected to a Russian operation to drop the Magnitsky sanctions.

Putin’s laundered billions, Trump and the GOP.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Orange County in Southern California is the terrain of limousine liberals but the images of surfers and socialites in beach towns like Laguna and Newport you see on TV belie the reality of this region. With a sprawling military industrial complex and a large libertarian community, Orange County has bucked the trend of California’s otherwise very left-leaning politics. It is, in fact, one of the most conservative districts in the country.

Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has represented the area since 1989, the last four years from his home base of Huntington Beach in the 48th district. It’s an open secret there and inside the beltway, Rohrabacher is “Vladimir Putin’s man” in Congress.

“I think Putin pays Rohrabacher and Trump,” House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told his colleagues in a leaked private conversation obtained by the Washington Post, adding after the laughter: “Swear to God.”

Rohrabacher has known Putin for decades

Rohrabacher has been friends with Putin since the early 90’s when he famously lost a drunken arm-wrestling match with the then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg who was visiting Washington.

Five years ago, the FBI warned Rohrabacher he was being targeted by the Kremlin as an agent of influence. The congressman rebuffed the warning but his legislative record appears to back up concerns he’s somehow compromised.

Rohrabacher sided with Russia when Moscow invaded Georgia and opposed U.S. support of Ukraine. In September, he called the White House to push for a pardon of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who released the hacked DNC emails last year.

But nothing gets Putin and Rohrabacher’s back up more than the Magnitsky Act. The 2012 sanctions bill was enacted in response to the prison murder of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who had exposed a scheme by Putin and his oligarchs to embezzle $230 million stolen from taxpayers.

Vladimir Putin launched an all out effort to end Magnitsky Sanctions with Rohrabacher and a web of Russian operatives.

Since then, Putin has waged a diplomatic war to get the sanctions dropped. First, he banned U.S adoption of Russian children. He then put together a strike team – lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and former intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin – to work on getting the sanctions lifted and he reached out to his old friend Dana Rohrabacher.

In 2014, Rohrabacher and his assistant Paul Behrends took a secret three-day trip to Moscow. In the months following their return colleagues noticed a softening of their position on Russia.“I don’t know why,” a colleague told Politico. “I know that he and Dana have traveled to Moscow, but how he got turned around on this issue, I have no idea.”  Behrends also became the chief congressional contact for Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin (he has since been fired from his post on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee).

A year later, a whistle-blower leaked a full registry of off-shore companies known as the Panama Papers which exposed the corrupt dealings of world leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Iceland, South Africa, Qatar, UAE and Russia.

The papers exposed Putin’s theft of $2 billion stolen from Russians and transferred into offshore companies registered to his friends. The Magnitsky Act means those assets could be frozen. Putin is enraged by the sanctions because they hit his own personal fortune held in these offshore holdings.

Yuri Vanetik, a mysterious Soviet-born funder connects the anti-Magnitsky effort to Donald Trump. 

The other connective tissue between Rohrabacher and Russia’s efforts to end the Magnitsky sanctions is Yuri Vanetik, a self-proclaimed financier and Republican official. Vanetik is a Rohrabacher donor and lives in California but was still somehow appointed the National Finance Co-Chair of the New York GOP in March..

Vanetik was born in Soviet Ukraine in 1970 and claims his family fled to the U.S. to avoid “political persecution”. This is striking because his father Anatoly was a major political and business figure in the Soviet Union working directly with the Russian Oil Ministry even after the fall of the USSR. In 2014, Yuri penned an op-ed calling for the U.S. to drop sanctions against Russia.

He claims a career in law but we couldn’t find any records of him being admitted to the bar in California, although he was licensed in Pennsylvania. He’s been embroiled in two lawsuits for allegedly defrauding investors in of Valueluck and Private Equity Management Group.

In February last year, Vanetik and several business leaders started the “Great America PAC” to help elect Trump. The PAC was well-funded with $26 million and was willing to accept donations from anyone, no matter how legal.

An undercover investigation by the Telegraph exposed PAC officials accepting a donation offer from reporters posing as Chinese donors, in exchange for implied promises from the new administration (video below).

Vanetik also has financial ties to both Russia and Trump properties. In 2007, Vanetik bought a unit at the Trump Ocean Tower in Panama City. Trump Towers are viewed as a vehicle for Russians to launder money with Trump skimming off the top by charging overblown “management fees”. In 2011, Vanetik invested in Terra Resources, a U.K. based company with plans to develop Russian oil fields.

Rohrabacher and Vanetik traveled to Europe to meet an anti-Magnitsky filmmaker and a Russian operative. They also received a “confidential” briefing from the Kremlin. 

Rohrabacher and Vanetik traveled to Berlin together in April and posted an Instagram photo of their dinner with anti-Magnitsky documentarian Andrei Nekrasov.

During the same trip to Berlin, Rohrabacher met Putin lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin in a hotel lobby. When asked about Akmetshin’s possible ties to Russian intelligence agencies, Rohrabacher told CNN: “I would certainly not rule that out.”

Rohrabacher and Behrends also traveled to Moscow as part of a congressional delegation where they received a “confidential” Russian document alleging the world was wrong about Magnitsky. The Kremlin also gave the Republican duo access to the above mentioned Russian documentary about Magnitsky. The document and film claimed human rights activist and Magnitsky sanctions champion Bill Browder lied about Putin’s money laundering.

Weeks later, Akhmetshin and a colleague showed up unannounced at Rohrabacher’s congressional office. “They said they were lobbying on behalf of a Russian company called Prevezon and asked us to delay the Global Magnitsky Act or at least remove Magnitsky from the name,” a congressional staffer told the Daily Beast.

On June 9, Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya visited Trump Tower where they met Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner for a meeting arranged to hand over dirt on Hillary Clinton to the Trump Campaign.

A few days later, Rohrabacher attempted to stage a “show trial” of Bill Browder in the form of a congressional hearing. “During the hearing, Rohrabacher had planned to confront Browder with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that viciously attacks him—as well as at least two witnesses linked to the Russian authorities, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya,” according to the Daily Beast.

When senior Republicans caught wind of the plan, the hearing was cancelled. Browder instead later testified in front of a full committee. The treasury and state departments are now implementing the sanctions.

Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary efforts to get the Magnitsky sanctions dropped using a web of Russian and Republican operatives, and their vocal opposition to the Panama Papers, raises a tantalizing question: Just how much looted Russian cash is stashed in the shell companies detailed in the Panama Papers and is it connected to Veselnitskaya, Akhmetsin, Vanetik and Rohrabacher themselves?

This post was written with valuable research from concerned citizens who are working to expose this issue.

The post The Panama Papers appeared first on Narativ.

The CIA Director is under “watch” by staffers who fear he is handing over classified secrets to the White House for political reasons but that’s not the only thing for which Mike Pompeo needs to answer.

Since their son’s death, Judy and Dennis Shepard have advocated tirelessly for LGBTQ equality. In October 1998, Matthew Shepard accepted a ride home with two men, also in their 20’s, he met at a local bar in Laramie, Wyoming. Instead of taking him home, the two men drove Matthew to a nearby rural road where they pistol-whipped and tortured him. They tied the 21-year-old to a fence and left him there in a coma. Matthew died six days later in hospital from severe head trauma. The ensuing court case revealed Shepard was killed because he was gay in a brutal hate crime – the first to expose America to a deep-seated homophobia coarsing through the heartland.

Matthew’s death gave Judy Shepard a mission: to give his life meaning and a voice. She started a foundation and still tours the country in support of LGBTQ issues. “I’m here today because I lost my son to hate…. No one has the right to tell my son whether or not he can work anywhere. Whether or not he can live wherever he wants to live and whether or not he can be with the one person he loves — no one has that right. We are all Americans. We are all equal Americans, gay, straight or whatever,” she told thousands at an equality march in Washington, D.C. in 2009 soon after meeting President Obama at the White House.

The Shepards were invited to tell their story and advocate for LGBTQ issues at a Pride Month event at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virgina in July this year. As the couple were preparing for the speech, the event was abruptly canceled. “The schedule was set, and the details arranged, but in the 11th hour, the senior leadership shut down the event. The seventh floor, where the director’s office sits, had the Shepards’ speech canceled, questioning what value it would bring to the CIA mission,”  three sources told Foreign Policy.

The cancellation appears to have come directly from CIA Director Mike Pompeo and is seen as a sign within the agency Pompeo is attempting to change the diverse culture of the organization and its famously apolitical role. “More white, more male, more Jesus,” according to Foreign Policy.

The 53-year-old West Point graduate has been an opponent of LGBTQ rights, abortion and environmental protection for years. In 2010, Pompeo supported to reinstating discrimination against gays within the military saying: “when you enter the army you give up a few of your rights”. Five years later he decried the Supreme Court ruling granting marriage equality in all 50 states as “a shocking abuse of power” which “flies in the face of centuries of shared understanding of our Constitution”. He’s also consulted for the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council.

“I will continue to fight to protect our most sacred institutions,” Pompeo promised after the SCOTUS ruling in 2015 and when he arrived at Langley in January, he began to do just that. The director privately snubbed the notion of diversity. Instead he’s spent his energy on creating a CIA chaplaincy, decrying Islam and proclaiming “Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”

Pompeo’s stance on equality at the Agency is particularly troubling because of its symmetry with Moscow’s policy on gay rights. After Vladimir Putin enacted anti-gay laws in Russia in 2013, crushing Pride events and turning a blind eye to hate crimes in Russia, President Obama ordered the State Department to begin advocating for LGBTQ rights in its mission to support universal human rights. The move irritated Putin.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo publicized Wikileaks hacks of the DNC during the election.

During the 2016 election campaign, Pompeo briefly flirted with Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl) before endorsing Donald Trump for president. His support was repaid with the Langley appointment but almost immediately officials began to be wary of Pompeo’s disregard for Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Pompeo’s support for Trump extended to publicizing the Wikileaks release of Russian-hacked DNC e-mails on Twitter: “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks,” he tweeted. Pompeo testified at his nomination hearing: “I never believed that WikiLeaks was a credible source of information”. He has come full circle since becoming CIA Director labeling Julian Assange’s organization “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia” in a move largely believed to be an attempt to prosecute leakers.

In the run-up to the November election, Pompeo briefed then VP nominee Mike Pence on Iran and Libya in preparation for the debates. The two men knew each other from their days in the House of Representatives and they share ties to various conservative groups including to the aforementioned anti-gay hate group Family Research Council.

After the election, Pence became chairman of the Trump transition and recruited Pompeo to the CIA. It’s worth noting that Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was Pence’s vice-chair at the time Pompeo was recruited. Pompeo also consulted with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) before taking the role.

Pompeo recoils at the notion of the unprecedented Russian interference in last year’s election becoming “testy” and reciting “talking points that seem designed to appease a president,” according to the Washington Post. Russian meddling in the 2016 election “is true and the one before that, and the one before that,” Pompeo told a conference in Aspen, Colorado, undermining agency consensus that Russia significantly stepped up its interference efforts in 2016.

The CIA Director is under “watch” by CIA officials for sharing information with the White House.

At Langley, the director has raised the suspicions of staffers by bringing the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center (CMC) under his direct report. The unit works closely with the FBI and is actively involved in the Trump-Russia investigation. The real concern is “that if you were passing on something too dicey [to Pompeo] he would go to the White House with it,” an official told the Washington Post. CIA guidelines expressly forbid sharing information with the White House for the purpose of affecting the political process in the United States.

Pompeo spends several hours a day at the White House and briefed former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn even after the Justice Department had indicated Flynn was compromised by the Kremlin. “People have to watch [Pompeo]. It’s almost as if he can’t resist the impulse to be political,” a source told the Washington Post.

On March 22, Trump asked Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to stay behind after an intelligence briefing. The DNI Director let it be known Trump leaned on him to intervene in the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. Pompeo refused to comment about the meeting but it puts him “in the room” for a critical event in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction of justice investigation into Comey’s firing.

Pompeo led a mission to Moscow in May for talks with Russian intelligence officials. While details of the meeting are scant, the CIA director’s visit is being mentioned in the context of a series of meetings discussing a Putin proposal for an abrupt normalization of relations with the United States. The efforts included discussing foreign flash points in the relationship with Russia like Ukraine, Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran but did not include Russia’s attack on the U.S. elections or Putin’s iron grip on his country.

On Afghanistan in particular, Pompeo has been supportive of a plan put forward by Mercenary Erik Prince to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

Pompeo’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal is now under scrutiny.

When Pompeo and staffers walk into the CIA headquarters in Langley, they are greeted by a Biblical verse carved into marble which serves as the agency’s motto. “And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free” (John 8:32). The motto seems increasingly at odds with the actions of its director.

Pompeo seems likley to become a central figure Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. He briefed Flynn and other White House staffers even after Flynn was outed as being compromised by the Russians. He was in the room when Trump pressed Coats to intervene in the Flynn investigation. CIA officials are also warning he may be handing over secrets to the White House in contravention of CIA guidelines. If those secrets are being relayed to our adversaries (as has been the practice by the White House), this would raise another serious question about the director’s allegiance to the agency and its apolitical mission.

Pompeo’s secret ‘detente’ diplomacy to Russia and his anti-LGBT campaign within CIA also seems to fulfill Moscow’s foreign policy wishes. Serious questions need to be asked about whether Pompeo is living up to the CIA’s mission but also whether he’s at least a witness, if not a person of interest, in the investigation of Robert Mueller.

The truth is the very least the service men and women of the CIA deserve, as do Judy and Dennis Shepard who should know why the story of their son’s murder does not add value to the agency’s mission.

The post The Fall Of Pompeo appeared first on Narativ.

An investigation into Facebook’s political donations to Republican and anti-LGBT politicians and its investments from Putin-linked Russian oligarchs. We found a pattern of political activity at odds with the company’s public image.

At 33, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s most recognizable names. Zuckerberg is also one of its richest, estimated to be worth $73.7 billion. The Facebook founder publicly espouses liberal notions on everything from gay rights to immigration but a closer look under the hood of Facebook’s finances and political operations reveals a record of support for conservative causes, opposition to LGBT rights and connections to Russian money.

Zuckerberg is now under enormous pressure to reveal more about Facebook’s role in a Russian propaganda campaign in support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election cycle. Despite a coy statement revealing $150,000 in advertising spend by a Russian social media firm with ties to Vladimir Putin and the FSB and new revelations the social network allowed Russian operatives posing as Americans to create and sell tickets to anti-immigration, secessionist, anti-LGBT and confederate events, Facebook is refusing to release the ads, groups and who was targeted.

“It appeared to me that the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything — our Facebooks, Googles and Twitters — it was my belief the Russians were using those sites to intervene in our elections,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told CNN “And the first reaction from Facebook was: ‘Well you’re crazy, there’s nothing going on’ — well, we find yesterday there actually was something going on.”

Amid all this pressure, a renewed spotlight should be shone on why Facebook donated $120,000 to the Conservative Political Action Committee. Facebook made the donation to CPAC partly to allow conference attendees could easily produce Facebook Live videos, according to the Daily Beast. Facebook had previously contributed to production at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions but the decision to support a partisan action committee conference raises questions about the motives of the donation amid conflicting statements from Facebook and CPAC.

The social network acknowledged the payment but said “our involvement is not an endorsement of any particular position or platform.” CPAC’s Matt Schlapp indicated however there was some ideological participation: “We are glad Facebook agreed to be at CPAC and to acknowledge the importance of conservatives to their company, and we continue to work with them on issues important to conservatives,” he said.

The CPAC convention took place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md in February this year and featured President Donald Trump, VP Mike Pence, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway. The NRA which is also linked to Russian influence is a big funder of CPAC.

Since 2011, Facebook’s PAC has contributed more to GOP candidates including those with anti-LGBT positions.

Facebook started its own Political Action Committee in 2011. The PAC supports politicians on both sides of the aisle which tends to favor Republican causes, giving $477,000 to Republican candidates like John Boehner and Paul Ryan. The PAC gave Democrats $425,000 in donations including to John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. The PAC only supported one presidential candidate in 2016, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who received $4,000.

Since 2012, Facebook has also favored politicians with anti-LGBT voting records. More than 40 percent of Facebook’s PAC contributions, totaling roughly $156,000, have gone to politicians voting against LGBT rights. In 2014, Northstar Asset Management which owns more than 55,000 shares in Facebook filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission demanding the company’s PAC fall in line with Facebook’s values of being pro-gay and intellectual property rights.

Facebook rejected the claim, saying: “We have practices in place to ensure the appropriate disclosure and oversight of our lobbying and political activities. The proposal seeks to impose requirements that would be cumbersome to apply, are not required by law and are not standard amongst other companies, including competitors”.

A look inside Facebook also reveals a culture devoid of diversity. There are literally no people of color on Facebook’s board which is mostly men. As a whole, 90% of Facebook is white or asian. In 2015, only 2% black overall and 3% black in senior leadership.

One of those white men who has a seat on the board is Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump (he personally donated $1.25 million to the Trump campaign and spoke at the RNC). Zuckerberg has resisted pressure to oust Thiel from the board but as investigators turn up evidence of Facebook’s role in targeting and delivering Facebook ads on behalf of the Trump campaign, Thiel’s role is likely to receive new scrutiny.

Zuckerberg touts Thiel as an example of ideological diversity. “I think the folks who are saying we shouldn’t have someone on our board because they’re a Republican, I think that’s crazy,” Zuckerberg told a forum at North Carolina A&T State University. “I think you need to have all kinds of diversity if you want to make progress together as a society.”

Thiel is also tied to mercenary Erik Prince, brother of Betsy DeVos who favors a private army take over the war in Afghanistan and is vocally opposed to rights for transgender people.

One of Facebook’s biggest shareholders is a Russian company partly-owned by an oligarch known as the “hard man” of Russia and is very close to Vladimir Putin.

In 2009, Facebook was struggling financially. The company sought outside investment and it came from Russian internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which invested $200 million for 2% in the company in 2009 (the stake has since climbed to between 5.4% to 10% depending on who you ask). Digital Sky’s CEO is Russian oligarch Yuri Milner but its largest shareholder and initial funder is Alisher Usmanov who is known “as the hard man” of Russia.

Usmanov is criticised for being a “racketeer and gangster”. He is a convicted criminal and was in jail in the former Soviet Union though he claims he was a political prisoner. He owns Britain’s Arsenal Football Club and investments in mines, metals factories, media properties, and mobile phones in Russia. He is the Chairman of ‘Gazpromholdings’, a subsidiary of state-run Gazprom, which has been sanctioned by the U.S.

“Usmanov became a billionaire oligarch in the gangster takeover of Russia’s “privatised” mineral assets. He is close to Putin, and has been used by him to buy up and neutralise much of the little remaining independent media in Russia. Usmanov does this in his own name or as Chairman of ‘GazpromInvestHolding’. Independent journalists have died in mysterious accidents following Usmanov takeovers,” says former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray who has taken on a personal crusade against the oligarch and was sued for his effort.

Usmanov owns 35 per cent of DST which makes him the indirect owner of a significant amount of Facebook through Digital Sky. “For a blackmailer who is a key tool in Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime, to have a share in Facebook is totally unacceptable,” says Murray.

Digital Sky’s CEO Milner presents a cleaner image to the world but is also very close to Putin, regularly attending meetings with Usmanov and the Russian president. DST is heavily invested in Silicon Valley including investments in Twitter, Groupon and many young startups.

Facebook’s reliance on DST was not just about getting Russian money. It gave the social network access to the Kremlin and the Russian digital market. “If Facebook wants to be successful in Russia, DST can bring a lot to the table besides knowledge. DST is close to the government there, the source said, and while outright involvement (or obstruction) from the Russian government is highly unlikely, if Facebook wants its business to go more smoothly, DST can help,” a source close to DST told CNET.

Facebook has many business reasons to supports conservative voices but it remains an open question how much they knew about Russia’s interference in 2016.

Silicon Valley is increasingly concerned about aggressive Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice antitrust investigations over “unfair or deceptive”, monopolies and online data collection and use, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and spam. According to Forbes, the FTC is known in Silicon Valley as the “Federal Technology Commission”. From a business perspective Facebook’s support for conservative allies makes some sense but that they fly in the social network’s public values could harm the company.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents is “zeroing in on how Russia spread fake and damaging information through social media and is seeking additional evidence from companies like Facebook and Twitter about what happened on their networks,” according to Bloomberg.

Mueller’s focus on social media is said to be “red hot” and Facebook, Twitter and Google executives may be called to testify in front of congressional committees as well. More troubling is a notion first floated by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Facebook, Twitter and Google may indeed be the scene of the biggest political crime in history. This would expose the tech giants to extraordinary examination by prosecutors and ironically the very regulation they may have sought to dissuade with their political efforts.

The post A Dirty Little Secret appeared first on Narativ.

Exclusive: The Kremlin began supporting Donald Trump on Facebook as soon as he announced his White House bid in June 2015. Investigators want to know if the campaign colluded with Russia to use Facebook as a propaganda tool.

Brad Parscale picked up the phone on Wednesday June 17, 2015. It was real-estate mogul Donald J. Trump. The San Antonio web designer had built websites for the Trump organization before but this request from his client was far bigger than anything the then 39-year-old Kansan had ever worked on before.

A day earlier, Trump descended the escalator at his Manhattan Tower to a basement full of supporters and journalists to announce his bid for the White House. Trump told Parscale on the phone he wanted him to build a full presidential campaign website.

Parscale had no political or campaign experience but in the ensuing seventeen months he would build the most aggressive digital media campaign for a president anyone had ever seen. The 6’7? web designer assembled a team in San Antonio, Texas where he lived while Donald Trump began doing the rounds on cable news.

“You think you’d be able to get along with Vladimir Putin,” Sean Hannity asked Trump on Fox News. “Did you talk to him?”

“I don’t want to say,” Trump dodged the question, then added with something of a wink: “Putin truly hates Obama. He thinks he’s terrible. He thinks he’s arrogant. He thinks he’s just terrible.”

At exactly the same time Trump said he was open to dealing with Putin, a Russian company funded by a “close Putin ally with ties to the Russian intelligence” began buying ads on Facebook supporting Trump campaign issues and continued doing so throughout the campaign. The social network describes the ads bought by Internet Research Agency as “amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum?—?touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights”

Trump launched his campaign with a tirade against Mexicans immigrants and proposed a border wall. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting,” he told supporters.

On Facebook, a Russian created community called “SecureBorders” with 133,000 followers, began publishing racists ads to amplify Trump’s message, including one of a cartoon Trump dangling a man wearing a T-shirt with a Mexican flag over a wall with the headline “You have to go back pal”.

Russian oligarch Evgeney Prigozhin hired hundreds of Russians to pose as American conservatives and post fake news on issues closely aligned to the Trump campaign.

“SecureBorders” and hundreds of other fake pages like “Spread Your Wings”, “Art Gone Conscious” and “Celebrities Against Obama” were created by the IRA which is funded by Russian oligarch Evgeney Prigozhin. Prigozhin was Putin’s chef for more than a decade. Since then, he’s built a catering empire serving Russian public sector and military contracts. He is now under sanctions by the U.S. for running a digital propaganda machine serving up fake news and memes to American voters.

Prigozhin pumped millions of rubles into the IRA to hire hundreds of well-paid 20 and 30-something year olds to generate content on a specific agenda. The New York Times Magazine revealed employees at the St. Petersburg agency had multiple fake Facebook accounts all created in the summer of 2014. They parroted, commented and shared content, amplifying the message across social media on Facebook groups by posing as American conservatives.

A former employee of the agency described a culture plagued with homophobia, racism and poor grammar. “You see these people with a lot of tattoos,” the insider told the New York Times Magazine. “They’re so cool, like they’re from New York; very hip clothing, very hip tattoos, like they’re from Williamsburg but they are stupid,” said Marat Burkhardt. “In office conversation, they used gay slurs to refer to [Ukrainian politician] Petro Poroshenko and called Barack Obama a monkey,” Burkhardt said.

Investigators want to know if the Trump Campaign coordinated efforts with a Russian propaganda army.

Facebook claims to have found $150,000 worth of ads from 470 suspicious Russian accounts but this may just be the tip of the iceberg. “This is a very significant set of data points produced by Facebook,” Congressman Adam Schiff told the Washington Post. “Left unanswered in what we received from Facebook — because it is beyond the scope of what they are able to determine — is whether there was any coordination between these social media trolls and the campaign. We have to get to the bottom of that,” Schiff said

Which brings us back to Brad Parscale. In the months after Parscale got the call from Trump to build a campaign website in June 2015, Parscale’s became something of a campaign manager involved in communicating every message for the Presidential nominee.

His company Giles-Parscale which was accustomed to billing in the double-digit thousands received $90 million dollars during the campaign, most of it destined to Facebook. Facebook was on-site at the Project Alamo headquarters in San Antonio. “They were helping us,” Trump social media director Theresa Hong told the BBC. “They were basically our “hands on” partners as far as being able to utilize the platform as effectively as possible.” Hong said.

Facebook worked alongside Cambridge Analytica in San Antonio. CA’s parent company SCL has been accused of stealing 30 million Facebook profiles through a malicious Facebook app. The social media network shut down the app in 2015. Facebook must also have been aware that Cambridge Analytica was profiling users through innocuous looking quizzes on the social network for use in the campaign.

Parscale’s team was able to identify voters in minute detail. “What I needed to do was to find smart people who came from the Republican Party, subcontractors and my own company and say how do we find these individual voters and the exact right ones,” Parscale told the Joe Page show. “I didn’t need a gut, because I had the data”.

Congressional investigation committees and Special Counsel Robert Mueller want to know if someone within the campaign helped the IRA target its Facebook ads geographically, which implies granular knowledge the campaign’s progress and local issue in specific counties across the country.

Parscale testified before the House Intelligence Committee in July he was unaware of any Russian links to the his social media campaign. We “used the exact same digital marketing strategies that are used everyday by corporate America,” Parscale said in a statement. This may be true but campaigns are not corporations and are subject to regulations forbidding foreign propaganda supporting a campaign.

The FBI is now investigating if Sputnik News and Russia Today, which use Facebook to distribute content, failed to register as foreign agents.

Investigators are also probing Facebook outlet “DC Leaks” which published the first samples of material stolen by Russian hackers from the DNC and they’re investigating the role of Russian news services like Sputnik and Russia Today, as well as Breitbart, in pushing fake news on Facebook at the Kremlin’s behest.

Andrew Feinberg, a former journalist who worked for Sputnik News told Yahoo! News he received his marching orders from his mostly Russian editors at the Washington D.C. office and claims they often said, “Moscow wants this, or Moscow wants that.” Feinberg was interviewed by the FBI recently about Sputnik’s operations to determine if it is in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

“This tells me they have good information and intelligence that these organizations have been acting on behalf of the Kremlin and that there’s a direct line between them and the [Russian influence operations] that are a significant threat to our democracy,” says Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Sputnik, along with Russia Today and Breitbart, relies heavily on Facebook and Google to target its news content at American consumers. If indeed Sputnik failed to register under FARA, their entire operation could become the subject of prosecution or expulsion. Dmitry Kiselyov runs Sputnik and formerly headed Russia Today and is widely referred to as Putin’s chief propagandist.

The big question now is whether the campaign coordinated its social media efforts with the Trump Campaign, and specifically Brad Parscale. If investigators are able to find this type of cooperation, it could well be the most conclusive proof of a conspiracy between Russia and Trump to influence the 2016 election yet.

The post Facebook The Nation appeared first on Narativ.

How a Russian central banker and suspected mob boss infiltrated the NRA and helped get Donald Trump elected.

Nashville native G. Kline Preston IV is proud to be a Russophile. A framed poster of Vladimir Putin hangs on his office wall overlooking a porcelain bust of the Russian president. The 61-year-old attorney runs a US-Russo law firm specializing in a unique mix of Russian legal interests including adoptions, trade deals and investments including Ukrainian vodka. His Twitter feed is filled with pro-Kremlin news links and photos of his visits to St. Petersburg and Moscow.

“We’re very similar people,” Preston says. “You could take many Russians and put them in a room with people from Nashville and everybody kind of looks the same,” says Preston who likes confederate, gun rights and anti-lgbt causes with almost as much passion as he does Russia’s national interests.  

In 2009, Preston was invited to Moscow by Kremlin insider Senator Alexander Torshin to brief a group of Russian legislators on the American legal practice of immunity or “plea bargaining”.  Preston’s briefing came amidst a series of mob-related executions of senior gangsters and attorneys trying to prosecute them in Russia but it’s unclear if the briefing was related.

The Deputy Governor of Russia’s Central Bank is a suspected Russian mafia “godfather” and a lifetime member of the NRA

Alexander Torshin has since climbed the ranks in the Kremlin and is now the Deputy Governor of Russia’s Central Bank and, according to Spanish prosecutors, the “godfather” of the same mob involved in those 2009 killings.  

Spanish police have been hunting Torshin since 2013 on charges of money laundering but he’s repeatedly escaped capture. The crime organization he allegedly heads is suspected of racketeering, fraud, bank scams, extortion and contract killings, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Attorney G. Kline Preston remains close to the alleged mobster. “Do you consider Alexander Torshin a friend?” MSNBC’s Kelly Cobiella asked Preston. “Absolutely,” Preston replied.  

In 2011, Preston introduced Torshin to David Keene, then President of the National Rifle Association, according to the Washington Post. The Russian banker has since become a life-long member of of the NRA and regularly attends its meetings. Torshin and a mysterious American-based operative Maria Butina also formed a Russian “NRA”  called “The Right to Bear Arms”.

“Is it possible that these are just well-meaning people who are reaching out to Americans with shared interests? It is possible,” says Steven L. Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015 after managing Russia operations for 30 years. “Is it likely? I don’t think it’s likely at all. .?.?. My assessment is that it’s definitely part of something bigger.”

When Putin elevated Torshin to Russia’s Central Bank, Butina became his “special” assistant, even though she lives in the U.S. and the Deputy Governor of Russia’s Central Bank is supposedly not involved in foreign affairs.

Torshin and Butina grew their influence within the NRA between 2011 and 2016, met with Donald Trump and his family and hosted an NRA delegation to the Kremlin.

Torshin and Butina joined G. Kline Preston at the NRA convention in Nashville in 2015. “The NRA is one of the most world famous and most important organizations” Butina told conservative publication Townhall. “We would like to be friends with NRA.”

At the meeting, she also advocated for the dropping of U.S. sanctions which have adversely affected Russia’s gun manufacturing sector.

The star attraction of the 2015 NRA Convention was Donald Trump. On the sidelines of that meeting, G. Kline Preston met Trump, even posting a photo and an accompanying Russian tweet in Cyrillic. Torshin later also told Bloomberg he “had a friendly exchange” with Trump at the convention.

Three months later, Torshin and Butina invited a delegation from the NRA to Moscow, where the NRA leadership met powerful Putin Deputy PM, Dmitry Rogozin, who is a target of U.S. sanctions. “Rogozin is chairman of the Russian Shooting Federation and his Board hosted a tour of Federation HQ for us while we were there,” Keene told the Daily Beast. “It was non-political,” Keene said.

The NRA delegation also met Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and that meeting definitely was political, according to at least one delegate. “[We] met earlier with Russian Foreign Minister who spoke on Mid East (sic),” ‘Sheriff’ David A Clarke tweeted. Clarke was until last week under consideration for Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary before his  appointment was stopped by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Butina and a Republican advisor opened mysterious company weeks after NRA delegation visited Moscow.  

In February 2016, Butina and a well known Republican with deep ties to the NRA, Paul Erickson, started a business in South Dakota, called “Bridges, LLC”. Erickson advised Mitt Romney and Pat Buchanan in the past and more recently bragged he was advising Donald Trump.  It’s unclear what the purpose of “Bridges LLC” is but its founding in the midst of unprecedented high level contacts between the NRA and Kremlin officials bears scrutiny.  Butina had previously hosted Erickson at the a Russian “Right To Bear Arms” conference in Moscow in 2014.  

Butina’s boss Torshin returned to the 2016 NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky in May.  Donald Trump was back to give the the keynote address but this time as a GOP candidate for President. Trump picked up an endorsement from the NRA and with it, $30 million in support from the the NRA’s Political Action Committee. Trump briefly shook hands with Torshin who also had a one-on-one dinner with Donald Trump, Jr. at a Louisville restaurant where he was seated next to him.

As the political Summer progressed, Maria Butina began inserting herself into U.S. politics. At FreedomFest in Las Vegas, she asked Trump about his policy on Russia, for the first time as a candidate.

“What will be your foreign politics, especially in the relations with my country?”

“I know Putin and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin,” he said.

After the election, Butina and Torshin began expanding their Washington profile, until his mob ties were discovered.

A week after President Donald Trump was elected, Butina held a costume-themed birthday party at Cafe Deluxe near American University, where she attends graduate school classes.  According to those in attendance, she repeated an oft-repeated claim she was “part of the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia,” according to the Daily Beast. Also in attendance Butina’s business partner in “Bridges LLC”, Paul Erickson. She was dressed as the Russian Empress Alexandra while Erickson was dressed as Rasputin.

On February 2, Alexander Torshin flew to Washington D.C. for a meeting with President Trump at The White House. The meeting was abruptly cancelled the night before when a national security aide discovered Torshin was wanted by Spanish Police as a “godfather of an organized crime and money-laundering ring,” reported Yahoo!’s Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff, citing an administration official and four other sources familiar with the event. The abrupt cancellation came at the same time as increased scrutiny over former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s connections to the Kremlin.

NRA spent $35 million more in 2016 than 2012, amid questions over its accounting practices and donor sources.

The NRA and its lobbying arm and Super PAC spent $54 million on the 2016 election cycle, $30 million for Trump’s campaign alone. That’s double what was spent in in 2014, and $35 million more than in the 2012 cycle. The NRA also funds many top Republicans in congress like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex). 98% of the NRA political spending goes to Republican coffers.

Federal law prohibits an organization like the NRA from soliciting money for itself and then redirecting that money to its PAC. An investigation by Yahoo! News in 2015 discovered the NRA was doing just that, making it impossible to accurately trace donors, as required by the FEC and IRS regulations.

“I simply cannot see how this is legal,” Larry Noble, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told the Guardian. “It is impossible to see how they are soliciting funds the way they’re soliciting, and putting those funds in their political action committee, without violating the law.”

Could the combination of a central banker and suspected mobster, an attorney from Tennessee, a Republican from South Dakota, a Sheriff from Wisconsin and a mysterious Russian gun advocate – all with ties to the Donald Trump and his son Jr – have worked together to bring money into the NRA in order to help fund and win an election? The enormous increase in political donations from the NRA may come under scrutiny as multiple investigations probe collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign.  

The post For Guns And Country appeared first on Narativ.

The secret story of how American minds were manipulated during the 2016 election campaign and how Donald Trump’s backers are making money off it.

Psychologist Michal Kosinski switched on the TV in his Zurich hotel room on the morning of November ninth. The headlines were all about Donald Trump’s against-all-odds win in the U.S. presidential election. The news filled the Polish-born academic with dread, Kosinski told Das Magazine. The 34-year-old psychologist was sure of one thing: the scientific model he had created helped elect Trump.

Kosinski is a pioneer in the field of psychometry. It’s the science of predicting behavior using a psychological profile gleaned from social media activity. There are five criteria which analysts use to define your personality called the OCEAN model.

• Openness to new ideas and learning.
• Conscientiousness is a measure of your reliability, promptness and organization.
• Extraversion measures openness and sociability.
• Agreeableness refers to your kindness, empathy and warmth.
• Neuroticism measures your emotional stability and rate of negative emotions.

In a 2012 study, Kosinski and two colleagues at Cambridge University were able to predict any person’s race, political affiliations and sexual orientation by analyzing someone’s social media activity.

While at Cambridge, Kosinski met fellow researcher Aleksandr Kogan. Russian-born Kogan asked about using Kosinski’s method for election manipulation. “The whole thing began to stink,” Kosinski told German Das Magazine.

Kosinski wanted nothing to do with using his research for malevolent means and broke off contact with Kogan. Since then, Kosinski has travelled the world lecturing about the dangers of ‘big data’ manipulation warning it can “threaten the welfare, freedom, or even the lives of men.”

Kogan, who has since changed his name to Alexandr Specter, had very different plans for his colleagues’ research.

After the invasion of the Ukraine, a Russian born researcher at Cambridge University began harvesting private data of 30 million U.S. Facebook users for Cambridge Analytica.

In 2014, Kogan founded “Global Science Research”, which was funded by London-based Scientific Communications Laboratory (SCL) and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Kogan’s company hired 185,000 Americans to take an online survey and download a Facebook app. Once downloaded, the app gave Kogan information on 30 million unsuspecting Facebook users who were Facebook friends with the original survey-takers, according to The Intercept. Kogan had used Kosinski’s model to build an an algorithm to profile American voters.

In 2015, Kogan’s app was shut down because of complaints about privacy concerns. By then Kogan had gathered data on millions of Americans. “No one in this larger group of 30 million knew that “likes” and demographic data from their Facebook profiles were being harvested by political operatives hired to influence American voters,” according to The Intercept.

SCL has since distanced itself from the use of this data and Kogan’s GSR. “We do not do any work with Facebook likes,” Cambridge Analytica spokesman Lindsey Platts, said in a statement. The company “has no relationship with GSR,” Platts said.

The Trump Campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for a database of 220 million U.S. voters including private details of their personality and activities.

In 2016, Cambridge Analytica, under the leadership of CEO Alexander Nix and vice-president Stephen Bannon helped manipulate the British electorate to vote for Brexit. The previously unknown company had achieved the unthinkable in breaking up the E.U. and then began to turn its attention to U.S. politics. Donald Trump even tweeted on Aug 18:

Every time you take one of those Facebook quizzes, you know the ones, which celebrity are you most like? Which Game of Thrones character are you? What country are you really from? You may think you’re taking an innocuous quiz, but what you’re really doing is giving a data mining firm like Cambridge Analytica, “express consent” to profile you. The company then cross-references that information with other data and creates an OCEAN profile of you which is even more accurate than a partner or family member could provide.

Donald Trump paid Cambridge Analytica $6 million for work on his 2016 campaign. The company’s data scientists were able to figure out Trump voters who were “very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness and slightly conscientious.” Once profiled, Cambridge Analytica could target their specific interests with tailor-made election messages and specific news content (real or fake) to work on their emotions, interests and regional location.

Think of it as a digital soapbox where the speaker is digitally crafted to appeal to your every fear and desire and pinpoint exactly where you live. Take for example, Donald Trump’s focus on the Opioid crisis and immigration during the 2016 election campaign. All of the messages were designed to surgically target voters with these seemingly “local” concerns in important swing states.

Meet the woman who wrote @realDonaldTrump's campaign Facebook posts – and the tech firm that helped him get elected. pic.twitter.com/9vA3KMIIGj

— BBC Stories (@bbcstories) August 13, 2017

As Russian hackers targeted state voters rolls, Cambridge Analytica provided the Trump campaign with private voting history.

Cambridge Analytica assembled a database for the Trump campaign of 220 million voters known as Project Alamo. The data set included voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, internet viewing history, car purchases and information from data-mining companies like Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom Corporation.

Theresa Hong was a key digital officer for the Trump campaign. Hong told the BBC the data-set also included information about voting history. “Some of the attributes would be when was the last time they voted, who did they vote for.” In response to a question on how Cambridge Analytica would know all that information, Hong replied, “that’s their secret sauce.” (video above).

You’ll recall Russian hackers were able to infiltrate voters rolls in almost every state before the election. “We had to assume that they actually tried to at least rattle the doorknobs on all 50, and we just happened to find them in a few of them.” Michael Daniel, who led the Obama White House effort to secure the vote against Russian intrusions, told Time Magazine.

Add to this, a mysterious server in Trump Tower which is suspected of compiling a massive database of hacked voter information with Russia’s Alfa Bank and the DeVos family-owned Spectrum Health, and you begin to see a clearer picture of how Cambridge Analytica may have gotten all this data. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was until recently owned by a British-Iranian businessman with ties to Putin-linked Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash who is wanted for bribery by the U.S. and was allegedly involved in a racketeering scheme with Paul Manafort.

From their digital headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, the Trump campaign placed between 70,000-175,000 different pieces of content on Facebook every day specifically targeting profiles provided from Cambridge Analytica. Trump’s digital advertising chief, Gary Coby, likened the effort to “high-frequency trading” and says Trump used Facebook “like no one else in politics has ever done.” In fact, all of Trump’s $85 million digital budget went into Facebook coffers.

Much of the targeted content that was delivered to voters was news created by Cambridge Analytica’s sister company Breitbart and Russian sponsored sites like Wikileaks, Sputnik and Russia Today. The FBI is investigating the role these news organizations played in Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections, according to McClatchy.

Trump Administration inked a $496,000 deal with Cambridge Analytica while Michael Flynn and Stephen Bannon were still in office which presents a possible conflict of interest.

Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by New York hedge fund manager and major Trump donor Robert Mercer, according to Politico. Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Bannon was until recently the company’s vice-president and owned a stake in the company which could be worth as much as $5 Million. Trump’s former National Security Adviser Lt-Gen Michael Flynn, a compromised Russian asset, also disclosed he played an advisory role for Cambridge Analytica.

On February 17, the Trump Administration paid $496,000 upfront to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL in a contract with the U.S. State Department. SCL’s role at the State Department is to “assess the impact of foreign propaganda campaigns and provide intelligence agencies with predictions and insight on emerging threats,” according to the Washington Post.

SCL is also working a deal with the Pentagon to teach them “how to conduct effective psychological operations,” says the Post. SCL has hired new staffers and opened a new office just up the street from the White House. SCL’s effort is being driven by a “former aide to now-departed national security adviser Michael Flynn, who served as an adviser to the company in the past,” says the Post.

Considering the senior roles Mercer, Bannon and Flynn held within Cambridge Analytica, the new Washington operation of SLC and the State Department deal could well indicate a conflict of interest.

More importantly, the way Cambridge Analytica gained access to some 30 million Facebook accounts without users’ consent, along with private voting records, raises serious privacy concerns.

The office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating all aspects of a possible conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the election. “That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” Former FBI Director James Comey testified before a congressional committee in March.

The post Psychological Warfare appeared first on Narativ.

Exposed: Vice President Mike Pence was installed by a Russian operative and has deep ties to “dark money”. 

Governor Eric Greitens is a Republican rising star. The 43-year-old former Navy SEAL rode the coattails of Donald Trump all the way to the Missouri Governor’s mansion in November, when he defeated Democrat Chris Koster 51%-45%.

Greitens has barely been in office for nine months and he’s attracting his fair share of critics. In March, The St Louis Post-Dispatch called his tenure “creepy” and The Kansas City Star published an editorial criticizing Greitens for “secret fundraising and secret spending”.

Just a block away from the Governor’s Mansion in Jefferson City, Greitens’ former campaign manager is running “A New Missouri Inc”, a slush fund masquerading as a social welfare nonprofit. The governor operates the nonprofit so he can accept unfettered contributions from foreign and corporate interests, skirting state election rules.

Greitens’ election campaign was powered by a single $1.9 million donation from a super PAC funneled through the American Policy Coalition run by lawyer David Langdon who has been dubbed “the nexus of dark money” by the Center of Public Integrity. Langdon is among a small group of lawyers “working to keep secret the origins of millions of dollars coursing through the American political system.”

It’s emerged that Greitens’ other big donor included the DeVos family who have been grooming Mike Pence for years and his election was run by Nick Ayres, Pence’s Chief of Staff.

Pence’s pick as VP was engineered by Paul Manafort. The two had daily phone calls during transition. 

Donald Trump initially wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to serve as his Vice President but Campaign Manager Paul Manafort had a different idea. On July 12 last year, Manafort concocted a tall tale about mechanical problems with Trump’s plane to force the then presumptive nominee to overnight in Indianapolis and meet Indiana Governor Mike Pence for breakfast the next morning.

“What had previously been reported as a “lucky break” by the New York Times was actually a swift political maneuver devised by the now fired campaign manager. Set on changing Trump’s mind,” CBS News reported.

The entire Trump family met Pence and his brood at the Governor’s mansion the next day and the two politicians sealed a deal to run on the same ticket. Pence declared he was “honored’ and “humbled” to be considered and Trump sidelined Christie by telling the New Jersey Governor, “it would tear my family apart if I gave you VP,” a source said.

Within a month, Manafort was officially exiled from the Trump campaign after it was revealed he illegally took $12.7 million from a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician. It later emerged Manafort was also being paid $10 million a year by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on behalf of Vladimir Putin between 2006 and 2009, “to greatly benefit the Putin Government,”

While Manafort officially disappeared from the campaign in August, he kept in close contact with Mike Pence well after Election Day and throughout the transition. “I think he is weighing in on everything,” a former official told The Daily Beast. “I think he still talks to Trump every day. I mean, Pence? That was all Manafort. Pence is on the phone with Manafort regularly.”

It’s worth recalling Pence headed the Trump transition team and was responsible for appointing Lt-Gen Michael Flynn as the National Security Adviser despite having been warned Flynn was compromised by Turkey and Russia. Flynn would later be forced to resign for his compromising contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Pence’s role in any Obstruction of Justice related to Flynn and the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Mueller’s investigators are also probing Manafort’s financial dealings with Russia, Deripaska and donations to the Republican Party. Pence has also lawyered up with seasoned criminal attorney Richard Cullen of the law firm McGuireWoods to “assist him in responding to inquiries by the special counsel.”

Pence’s ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska date back to before the campaign and may involve an illegal private email account Pence maintained while Indiana Governor.

Another sign Russian fingerprints were all over the Pence appointment came in the form of a ringing endorsement from Sergei Millian, president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, and a long-time Deripaska associate. Millian called Pence an “excellent’ candidate” all while being under FBI investigation as a Russian spy recruiter. “He works well in his post and gets by without scandals,” Millian said.

Deripaska used to be one of Russia’s richest men but a series of bankruptcies has left him and his company Rusal beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016, then Indiana Governor Mike Pence led an economic mission to Israel and later picked up a lucrative deal from Rusal’s Israeli partner Omen to open an aluminum parts factory in Pence’s state of Indiana.

It’s around that time that Pence had an email scandal of his own. Pence’s private AOL email account was compromised by a Russian hacker. Pence took six months to turn over his emails to Indiana officials, raising the specter that Russia may have kompromat on Pence and that he may have attempted to delete important emails before handing over the documents to investigators.

Pence has also been close to mercenary Erik Prince for over a decade. Prince met with Pence at the Trump transition offices in December 2016 before undertaking a secret mission to meet with Russian officials in the Seychelles In January this year.

Republican dark money and Russia operatives are backing a new team in the event Trump is impeached.

With the Trump administration in trouble, Vice President Mike Pence has taken the unusual move of forming his own fundraising committee, raising millions for a political action committee and a legal defense fund for the Trump-Russia affair. Pence’s fund is the brainchild of Nick Ayres, who also became the Vice President’s Chief of Staff on July 28.

There are signs the group of billionaire funders and Russian operatives who helped install Trump are preparing for his impeachment and readying Pence for the presidency with Missouri Governor Eric Greitens being groomed for vice-president.

Those dreams may be short-lived. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Vice President Mike Pence is himself a person of interest in Robert Mueller’s investigation. Pence had extensive and daily interactions with Paul Manafort, a known Russian asset, even after Manafort left the campaign. Pence’s financial deals involving satellite companies of Oleg Deripaska and “dark money” political operations remain the subject of increased scrutiny complicated by Pence’s own hacked email scandal. Most troubling to investigators must be the notion that Pence himself was installed at the behest of the Kremlin.

The post Dark Shadows appeared first on Narativ.

New: The same people involved in a failed Moscow Trump Tower also tried to end U.S. sanctions on Russia.

Every politician needs a good spin doctor, and for Vladimir Putin, that man is Dmitry Peskov. Peskov’s official salary as the spokesman for Vladimir Putin is about $200,000 a year, but his lavish lifestyle belies his public servant income, according to Russian anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny.

Peskov and his wife Tatyana Navka live in a $17 million mansion in Moscow, and he sports a limited edition Richard Mille wristwatch on his arm worth more than three times his annual salary. Peskov’s son from an earlier marriage, Nicholas Choles, is the proud owner of a fleet of cars which includes a Tesla, Ferrari, Mercedes CLA and a Harley Davidson. Nikolai has no apparent means of support of his own except for on-air work at the pro-Kremlin network Russia Today. He also has a rap sheet that includes 116 traffic fines, failure to pay alimony and an assault conviction for beating up a youth in Cambridgeshire in the U.K, where he occasionally resides.

“Nikolai is an example of how in Russia, where 20 million people live below the poverty line, where 70 percent of residents dream of a salary of 45,000 rubles ($750), one can live happily at the highest level and at the same time not have to do anything,” says Navalny, who has been tracking Peskov’s outsized lifestyle for two and a half years.

Now Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, has been linked to a failed bid to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

With the U.S. elections in full swing, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen reached out to Putin’s press secretary for help in saving a stalled bid to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The Trump organization has tried to build a Moscow tower for over three decades. It’s a shiny object Donald Trump has always coveted. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” Trump said in a 2007 court deposition. “We will be in Moscow at some point.”

In 2013, Trump tried to build a tower with Putin-linked oligarch Aras Agalarov who was indirectly involved in a Russian plot to smear Hillary Clinton during that now-infamous June 2016 meeting with Trump’s son, Don Jr.

Now it’s been revealed Trump made another attempt to build a tower in Moscow between September 2015 and January 2016, in the midst of the 2016 campaign.

The deal was being brokered by 50-year-old Russian-born businessman Felix Sater, who has deep ties to the Kremlin. In 1991, Sater was convicted of assault charges for slashing a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass in a barroom brawl. In 1998, he was convicted on one count of racketeering for his part in a $40 million stock fraud scheme which artificially inflated Wall Street stock prices. Sater never went to prison because he turned state witness against his cohorts.

In January of last year, Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, reached out to Putin’s press secretary Peskov via email.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower – Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to the Washington Post. “Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.”

“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote.

Felix Sater and Donald Trump were partners in building Trump Towers around the world for over a decade.

Felix Sater has been cultivating a relationship with Donald Trump since he joined Bayrock Group as Managing Director in 2001. In the following years, Sater made regular visits to Trump, had an office in the Trump organization and even carried Trump branded business cards. Since at least 2005, Sater and Trump have had a business agreement to build Trump Towers across the US and around the world.

The relationship has had its bumps. Aggrieved condo buyers from the Fort Lauderdale Trump International Hotel sued Trump and Sater after construction stalled in 2009, partly because Trump had failed to tell them about Sater’s criminal past. In November 2013, Trump said in a deposition about Sater, “If he was sitting in the room right now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”

A similar lawsuit was brought against Trump and Sater by the condo owners of a 46-story luxury Trump building on Spring Street in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo. That lawsuit claimed Trump had misled the condo owners about the value of their properties and “undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan,” according to the New York Times.

In 2015, Sater reached out to Trump’s lawyer Cohen with a proposal to kickstart a new attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, predicting it would propel Trump’s rise to the White House. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email excerpted in the New York Times. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Sater also boasted he had arranged for Ivanka Trump to sit in Putin’s chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.

Sater claimed he had arranged funding for the project from Russia’s VTB Bank which is sanctioned by the U.S. but this effort clearly stalled. That’s why in January 2016, Cohen reached out to Peskov, in the email obtained by the Washington Post.

Peskov flew to New York City three days after Trump was elected to attend the start of the World Chess Championship match. “[He] was clearly trying to meet Trump people,” Laura Rosen, a reporter for AIMonitor tweeted.

There may have also been an underlying agenda item involved in negotiating the Moscow Trump Tower deal that was financed by a Russian bank under U.S. sanctions, namely, the very sanctions themselves.

Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and Felix Sater also attempted to negotiate a Putin plan to end the conflict in Ukraine.

A few weeks after Putin’s spokesman Peskov visited New York City for a chess tournament, Trump’s business associate Sater and his attorney Cohen met at the Loews Hotel on Park Avenue with Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin Ukrainian politician. The three discussed a plan to end the conflict in Ukraine by exposing corruption by Ukrainian President Petro O. Poroshenko, a plan that had received encouragement from “top aides to Mr. Putin,” according to the New York Times.

The proposed plan by Cohen, Sater and Artemenko would later reach the desk of former National Security Adviser Lt.Gen. Michael Flynn, a week before he resigned after the Justice Department said he’d been “compromised” by Russia.

Sater has a long history of providing evidence to law enforcement regarding his dealings with the underworld. In 2015, Loretta Lynch testified during her confirmation hearings to become U.S. Attorney General that Sater had provided “valuable and sensitive information” for more than ten years, and that his work had been “crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”

Is Sater now providing investigators at the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller with information regarding Donald Trump’s dealings with Russia? Time will tell. If he does, he’ll not only be able to provide insight into his part in the proposed Moscow Trump Tower with lawyer Michael Cohen, but also the two men’s attempt to negotiate a Putin-endorsed plan to end the conflict in Ukraine and drop U.S. sanctions against Russia.

The post Pulling Strings appeared first on Narativ.

New details of how a Russian hacker, a Republican operative and a cabal in the FBI worked to expose Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal to hurt Hillary Clinton’s election chances.

The use of compromising sex secrets to ruin politicians’ careers is as old as the profession itself. Be it Alexander Hamilton’s affair, Thomas Jefferson’s love child with a slave, the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the careers of Gary Hart, Elliot Spitzer, or Anthony Weiner, U.S. history is littered with political ambitions ruined by sexual exploits.

Sex scandals are common in Russia, too. But under the supervision of Vladimir Putin, the dark art now has its own moniker, “kompromat.” Putin infamously climbed the ranks of the Kremlin by leaking secretly filmed tapes of a prosecutor cavorting with two prostitutes. The prosecutor was investigating corruption by then-President Boris Yeltsin. As a reward, Yeltsin elevated Putin to Prime Minister.

Russia’s “kompromat” arsenal is a new weapon in the digital age. Recently, the Kremlin has taken to hacking opposition activists’ computers and planting “child porn” on their hard drives, as happened to Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident in England. Once imbedded on Bukovsky’s computer, a tip to the police resulted in a raid and an arrest. Bukovsky was later cleared after it was established a third-party had hacked his home network and “planted” the evidence. The implication was Russian intelligence was the culprit.

In 2016, Russia exported her “kompromat” tactic to the U.S. when the Kremlin invaded the American democracy. The key exhibit is the claim in the Steele Dossier of a caught-on-tape sexual impropriety by Donald Trump, allegedly with prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. The Russian attacks on U.S. democracy included hacks on the DNC, state voters rolls, electronic voting machine vendors and malware distribution which allowed access to the personal computers and drives of prominent Americans.

In one such act, Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin, 29, hacked Formspring, the platform former Congressman Anthony Weiner used for sexting. Nikulin was arrested in a restaurant in Prague on the fifth of October and is the subject of dueling extradition requests by the U.S. and Russia.

Anthony Weiner was ‘honey trapped’ into sexting an ‘underage’ girl, allowing the FBI to access his laptop.

Honey trapping is the term investigators use for seducing someone into a sexual relationship so that incriminating evidence can be used against the target for blackmail. A honey trap is also often set for the purpose incriminating someone in a broader conspiracy.

In September of last year, the Daily Mail published an explosive story about disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is married to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top-aide at the time. It detailed  Weiner’s months-long online relationship with a 15-year-old girl. Weiner would later take a plea bargain for transfer of “obscene material to a minor”. But, more importantly, the criminal charge opened the door to an FBI investigation of Weiner’s laptop on which they “discovered” confidential emails from Secretary Clinton.  

The facts of the crime Weiner committed were, however, a lie. The official story was that the girl was a pro-Clinton 15-year-old but according to an investigation by whowhatwhy.org, she was a Trump supporter.

She told Inside Edition in September, “I knew that Hillary Clinton would be running for president in the year 2016 and I wanted to see if Anthony was still up to the same antics.” 

The teen told Inside Edition it was her, not Weiner, who initiated the conversation. The teen’s father also has a long rap sheet including assault and strangulation. This conspiracy was first detailed in an exclusive report on Louise Mensch’s blog Patribotics. 

The teen who sexted with Weiner also sought advice from GOP cyber provocateur Chuck Johnson. Johnson is connected to Trump funder Peter Thiel and reportedly speaks to mercenary Erik Prince “once a week,” according to whowhatwhy. He also met with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and other known Russian assets but is refusing to provide the Senate intelligence Committee because of “journalistic privilege”.

It was Chuck Johnson who got the story published in the Daily Mail.

“It did seem kind of strange that a 15-year old would have this level of, yeah, wherewithal, so I will say I somewhat suspected that there was something else going on at the time,” Johnson told whowhatwhy.  “But it was sort of like in the fog of war, you know, in the fog of the election, and so when I flipped it to [Daily Mail reporter Alana Goodman], you know, Alana was convinced that the girl was legit, everything was legit. I told her ‘I think you should look a little harder at this because it’s kind of a big deal. Weiner had been catfished before,” Johnson said.

This is how the Clinton emails were discovered on Anthony Weiner’s computer through a honey trap involving a teen who lied about her age and who used well-known Republican agitator Chuck Johnson to publicise the story. Johnson would later tweet “The role I played in helping to put Anthony Weiner behind bars will ring out for a long time”.

The FBI New York Field Office actively worked to undermine the Clinton campaign, with Trump associates.

As Election Day neared, and Trump slumped in the polls, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump appeared on Fox and Friends on October 25 and promised an “October surprise” was coming. The next day Rudy Giuliani told Fox News “I think he’s [Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” Later, mercenary Erik Prince boasted on Breitbart Radio the NYPD and the FBI had forced FBI Director Jim Comey to release the emails or they would “go public” with their revelations.

Eleven days before the 2016 election, then-FBI Director Jim Comey publicly revealed the discovery of the Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop. It was a bombshell which altered the course of the election. Comey could never clearly articulate how Clinton’s emails got onto the laptop, telling a congressional hearing in May, “somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information by her assistant, Huma Abedin.” Comey later added, Huma sent the emails to him “to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the Secretary of State.”

Abedin’s lawyers said they had no idea how the emails got on there.

The actual e-mails found on Weiner’s laptop were nothing new but the course of events and the myriad connections to Republican operatives clearly lends credence to the notion the Bureau played a significant role in the 2016 election. “The FBI is Trumpland,” an FBI agent told The Guardian in November. “Clinton is the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

Last week, we reported that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele had become aware of this “cabal” within the FBI New York office (known to have close ties to Giuliani). Steele was frustrated his repeated attempts to alert the FBI about the discoveries his investigation had unearthed had fallen on deaf ears. Steele penned a letter to the FBI on July 23 with proof Russia and the Trump Campaign had cut a deal to drop Russian sanctions in exchange for help in the elections, but this, too, was ignored.

“The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms. Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city,” The Independent wrote after interviewing Steele.

Rudy Giuliani & Donald Trump’s ties date back to the 80’s. They both have close ties to current and former FBI agents.

Giuliani met Trump in the late 80’s, when Trump was the co-chair of Giuliani’s first fundraiser. It was around this time that Giuliani made an alleged case of money-laundering against Trump disappear without even giving it a case number. “That meant that New Jersey gaming authorities would never know it existed,” biographer Wayne Barrett said in the NY Daily News.

During the campaign, Giuliani worked as the head of “cybersecurity” for Greenberg Taurig, a law firm representing Trump, Jared Kushner and ex-Fox News boss Roger Ailes. The former mayor still works as Trump’s cyber-czar on issues such as “hacking, intrusions, disruptions, manipulations, theft of data and identities, and securing information technology infrastructure,” according to a Trump transition statement.

Giuliani’s tentacles also reach deep into the Kremlin, having provided “image consulting” to Russian oligarchs, according to the New York Times. His clients included Transneft, a company targeted by U.S.-sanctions. In March of this year, Giuliani also joined the defense of accused Iranian money launderer Reza Zarreb who has ties to Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan, a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

Rudy served as a U.S. attorney for 17 years and maintained his ties to the FBI after leaving office. The former head of the FBI New York office Jim Kallstrom works for Giuliani’s security firm, and both he and Rudy are in touch with agents there. Giuliani’s former law firm acts as general counsel to FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents and was started in the New York office. Kallstrom told Fox News in September “I think we’re going to see a lot more of the facts come out in the course of the next few months. That’s my prediction.”

Trump has his own ties to Kallstrom. In fact he attended a fundraiser for Kallstrom’s charity in lieu of campaigning in Iowa on GOP primary election day. Previously, Trump donated $230,000 to Kallstrom’s foundation.

In light of all of these new revelations, The FBI is conducting forensic analysis on Anthony Weiner’s laptop which may become key evidence in a case involving Russian intelligence and agents within the FBI’s New York field office, in a massive criminal conspiracy to swing the election towards Donald Trump.

The post The Honey Trap appeared first on Narativ.

Exclusive: The U.S. Navy is investigating whether a cyber attack on the USS John McCain’s steering controls may have led to the destroyer’s crash with an oil tanker. Could China or Russia be involved?

The USS John McCain was on a routine voyage to Singapore through the Straits of Malacca on Saturday after conducting a sensitive “freedom of navigation mission” in the South China Sea. The Malacca Strait connects the Pacific and Indian Oceans and is the main thoroughfare for trade between the world’s biggest economies. Nearly 100,000 vessels pass through it each year, accounting for about one-quarter of the world’s traded goods. With so much traffic, it’s not the kind of route one sails without every precaution.

“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs told McClatchy.

As the USS John McCain, entered the strait, the 338-man crew on the bridge faced multiple system failures. First the main steering mechanism failed to respond. Then, the back up system failed. The ship’s rudder was completely unusable.

Still, the experienced crew on board should have been able to guide the ship by altering the speed of the ship’s propellers. Perhaps they were trying that when the unthinkable happened. The 600-ft Liberian flagged oil tanker Alnic MC smashed into the warship’s rear left. The “rear-end collision” is an indicator the US vessel was not at fault. Satellite tracking also shows the Alnic MC unexpectedly veered sharply left at around that time.

The Alnic MC ripped into the USS John McCain’s side below the waterline and bore into the warship’s hull. Water flooded the machinery, communication rooms, sleeping quarters and an area on the vessel known as “shaft alley”. Ten crew members were reported missing, presumed drowned. Four injured sailors were medically evacuated to Singapore with non-life threatening injuries. The fifth sailor did not need further medical attention.

After the McCain limped back to shore, the US navy called for a rare one or two day pause in operations.

This is the third major accident involving a naval vessel from the Japanese-based Seventh fleet and the fourth incident involving U.S. vessels in the Pacific Ocean around Japan Singapore and China:

• On January 31, the USS Antietam ran aground while sailing along the Japanese coastline.
• On May 9, the USS Lake Champlain was struck by a South Korean fishing boat.
• On June 17, seven US sailors died after a container ship collided into the USS Fitzgerald into the USS Fitzgerald.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Itay Glick, a cybersecurity expert and former Israeli intelligence agent told Australian media. “Both USS McCain and USS Fitzgerald were part of the Seventh Fleet, there is a relationship between these two events and there may be a connection.” he said.

Russian-based hackers recently tested a GPS “spoofing” device to trick 20 ships in the Black Sea into believing they were somewhere else.

Surprisingly, hacking a marine vessel is relatively easy. A group of cybersecurity researchers recently discovered “the configuration of certain ships’ satellite antenna systems leaves them wide open to attack,” Jack Morse wrote in Mashable. “Anyone who gained access to the system in question, and was so inclined, could manually change a ship’s GPS coordinates or possibly even brick the boat’s navigation system entirely by uploading new firmware.”

On June 22, a Russian-based hacker was able to infiltrate the GPS systems of 20 vessels in the eastern part of the Black Sea. The hackers were able to reprogram the ships’ navigation equipment, making it appear that the vessels were 20 miles inland, near an airport.

“We saw it done in, I would say, a really unsubtle way, a really ham-fisted way. It was probably a signal that came from the Russian mainland,” says Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas. On June 27, a worldwide hack of shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersklead forced the company to deploy manual tracking of vessels.

Even car and passenger planes can be easily hacked and controlled remotely. Security experts recently took control of a Jeep Cherokee from ten miles away; the hackers were able to turn off the engine and apply the brakes, veering the car off the road. They did this via the software built into the dashboard of the manufacturer Fiat Chrysler’s cars. “There is already a lot of interest in cyber protection of cars and autonomous vehicles. We can deduce from that, there might be a way to control ships and airplanes,” Mr Glick told Australian media. “Whenever control of the vessel is done by computer, or navigation is done by computer, there is a big risk for a cyber attack on that computer.”

The US Defense Department is under constant attack by enemy hackers and utilizes vulnerable software.

The U.S. military is a tougher nut for hackers to crack than a car or plane, but it hasn’t stopped many from trying and succeeding. The Department of Defense alone experiences 41 million scans, probes and attacks per month. “The Navy Networking Environment consists of more than 500,000 end user devices; an estimated 75,000 network devices (servers, domain controllers); and approximately 45,000 applications and systems across three security enclaves,” Vice Adm. Jan Tighe, commander of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command told congress in 2015.

In recent years, the military has sought an operational advantage over its enemies by creating a more connected eco-system. It has contracted private Silicon Valley companies to link formerly isolated systems together. Once independent systems now rely on each other to link together our warfighters, ships, submarines, aircraft, land-based command centers and distant satellites.

One such system is Palantir, which has close ties to former National Security Adviser Lt-General Michael Flynn (a compromised Russian asset) and is founded by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder who is allied to mercenary Erik Prince. Palantir has been criticized for its security vulnerability.

Speaking at a defense conference in 2015, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said, “We’ve got to pay a whole lot of attention to this, cyber is in everything now,” he said. “It’s not just weapons systems. It’s in every system because we are so networked.” Mabus said the navy intended to replace IBM servers used for its Aegis combat system after China’s Lenovo bought IBM. “If there’s a danger or potential danger with a platform, you’ve got to take a look at that.”

In March, U.S. counterintelligence officials warned that Russians had embedded malware into messages sent to the Defense Department’s 10,000 Twitter users. The message topics were specifically targeted to users’ unique interests – from sports to entertainment – but when clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a malware allowing Russian hackers to take control of the victim’s phone or computer. The Department of Defense until recently also used Kaspersky Lab, a Russian built anti-virus software which has a built-in “back door” allowing Russian Intelligence to access vital networks.

China and Russia have the capability to carry out a hack on a vessel; US Navy investigates possibility of cyber attack.

It’s not just Russia which has the capability of hacking navigation systems, as it did in the Black Sea last month. The location of the recent U.S. naval crashes in the Pacific Ocean suggest a possible link to China. When the USS John McCain was struck in the Straits of Malacca on Saturday, it was returning from a what the navy terms a “freedom of navigation” mission. This means it came within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built by China in the “South China Sea”.

Nine days before the crash of the USS John McCain which may have killed 10 sailors, a US Navy official told Reuters the warship traveled close to Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands. China has territorial disputes with its neighbors over the area, and the U.S. considers the man-built island an attempt to impede global trade and travel. The “freedom of navigation” mission undertaken by the USS John McCain was the third this year and comes at a time that the U.S. is seeking China’s help in North Korea.

Itay Glick, the cybersecurity expert and former Israeli intelligence agent believes countries like Russia and China may have the capability to launch an attack on the warships. “China has capabilities, maybe they are trying things, it is possible,” he said.

While the U.S. Navy initially dismissed the idea of a cyber attack, CBS News now reports Admiral Scott Swift told a news conference the navy is looking at “all possible causes for the collision…including a cyber attack on the ship’s controls”. Chief of Naval Operations US Admiral John Richardson also tweeted “[Regarding the] possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, [there are] no indications right now … but review will consider all possibilities,” he tweeted.

Any investigation would have to consider two possible cyber attacks. The first on the navigation system of the oil tanker Alnic MC’s navigation system would have veered the ship off path and into the USS John McCain. The second would have disabled the USS McCain’s steering capability and its backup prior to the crash.

Who would have the capability of such a coordinated dual attack? Likely only a nation state like Russia or China with grudges to bear and the cyber warfare capability to expedite such an attack. Why? Other than the human, financial and tactical toll, such an attack would weaken America’s resolve at a time of crisis or could even provoke U.S. retaliation.

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