by Zev Shalev and Heidi Cuda

A suspected Russian asset was involved in organizing the January 6 attempted coup, including supplying accommodation and a gathering place for protest leaders in the weeks and days leading up to the storming of the Capitol.

Charles Bausman’s father was the Moscow Bureau Chief for Associated Press between 1968 and 1972, just the type of role Soviet officials would have targeted for recruitment to their intelligence services. It’s unclear if the elder Bausman was ever recruited, but Charles who has spent most of his adult life in Moscow, bears all the hallmarks of a man working for the Kremlin.

Bausman lived in Russia for 30 years before moving to Lancaster, PA in 2018 with enough money to buy three properties. On his arrival, he immediately launched US versions of his three Russian web sites pushing disinformation and propaganda, most notably Russia Insider, which included rabidly anti-semitic sentiment and Holocaust denialism. One of Bausman’s common themes is that America is “fractured.”

His websites were pro-Russian but the content decidedly focused on divisive U.S. domestic issues. Bausman promoted “Stop the Steal”— including appearing in and organizing anti-lockdown election protests in December and January outside the office and home of the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He was spotted at protests outside Speaker Brian Cutler’s home and office in December. 

On the season premiere of Narativ, we broke the story about Bausman’s barn being used as a venue to plan for the insurrection and also discussed Bausman’s relationship with Sean Moon. Our guests were “Cult of Trump” author Dr. Steven Hassan, a former “Moonies Rev” himself and Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who wrote the first expose of Bausman. Heidi Cuda co-produced the show. Scroll down for Part 2.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

In psychological warfare, there are no strange bedfellows, and the purported Russian sleeper agent Bausman and gun crazy Pastor Sean Moon, of the Rod Iron Ministries, also known as the World Peace Unification Sanctuary, have been linked together during the lead up to the January 6 insurrection.

Turns out the next-gen Moonies and the alleged Russian spy Bausman reportedly played a much bigger role in the January 6 Insurrection than previously known.

And on Jan. 3, Bausman allowed out of town groups to stay over at his Pennsylvania property, specifically Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron group from Warren County. In fiery speeches, Moon invoked God’s name and fear of a Chi Com planet to whip people into a Trump-defending frenzy. Moon’s brother owns a tommy gun warehouse, whose 2016 grand opening was attended by Eric and Lara Trump. Eric was the guest speaker at the event. Donald Trump is scheduled to spend the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with Moon’s mother, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of Moonies founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Trump is listed as the featured speaker at the billionaire widow’s conference.

MEET THE MOONIES

According to multiple media reports and its own website, Sean Moon’s “Moonies” splinter group, Rod of Iron Ministries, worships at the altar of the AR-15, and Moon recently purchased a Waco-style compound about 40 miles from Waco, Texas, to prep for a war with the “deep state,” he said. Political provocateur Steve Bannon has spoken at Rod of Iron events, and both Moon and Bausman were present at the Insurrection. Moon was seen at the Capitol leading members into scaffolding. Bausman advanced to the Capitol, according to news reports, and then fled the country for Moscow.  

The Moonies weren’t the only Russian friendly assets at the Insurrection. Putin’s favorite former Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was at the Capitol; Russian chants can be heard as windows are being smashed; a Russian expat now living in Florida, Stanislauv Doudnik, broadcast live to Russian news outlets blaming Antifa and BLM for the violence. Two Russian women–a mother and daughter, originally from Moldova–were arrested for illegal entry. The daughter, Kristina Malimon, is a GOP activist living in Portland, according to a McClatchy report. In addition, a Ukrainian infowars host who appears on a network with ties to oligarch Dmitry Firtash posed with the QAnon shaman, Jake Angeli, on January 6.

Bausman left Russia where he had been living for decades and arrived in the US in 2018, quickly establishing his pro-Russian pop-up blogs and acquiring three properties. He left the US on Jan 7 in such a hurry, he didn’t have time to take down the Christmas lights at his home. Neighbors a say a friend took down the decorations weeks later.

One of Bausman’s Lancaster properties is a barn not far from his family home in Lancaster, PA, which he acquired under an LLC. The barn has been used to host white nationalist events like the launch of the National Justice Party, which is virulently anti-Zionist.

The following year he and Bausman’s family traveled to Verona for the 2019 anti-LGBT World Congress of Families conference.

Handler? Leaked emails from Charles Bausman reveal he sought funding from Konstantin Malofeev through an intermediary Alesksei Komov.

RENDEZVOUZ IN VERONA

In Verona, Bausman would likely have met up with another delegate at the WCF that year – the organization’s Russian representative, Aleksei Komov. One of Komov’s many job titles was journalist for Bausman’s Russia Insider.

Bausman’s emails also revealed Komov often arranged financing for Bausman’s projects through the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. Komov served as head of foreign charities at the Foundation.

The charitable foundation is a philanthropic effort Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev. Malofeev also funds the WCF and is a staunch supporter of Russia’s Orthodox Church. He is also said to have been the architect of Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Komov is considered one of Malofeev’s right-hand men. Malofeev was sanctioned by the U.S., EU, and Canada for his alleged role in financing financing Russian military operatives in Ukraine.

After a couple of surprisingly successful financial years, Bausman encountered some financial trouble at his publications and shuttered them in late 2020, soon after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden published an expose about him.

Part 2 of our podcast about Bausman and Moon: ‘A Bear in our House’

PLANNING PROTESTS

He may have quit his online news business, but Bausman kept engaged in politics, hosting Sean Moon and delegation from his “Rod Of Iron” Church overnight on Jan 2. The next day the heads of many insurrectionist groups were attending a secret closed-door meeting in an unknown location in the same PA town. It’s unclear if Bausman’s barn was used for the meeting or if he attended.

Bausman’s trail of strange associations with extremist groups, Russia’s Orthodox Church, and a continuing association with Konstantin Malofeev’s right hand-man, suggest Bausman’s pro-Russia agenda may have been operational in an espionage sense, or as we like to say on Narativ, he is likely a spy.

Bausman is now back in Moscow full-time and denies any link to the Russian state. His funder Aleksei Komov denies Malofeev funds Bausman or his publications.

If Bausman is an agent for the Kremlin, it would be standard operating procedure to wire up a meeting room like the barn for surveillance. Extremist leaders like Mike Peinovich of the National Justice Party and Sean Moon may have believed they were meeting in secret, when in reality they could have been meeting at a SVR-owned and monitored venue.

This is the first time we’ve been able to link a suspected Russian asset to the insurrection.

Narativ is made possible by viewers like you. Support our independent journalism. Patreon.com/Narativ

The post A Bear in Our House 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.

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.

Exclusive: Beyond Facebook, Russia colluded with U.S. anti-gay groups to stoke tensions over LGBTQ equality in the run-up to the 2016 election.

“God has decided,” Vladimir Putin told Oliver Stone in Showtime’s Putin Interviews. “I believe it’s my duty to uphold traditional values and family values. But why? Because same-sex marriages will not produce any children,” the Russian president said.

It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia but it’s a crime to wave a pride flag, show same-sex public displays of affection or demonstrate for gay rights. Gay Russians in Chechnya are routinely rounded up and tortured and vigilante gangs use social media to lure hundreds of gay men on fake dates where they are filmed being beaten or sexually humiliated. Everything from same-sex emoji bans to a total prohibition on coming out publicly has been considered by Russia’s legislature.

The anti-gay sentiment in Russia began to swell in the mid-1990’s after the fall of the Soviet Union but it wasn’t until Barack Obama’s election that Russian anti-gay activists began to build bridges with their soul mates in the fringe right of U.S. conservatism.

In the 90’s, two Russian sociologists and an American activist birthed the World Congress of Families, a global coalition of anti-gay groups with deep Russian interests. WCF is based in the U.S. and is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“The Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world,” says Larry Jacobs, WCF’s managing director. “At the UN, they are really the ones standing up for these traditional values of family and faith.”

The congress partners with U.S. conservative organizations including Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Alliance Defense Fund, Americans United For Life and Concerned Women For America.

Members of these organizations regularly meet at the WCF conventions around the world and in Russia. This gives them a direct line to anti-gay members of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, the Russian Orthodox Church and to two Russian oligarchs who “are footing many of the WCF’s bills, Vladimir Yakunin, the president of the Russian railways, and investor Konstantin Malofeev,” according to Mother Jones.

A Russian oligarch and Putin ally is a key funder of the anti-gay World Congress of Families. Its president is America’s leading anti-gay activist.

Yakunin is one of Putin’s closest oligarchs. The billionaire is adept at aligning Russian Orthodox Church policies with those of Vladimir Putin. The church has approval over any legislation tabled by the Duma and in turn the church is heavily influenced by Putin’s oligarchs.

Yakunin’s wife, Natalia Yakunina, runs Russia’s anti-gay Sanctity of Motherhood which first invited Jacobs to a conference in Moscow in 2010. The same year, Russia’s Orthodox Church dispatched one of WCF’s Russian co-founders to meet with the U.S. anti-gay group Focus on the Family.

Konstantin Malofeev is also a devout Orthodox christian and is often referred to as “Putin’s Soros”. He operates his own think tank and TV station. He believes in the restoration of the Russian empire and has fostered relations with many of Europe’s far right politicians including France’s Marine Le Pen.

Malofeev is a key financier of the Russian attack on Ukraine. He claims to only send food and water to rebel-held areas but Ukrainian officials believe the oligarch is an arm’s length way for Putin to control the war. In 2013, Malofeev used the church’s Ukrainian missions to subdue opposition to Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea

“I’m in the middle of patriotic circles.” says Malofeev. “People who have patriotic and Orthodox views know me, and sometimes I know them. You can find a link between me and almost any Orthodox activist. But that doesn’t mean I’m paying them a salary or that we’re in the same business,” Malofeev says.

In 2013, Malofeev’s St. Basil charity invited Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage to attend a round table discussion. NOM rose to prominence as the main advocate for California’s Proposition 8 which overturned gay marriage rights in the state.  Brown created a campaign which demeaned the LGBTQ community as predatory, diseased and disordered. Their claims were supported by faux-science, much of it created by the WCF.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian created and funded anti-LGBTQ ads and the organizations which shared them.

Wikileaks published the hacked DNC emails and an unprecedented sequence of Trump-Russia meetings took place in June last year. It’s perhaps not too coincidental that Brown was appointed president at last year’s WCF June convention. “I look forward to continuing to work to advance the pro-family movement in the US and around the world,” Brown said in a statement about his new role.

NOM regularly publishes anti-LGBTQ ads in its Facebook feed, some of it shared from the pages of other organizations like “Moms Like Me” and “Stand With Children”.  One ad showed a photo of Hillary Clinton and Obama under a headline which read: “when you demand everyone deny science so that girls can become boys, you have overplayed your hand.”

A handful of wealthy donors keeps NOM funded to the tune of about $7.4 million annually. Amway’s Doug DeVos (Betsy’s brother-in-law) donated $750,000 to the organization between 2009 and 2012.

NOM’s goal is to support the elections of anti-gay legislators. Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who believes homosexuality should be illegal, is a recent beneficiary of a NOM endorsement. The organization has repeatedly broken election law for not revealing its donors and is listed as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

All of the above could normally fall into the sphere of state-sponsored NGO activity (the U.S. does similar things in other countries to influence human rights) but now there’s an added element of an investigation of conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. This month, Special Counsel Robert Mueller executed a search warrant on Facebook after revelations that Russian-owned accounts bought $150,000 in ads on Facebook on issues from Black Lives Matter, immigration and LGBTQ issues between 2015 and 2016.

The ads were intended to inflame tensions on wedge issues like LGBTQ rights. Mueller’s team has not publicly released the ads but is analyzing their origin and which accounts and pages shared the posts, which in itself could constitute a crime.

“These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another,” the Washington Post reported.

We’ve written before about Russia’s extraordinary efforts to engage the NRA between 2010 and 2016. Investigators are now probing if the Kremlin officials infiltrated social, evangelical and constitutional causes and created ads to divide and conquer an electorate. All under the pretense of shared values but with only one aim in mind: furthering Russia’s kleptocracy.

The post Divide & Conquer 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.

Exclusive: With Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon out at the White House, a renewed focus on the Mercer family, who helped install Trump and its deep ties to Russia.

With reporting by Tracie McElroy

Donald J. Trump was still gushing about his capture of the Republican presidential nomination a month earlier when he met with uber political financier Rebekah Mercer at a swanky Hamptons house party on August 13th last year. For all the boasting, Trump and Mercer both knew his campaign for the White House was in deep trouble.

Weeks of sliding poll numbers had thrown the campaign into turmoil. Trump had reportedly erupted in private meetings, deriding his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, as being “low energy” (a term he’d previously reserved for rivals like Jeb Bush). As Mercer and Trump engaged in political strategy in the Hamptons, Manafort’s campaign death was hanging in the air. The New York Times was about to publish a devastating story revealing Manafort had been paid $12.7 million from Vladimir Putin’s pro-Russian party in the Ukraine.

With the Manafort political writing on the wall, Rebekah Mercer recommended Stephen Bannon, a long-time confidante of Donald Trump. People who know Bekah caution not to confuse her congeniality for flexibility.  “She’s very nice and very unassuming … but she’s also no bullshit. Her style is, ‘If you want my money, you have to do things the way I want,'” a source told The Hill.

By the following Wednesday, Manafort was out at the Trump campaign, and Stephen Bannon became its CEO. Kellyanne Conway was upped from campaign adviser to manager. Both have long histories connecting them to the Mercers. Rebekah and her father, Robert, funded Bannon’s anti-Clinton film “Clinton Cash”, and his alt-right Breitbart Media. “Rebekah Mercer has been known to indicate to people in the public policy world that she can influence Breitbart coverage where needed,” says The Hill.

With her appointments in place, Mercer money came flowing into the Trump campaign, with $17 million dollars going to the Super PAC “Make America #1”. By September, Bekah assumed control of the PAC. For all intents and purposes, the Mercers owned the campaign – financially and operationally. The same month, the Trump campaign paid the Mercer-backed Cambridge Analytica $5 million for its work targeting social news feeds through psychographics. Stephen Bannon is also an advisor to Cambridge Analytica and much of the content being pushed by it came from Breitbart. The super PAC paid Kellyanne Conway’s company $247,000 and Bannon’s production company $950,000 for their work on the campaign, which may be a felony violating election conflicts of interest rules.

Once Trump was elected, Bekah was named to the transition team and is believed to have influenced the appointments of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The Mercer fortune is closely tied to Russia and Deutsche Bank.

43-year-old Rebekah Mercer is the political operative of the family’s fortune, but her father is the source of the funds. She is his middle daughter, and ten years ago bought a bakery in Manhattan’s “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood with her sisters. He is a 70-year-old reclusive billionaire who owns the hedge funds Renaissance Technologies and Medallion Fund. Over the years, the father and daughter duo have become the largest political donors in Republican circles. It’s worth noting that Renaissance’s other partners are equally generous to Democratic circles.

Mercer’s funds have always had close connections to Russia – both in staffing and business. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of Russia’s top scientists fled the country to find cushy jobs in the U.S., and some of them landed at Mercer’s funds. In 2003, two of them, Pavel Volfbeyn and Alexander Belopolsky, departed the company. Insiders at the fund were caught by surprise when another Russian, Alexey Kononenko, was elevated over them. “People with knowledge of the firm say Kononenko’s promotion was a significant event in Renaissance’s history and that the Russian had actually executed a power play,” according to Bloomberg.

Very little is known about how Renaissance makes so much money, but it has a Midas touch like no other, making money in good times and bad. It operates quantum trading computers programmed by some of the world’s most brilliant scientists, many of whom are Russian. That means machines do all the trading based on algorithms, executing millions  of trades in milliseconds.  They can drive the stock market up and down with very little, if any, human interference. The machines place bets on whether prices will go up or down and make profit when their bets are right.

Vladimir Putin and Russia’s energy sector is linked to Deutsche Bank.

Nine years ago, with Russia reeling from economic failure and rising foreign debt, Vladimir Putin authorized the State’s development bank, VEB, to start issuing bailouts to key Russian oligarchs, including Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank and Oleg Deripaska’s United Company RUSAL. The $50 billion dollars in loans came with strings. “The major question is the price [they] will have to pay for such generosity,” analyst Troika Dialog said. In Russia, that means one thing: loyalty to Vladimir Putin. 

The Russian firms who received the bailouts from VEB became organs of the state, allowing the Kremlin to cut off energy supplies to countries it wanted to annex, like the Ukraine, or for other foreign misadventures. Alfa, you’ll recall, is deeply tied to the Trump-Russia scandal through a server in Trump Tower. VEB’s CEO had a secret meeting with Jared Kushner last December, and Oleg Deripaska, who is tied to organized crime in the US and Russia’s richest man,  paid Paul Manafort 10 million dollars a year between 2006-2009 to support Vladimir Putin’s political interests in the Ukraine and the US.

The other main stakeholder in the bailout was Deutsche Bank. The Bank is deeply tied to Russia’s energy sector and is the also the prime broker for Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies. Mercer’s fund takes large bets on energy price and Deutsche facilitates them. “Energy is indeed the largest speculative market with billions made and lost daily”, says Bill Parish.”[Mercer’s] Renaissance simply speculates on stocks and commodities and does millions of transactions with Deutsche Bank each year.”

Facing financial ruin and $300 Million in debt, Donald Trump launched his Presidential campaign.

Donald Trump owes $300 million to Deutsche Bank with no obvious means to pay it off.  As Trump was fast approaching bankruptcy, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump decided to launch his White House bid as a way to rescue his fortune.

Deutsche Bank is by any standard a bad corporate entity. The bank was recently fined $10 billion  for its role in a Russian money-laundering scheme. The bank was also heavily involved in financing the vastly over-budget 2014 Sochi Olympics (itself a Russian money laundering scheme). In 2014, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levin (D-MI) launched a congressional investigation into Mercer and Deutsche Bank’s illegal tax evasion scheme.

Rebekah Mercer’s husband is directly linked to the Moscow Exchange, which rises and falls on world events.

Then there’s Rebekah Mercer’s husband, Sylvain Michel Mirochnikoff, who until recently shared an apartment with her in a Trump-branded building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They are now getting divorced.

Mirochnikoff is a Morgan Stanley broker. In 2012, he joined the board of the International Security Exchange, which buys and sell stocks electronically. The following year the ISE partnered with the Moscow exchange to “share information”. If you’re in the business of placing bets on the futures of stocks (especially energy stocks), which Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies is, a family member with an inside track to Russia’s exchange could be very profitable. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2013, for example, the Moscow Exchange rallied. As Putin cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine from Russia’s state-run oil and energy companies, Mercer, Mirochnikoff and Oleg Deripaska were all making money off the crisis.

The same thing happened late last year. The Moscow Exchange rallied after Trump’s  election in November and the sale of 19.5% of Russian oil giant Rosneft in December (see chart). As Trump’s presidency has faltered, so has the Moscow Exchange.

The Mercers have become accustomed to making money by making “knowledgeable” bets on the future of stock prices. Through Russia, Deutsche Bank and Mirochnikoff, they had an inside track on world events that would move the markets and could easily react to them, particularly in the energy sector. By funding and staffing the Trump campaign, and manipulating people’s fears through Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart, they were able to install a financially imperiled   president who was not only beholden to their chief financial partner, Deutsche Bank, but could also imitate Vladimir Putin’s strategy of manipulating world events to turn a profit.

Opinion: Is John Kelly our Alexander Haig?

The post Politics of Greed appeared first on Narativ.

President Trump’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan would enrich three of Trump’s key financial donors and plays into Russia’s military objectives.

With reporting by Tracie McElroy.

In September 2007, Blackwater armed military personnel, guarding State Department officials, drove into Baghdad’s Nisour Square and opened fire, killing 17 people and injuring 20 others. Blackwater worked for the US as a “contracted” private army (there were as many as 160,000 contracted personnel operating during the Iraq war). Blackwater guards worked outside the normal military command of the military and the House Oversight Committee would later reveal the firm was engaged in over 195 unprovoked attacks in a 9 month period in 2014.

As a result of the Nisour Square massacre, Iraq terminated Blackwater’s license to operate within its borders. Four Blackwater employees were tried and convicted in U.S. federal court; one for murder, and the other three of manslaughter and firearms charges.

Peter Singer, a former Brookings Analyst would later write, “When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops.”

Mercenary Erik Prince wants to command a private army to fight the war in Afghanistan.

10 years after the Nisour Square Massacre, Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the same man who helmed the company in 2007, is proposing that a private army should fight another U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy Devos, is a staunch supporter of the Trump administration with close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, Trump backers Robert and Rebekah Mercer and former White House strategist Stephen Bannon. Prince, as you may recall, was the Trump adviser who held secret talks with Russia in the Seychelles in December 2016. Now, he wants to privatize the 16- year-old war in Afghanistan.

“We aren’t winning,” President Trump recently chastised his Generals at a meeting on Afghanistan. “We are losing.” The Generals reminded the President that the U.S. isn’t winning the war because he’d delayed signing off on a strategy for months. It’s in that vacuum that Prince and the White House have floated an idea to pay Blackwater $10 billion to hire 5,500 private contractors to run the war in Afghanistan.

Prince is not the only private citizen to set to benefit from this deployment. Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, who helped found PayPal and Facebook donated $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign and was even given an important prime-time speaking role at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. He is close to Erik Prince. Thiel showed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “a picture on his phone of him posing with Erik Prince, who founded the private military company Blackwater, and Mr. Trump but joke[d] that it was ’N.S.F.I.’ (Not Safe for the Internet).”

Thiel is the co-founder of Palantir, a controversial yet effective data mining software company which provides clients, including many branches of the U.S. military, a real-time view of what is going on in an operational theatre (weather conditions, cell-phone and social media tracking, and other real-time data). Palantir’s software is believed to have been used in the raid that killed Osama Bin-Laden and has been effectively deployed elsewhere.

Critics say Palantir doesn’t have the right security and privacy mechanisms and as a private company, the vast data set that it owns, often classified, is in the hands of a private company and can easily pass into the wrong hands. The system has has also been vulnerable to significant malware attacks.

Former National Security Adviser, Lt-Gen Michael Flynn, exposed as “compromised” by Russia, has ties to mercenary Erik Prince and Peter Thiel’s company Palantir.

Palantir has many supporters in the military ranks, including three of General Jim Mattis’ deputies who have lobbied on behalf of Thiel’s company. Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet advise the company. Perhaps Palantir’s most ardent supporter is Lt-General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security adviser, who was working for Turkey and who Justice officials say was compromised by the Russians. Back in 2010, when he was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn pushed the military to adopt Palantir software. “Intelligence analysts in theater currently do not have the tools required to fully analyze the tremendous amounts of information currently available,” Flynn wrote.

Flynn also played a behind the scenes role connecting Palantir to partners. Steven Brill speculates in Fortune magazine that with Trump in office, Thiel can get Palantir approval across U.S. agencies, something his key lobbyist (and compromised Russian operative) Michael Flynn would wholeheartedly endorse.

Flynn served under Mike Pence as the vice chairman of Trump’s transition team. In December, he met with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. The same month Flynn, Erik Prince, Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon met Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan in a secret meeting in New York. Zayed had met with Putin twice in 2016. A few weeks after the New York meeting, Zayed arranged for Erik Prince to meet a representative of Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles in order to explore Russia’s willingness to isolate Iran in exchange for closer U.S. relations and dropping of sanctions.

Another top Trump supporter Stephen A. Feinberg is working with Prince to support the privatization of the war in Afghanistan. Feinberg is the billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International. Bannon and Kushner tapped Prince and Feinberg to come up with the plan to privatize the conflict in Afghanistan. Feinberg is also close to Thiel.

Russia supplies weapons to the Taliban while working with the Trump administration to co-operate in the fight against it.

Afghanistan has been a quagmire for the United States for 16 years, and part of the reason it is bogged down there is Russia. The head of U.S. forces there, Gen. John Nicholson confirmed Moscow is supplying weapons to the Taliban. “We continue to get reports of this assistance,” Nicholson said, speaking to reporters alongside Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “We support anyone who wants to help us advance the reconciliation process, but anyone who arms belligerents who perpetuate attacks like the one we saw two days ago in Mazar-e Sharif is not the best way forward to a peaceful reconciliation.”

It’s easy to see why Russia has a strategic goal in Afghanistan. Russia’s foreign policy is guided by a drive to access warm water ports. This is true in Syria, North Korea, Turkey, Iran and the “stan” countries – particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition to the efforts to prop up the Taliban, Russia has supported ISIS, Hezbollah through Iran and despots like Bashar al-Assad.

Putin likes to wage war between two forces he controls so any move by the Trump administration to “privatize” the war in Afghanistan should be viewed in this light. Without real U.S. military involvement, a private army run by Erik Prince and cooperation from Russia in taming the Taliban it supports, joint Russian and U.S. control over Afghanistan would bring a cold peace to the region, but it also gives Russia a strategic foothold at the expense of the U.S. It would certainly enrich three of Trump’s biggest supporters: Erik Prince, Peter Thiel and Stephen Feinberg.

The post A Private War appeared first on Narativ.

New details of how the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin forged a deal during the 2016 Campaign and the mysterious role of a pro-Russian mercenary who has close ties to Mike Pence.

With additional reporting by Tracie McElroy

By July 2016, former MI6 Russia Desk head, Christopher Steele, had become frustrated. Despite a growing dossier of compromising evidence against Donald J. Trump’s collusion with Russia, the media and law enforcement narrative was instead focused on what seemed like a much lesser investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.

Steele became convinced the Trump campaign had been intentionally amplifying the Clinton e-mail scandal because they knew Russia had been hacking the DNC emails and may have had possession of Clinton’s 30,000 missing e-mails. Publicly, a number of Trump campaign operatives had been championing this narrative – notably former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone and Erik Prince, America’s most famous mercenary.

Prince, the 48-year-old former CEO of Blackwater, was too radioactive to be officially named as a member of Trump’s campaign but all indications are that he played a crucial role. Prince personally donated $250,000 to the Trump coffers and to a pro-Trump super PAC led by Rebekah Mercer (a major christian conservative donor). Mercer owns Breitbart, then run by Stephen Bannon, and Prince made several appearances on Bannon’s Breitbart Radio to spin up conspiracy theories about the Clinton e-mails, according to the Washington Post.

By all accounts, Prince’s role was far larger than just your typical donor relationship with a politician. “A former senior U.S. official who has advised the Trump transition told The Intercept that Prince has been advising the team on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the defense and state departments,” according to PJ Wilcox. He was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December.

Then, in January this year, Prince held a meeting with a representative of Putin’s government and the UAE in the Seychelles in order to open up a back-channel between Trump and Russia.

Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, serves as education secretary in the Trump administration and his brother-in-law, Dick DeVos, owns Spectrum Health.

Unusual spike in Spectrum Server activity as Trump Adviser visits Russia for secret meeting.

Spectrum Health is particularly important to investigators of the Trump-Russia conspiracy. A server registered to the company is very deeply intertwined in the caper that is the becoming the greatest political crime in history.  It’s Spectrum’s server which is believed to have been consolidating and washing private email addresses with voters information hacked by Russian-paid hackers via a server at Trump Tower and one run by Russia’s Alfa Bank. The illegally obtained information was used to create a database which Breitbart, Infowars, RT and Sputnik News used to bombard voters with fake and hyped news to help turn the electorate towards Trump.

Independent analysis of the server activity by David Schiminovich points to a significant spike in traffic between Spectrum’s servers and the one in Trump Tower on July 9 and 31. The first, on July 9, came on the same day Carter Page, another Trump adviser, held a secret meeting in Moscow with Putin’s handpicked CEO of Russia’s main oil company, Rosneft. It’s at that meeting that a quid-pro-quo was believed to have been negotiated, Trump would drop sanctions against Russia in exchange for help with the election. According to the Steele Dossier, a sizable portion of Rosneft would also trade hands for the effort.

While Christopher Steele is well-regarded in intelligence circles, his account of Page’s meeting with the Rosneft CEO is yet to be publicly confirmed. What is clear, is that on Page’s return from Moscow, the Trump campaign began an earnest campaign to put in place the lessening of sanctions against Russia.

After secret Russian meeting, Trump team makes public moves in support of dropping sanctions.

Back in the U.S., Page attended the GOP’s platform planning week in Cleveland which began on July 11, a week before the Republican National Convention. One of the first orders of business was a surprising plank proposal to water down support for Ukrainian troops fighting Russian-backed rebels. Instead of sending the Ukrainians “lethal weapons”, the GOP pledged “appropriate support”.

Page attended a follow-up meeting with Jeff Sessions, Trump advisor JD Gordon and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy event staged by the Heritage Foundation on July 19. “Much of the discussion focused on Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Georgia,” according to delegate Victor Ashe.

Trump was officially nominated to lead the Republican ticket at the Republican Convention in Cleveland.  The day after the convention ended, July 22, Wikileaks published the first hacked DNC emails which they obtained from Russian hackers.  It’s notable that the Trump/Alfa/Spectrum servers showed increased activity at the same time.

The next day, July 23, Christopher Steele penned a memo to the FBI stating that Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine.

Trump got a boost in the polls from the Wikileaks DNC e-mail dump. On July 27, he publicly asked Moscow for even more help. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing,” Trump said at a press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be nice.”

At the same news conference, Trump made a less noticed but equally significant comment about Russian sanctions which lent credence to the details of what Steele alleged happened at the Page meeting on July 9 in Moscow. German reporter, Mareike Aden, asked Trump whether he would recognize Crimea, if elected. Trump replied: “Yes. We would be looking at that.”

On July 31, the Spectrum server had another unusual spike.

Behind the scenes, mercenary Erik Prince proposed dropping Russian sanctions and worked to build a back-channel with Russia.

Wherever you look behind the Trump campaign, the same names keep coming up: Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon, Peter Thiel, Betsy and Dick DeVos and Erik Prince. These seven continue to pull the strings of the administration, Russia collusion and the mass disinformation campaign which supported it.

It’s Prince who is known to have worked behind the scenes to open a back-channel between the Trump Administration and Moscow. Prince’s world-view also closely aligns with Trump’s foreign policy of detente.

“Think about it: If FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, can deal with Stalin to defeat German fascism in World War II, certainly the United States of America could work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. We don’t have to agree with the Russians on everything, or even on a lot, but we can at least agree that crushing ISIS in the Middle East is a very good idea.,” Prince is quoted in The Intercept. It may be coincidental, but it’s unusual that Prince’s brother-in-law owns the company whose server had repeated unusual links with the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank. It should be noted Prince’s company “Frontiers Services Group” also worked for the Chinese Government.

Mike Pence has close ties to pro-russian mercenary Erik Prince.

Which brings us to Vice President Mike Pence, who seems to be operating as a President-in-waiting, pending a Trump impeachment. This should trouble Americans because behind the scenes Pence is powered by the very same people who put Trump in office and is closely aligned to Erik Prince.

The Prince and DeVos clans have a long history of supporting right-wing causes from  bankrolling Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” to supporting anti-gay, anti-abortion organizations and ballot initiatives. Erik, was very close to Charles “Chuck” Colson, Richard Nixon’s “Watergate hatchet man” who Pence calls “a dear friend and mentor.” Erik Prince donated to Pence’s PAC “Principles Exalt a Nation”. After Prince’s Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in 2007, Pence organized a welcoming reception for Prince in Washington D.C.  The Prince and Devos clans also support and believe in establishing a Christian government in the US, just like Pence. 

While Pence claims he is not aware of any collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, it’s clear Prince not only acted in an advisory capacity for Pence when he headed the Trump transition team, he was actively involved in setting up a back-channel with Russia. Prince and Pence have been close friends and allies for at least a decade.

If President Trump is impeached and Mike Pence becomes President, the group of evangelical supporters who helped elect Trump may be closer to achieving their and Vladimir Putin’s goal. Jeremy Scahill puts it all in a far more Machiavellian way, “Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors,” says Jeremy Scahill.

Opinion: Is John Kelly our Alexander Haig?

The post Trojan Horse appeared first on Narativ.

Five of Donald Trump’s key advisers are linked to an attempt to buy Hillary Clinton’s missing State Department e-mails from a hacking broker on the dark web. 

For more than 40 years, Peter W. Smith was a fixture among Chicago’s elite. He was at once a high-flying private equity banker and a trusted Republican operative. “When Peter W. Smith talks, Newt Gingrich listens,” a 1995 article from Crain’s said about him. As Gingrich climbed the ranks of the Republican Party in the 90’s, Smith became his “No. 1 financial backer … and one of the top 20 contributors nationwide.”

Peter Smith’s connected life in business and Republican circles ended on May 14 when he died. Smith was 81 but the circumstances surrounding his death are shrouded in mystery. An obituary posted in the Chicago Tribune, lauded Smith’s work as a tycoon and Republican operative but it did not list a cause of death.

“I should say we do not know how he died,” says the Wall Street Journal’s Shane Harris.  “We made multiple attempts, both with family members and with associates of his, as well as government officials in the town where he lived, to try to determine his cause of death, and we were unsuccessful,” Harris told MSNBC.

The Wall Street Journal reporter had good reason to be inquiring about Peter W. Smith’s death. Just ten days before the 81-year-old private equity banker’s demise, he called up Shane at the Wall Street Journal and confirmed a story the reporter had been chasing.  Smith revealed he had mounted  an “independent” campaign to find the 30,000 missing e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server she used while Secretary of State. Smith was convinced the e-mails were out there, theorizing Russian hackers could have them.

Smith’s efforts to find the missing Clinton e-mails date back to last Summer, just a few weeks after the Washington Post revealed the hack of the Democratic Party servers was the act of a Kremlin-linked hacker. The operation launch also coincided with Donald Trump’s public request for Russian help in finding the documents. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” Trump said.  “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Peter W. Smith began assembling a team to work on the e-mail project.

As Matt Tait, a UK-based cyber security expert and former British spy, tells it, Smith contacted him “out of the blue”. He introduced himself as a Republican Party operative. “He mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “dark web” who claimed to have a copy of e-mails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine,” says Tait.

The U.K. based cyber security expert agreed to help verify the e-mails, theorizing the dark web contact was either a Russian cut-out (espionage speak for an arm’s-length agent of a nation-state), or a fraudster trying to “dupe Smith out of his money.”  Smith denied he intended to pay for the e-mails in his interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Tait stayed in contact with Smith in the following months but never did see the e-mails. He notes Smith regularly boasted of his links to the Trump campaign, particularly Lt-Gen Michael Flynn. Flynn briefly served as Trump’s National Security Adviser before a Justice department investigation found him to be compromised by the Kremlin. Before his death, Smith denied Flynn was involved in the operation but several e-mails obtained by the Wall Street Journal, suggest Smith was acting as a conduit for Flynn.

According to Tait, and others involved in the operation, Smith sent out a document on Labor Day last year, listing four groups involved in the e-mail scheme. Among them was a group labeled “Trump Campaign” which included a who’s who of Trump’s inner circle: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn and Lisa Nelson.

The Trump administration says it wasn’t involved with Smith’s scheme but isn’t denying the operation existed.  “If Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual,” a spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. Flynn is widely believed to be co-operating with the FBI investigation so pinning the entire thing on him comes at little cost to the administration. But what about the other four Trump advisers listed in Smith’s document? How deep was their involvement? That may be a secret Smith has taken to his grave.

The post A Dark Web appeared first on Narativ.

Over 12 weeks, beginning last Spring, the Trump campaign and Putin’s emissaries sealed a deal that could unravel his presidency.

In Washington scandals, all roads lead to The Mayflower Hotel. JFK stayed there in a permanent private suite, Bill Clinton taped his testimony in the Lewinsky scandal in the Presidential Suite, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was busted for cocaine possession there, and Eliot Spitzer hired high-end prostitutes in room 871. So it seems fitting that the biggest scandal in our nation’s history finds a setting in the hotel’s sumptuous Senate Room.

Jared Kushner was the first to approach National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn about hosting an event where Kushner’s father-in-law, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, could outline his vague foreign policy. Whether the meeting achieved its goal remains an open question, but it has become a significant point of interest for FBI investigators probing the Trump-Russia scandal.

As the National Interest editor explains, the magazine arranged everything about the meeting: “The menu, the venue, the seating,” to borrow a lyric from Hamilton. The Mayflower was chosen over the originally booked National Press Club, perhaps because the Press Club doesn’t offer hotel rooms on-site where personal or political business can take place in complete privacy behind closed doors.

The April 27 event was attended by a typical mix of Trump loyalists, interested observers, and a handful of ambassadors, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak’s attendance was symbolic, designed to underscore Trump’s main talking point: lessening Russian sanctions and building an alliance with Moscow.

After the speech, two dozen high-profile guests attended a small reception at the hotel. “Trump certainly knows how to put everyone at ease,” recalls Heilbrunn.

“He bounded into the room with a hearty ‘Hello, everybody!’ A kind of impromptu receiving line formed in deference to the man—as though he were already president. Trump doesn’t work the room. You come to him.” 

Senator Jeff Sessions was also present. While details of his activities at the Mayflower remain primarily undisclosed, the FBI has confirmed that it intercepted communications from Ambassador Kislyak, in which he informed his superiors in Moscow about a private meeting with Sessions at the hotel.

Despite numerous photos showing Kislyak close to Sessions at the Mayflower, the now-Attorney General denies any meeting took place. “I did not have any private meetings, nor do I recall any conversations with any Russian officials at the Mayflower Hotel,” Sessions testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. When pressed by senators, he adjusted his language to say, “It’s conceivable.” A conversation occurred, but he had “no recollection.”

SENATOR ROY BLUNT (R-MO): You didn’t have a room at that event where you had private meetings, did you?

SESSIONS: No, I did not.

BLUNT: So when you said you possibly had a meeting with Mr. Kislyak, did you mean you possibly met him?

SESSIONS: I didn’t have any formal meeting with him. I’m confident of that, but I may have had an encounter during the reception.

BLUNT: Alright, so you were there. You’ve read since he was there, you may have seen him, but you had no room where you were having meetings with individuals to have discussions at the Mayflower Hotel that day.

SESSIONS: No, that is correct.

Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, and Senator Jeff Sessions simultaneously take their seats at the Mayflower.

All of this is inconsistent with Sessions’ role as chairman of the Trump Campaign’s national security advisory board. Why wouldn’t he talk to the Russian ambassador? Time will tell if Sessions’ Senate testimony and FBI scrutiny stand the test of time.

To Moscow, with love.

Sessions introduced Donald Trump to Carter Page in March 2016. At the time of their meeting, Page was a little-known energy consultant with deep ties to Russia’s oil and energy sector. He quickly became a trusted advisor for the campaign.

Six weeks after the Mayflower event and ten weeks into the campaign, Carter Page traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the New Economic School. During his visit, he delivered a scathing critique of what he called “hypocritical” US policies. Page arrived on Friday, July 9, and by Sunday, he reportedly held a clandestine meeting with Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russian oil and energy giant Rosneft.

The secret meeting between Page and Sechin has been publicly confirmed, though the details remain speculative, based mainly on former MI-6 spy Christopher Steele’s findings. Steele reported that a quid-pro-quo was arranged: if Trump lifts sanctions, he would receive 19.5% of Rosneft or a portion thereof.

Steele’s source is believed to have been Sechin’s former Chief of Staff, who was fatally shot in Moscow in December. It’s also speculated in Russiagate circles that there was another leg to the Trump-Russia deal. Page is believed to have asked Russian officials for help with hacking on behalf of the Trump campaign. This seems to line up with an FBI-sourced report by CNN: “The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

Page was only in Moscow for three days. He returned in time to join fellow Republicans at the GOP’s platform planning week, which began on July 11, a week before the Republican National Convention. One of the first orders of business was a surprising plank proposal to water down support for Ukrainian troops fighting Russian-backed rebels. Instead of sending the Ukrainians “lethal weapons,” the GOP pledged “appropriate support.”

The following week, as the convention got underway in Cleveland, Page, Sessions, and Trump advisor JD Gordon met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Global Partners in Diplomacy event staged by the Heritage Foundation on July 19. “Much of the discussion focused on Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Georgia,” according to delegate Victor Ashe. Russia’s crippling sanctions are primarily a result of their incursion into Ukraine. Under oath, Sessions initially denied that this meeting took place but later admitted to meeting Kislyak when confronted by media reports to the contrary.

So let’s thread this needle. Sessions has a meeting he can’t recall with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower on April 27th. A member of his National Security Advisory Board, Carter Page, heads to Moscow in July and takes a top-level meeting with the CEO of Russia’s state-run oil company, Rosneft. A deal is allegedly struck: a piece of Rosneft in exchange for dropping sanctions and, to grease the wheels, some hacking help from Russia’s state-authorized team of cyber-criminals to help Trump get elected.

That hacking help came on July 22 – three days after Sessions met Kislyak in Cleveland. Wikileaks published the first hacked DNC emails obtained from Russian hackers. As Trump got a boost in the polls, he publicly asked Moscow for even more help. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing,” Trump said at a press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be nice.”

All of this happened under the watch of then-Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, who received $12.7 million in kickbacks from Ukraine’s former Russian-backed president and was paid $10 million a year on behalf of Putin’s ally, oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to further Russian interests around the world.

If the walls of the Mayflower could talk, they’d spill some of Washington’s seediest secrets.  That may not be necessary in today’s world of electronic surveillance. After all, any meeting involving Kislyak could well have been in earshot of the FBI, who had been surveilling him for quite some time.

The post Meet Me At The Mayflower appeared first on Narativ.

President Donald J. Trump is having a bad day, and things are about to get worse.

Tuesday, January 24, was relatively warm for a winter day in Washington DC. The town was still smarting from the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump the previous Friday and already, the administration was under investigation.

On that day, FBI investigators paid a visit to Trump’s National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn. They wanted to ask Flynn some questions about the nature of his relationship with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Investigators had inadvertently picked up the National Security Adviser’s texts and phone calls in their surveillance of the Russian ambassador. Flynn seemed to be leaking confidential information to the Russians, even promising to ease sanctions as soon as soon as Trump took office.

The interview deeply troubled investigators. He not only lied to them about the nature of the contacts with Kislyak but he seemed to have lied to the Vice President, and others, in the administration. A lie which was being repeated again and again, as fact, in public interviews.

Investigators returned to their office and sent a message up the chain to the Justice Department. They had sobering news for the Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Flynn had likely been compromised by the Russians. At the very least, the Russians had significant leverage over the National Security Adviser.

First thing on Thursday morning, Yates called Trump’s Counsel Don McGhan at the White House. She needed to see him immediately on a matter of extreme urgency.  When she arrived at the White House later that afternoon, she told McGhan about the DOJ’s concerns about Flynn. After inquiring how Flynn had done in his interview, he asked Yates to return the next day, to answer some additional questions.

That Friday marked the end of the first week of the 45th President. Early that morning, President Trump picked up the phone. He dialed the FBI Director James Comey.

“Can you come over for dinner tonight?” President Trump asked his FBI Director.

“Yes, sir,” Comey replied.

“Will 6:00 work?” Trump inquired.

“I was going to invite your whole family but we’ll do it next time,” the President said. “Is that a good time?”

“Sir, whatever works for you,” Comey replied.

“How about 6:30?” Trump offered.

“Whatever works for you, sir,” Director Comey responded.

The FBI Director hung up the phone and called his wife. He had to break the news to her that he’d have to cancel their dinner date that night. While Comey adjusted his evening plans. His boss, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, returned to the White House Counsel’s office.

“Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another White House official?” Yates recalls McGhan asking. Yates explained DOJ’s concern about Flynn’s actual conduct – which involved subversive contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Then, she added. “Flynn had lied to the vice president and others, the American public had been misled.” The “others” was likely a reference to the FBI. McGhan asked Yates if he could take a look at the underlying evidence. She said she would arrange that over the weekend.

James Comey arrived for dinner with the President at 6:30 and was surprised he was the only guest. The two of them sat at a small oval table in the center of the Green room. A couple of Navy stewards waited on them but they only entered the room to serve food and drinks, then left.

Twice before, the President assured Comey he would stay on as FBI Director so Comey was surprised the President brought it up again. Trump broached the uncomfortable topic by questioning the FBI Director’s reliability.

“I am not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but you could always count on me to tell you the truth,” Comey responded, assuring the President he wasn’t on anyone’s side politically.

“I need loyalty,” the President said.

“You will always get honesty from me,” Comey responded.

“That’s what I want, honest loyalty,” Trump insisted.

“You will get that from me,” Comey responded though still unsure of what that term meant to the President.

As the FBI Director left the White House that Friday night, he felt the message was clear.  He could keep his job, only if he demonstrated loyalty.

Over the weekend, Sally Yates worked on arranging a meeting for McGhan to view the underlying evidence. She called him first thing that Monday morning to share details but didn’t hear back from him until later that afternoon. She would never find out if he got to see the evidence. Trump fired Yates that night in tersely worded statement that said she had “betrayed” her country for not supporting his immigration ban. In hindsight, her “betrayal” may have had more to do with her handling of the Flynn investigation.

Flynn was forced to resign after just 18 days on the job. President Trump said it was because Flynn had lied to the Vice President. Trump failed to mention Flynn had also lied to FBI investigators. A felony.

Comey returned to the White House on February 14th for a counter-intelligence briefing of the President. Also there: the Vice President, the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner. As the meeting drew to a close, Trump indicated he wanted Comey to stay behind, alone.

“Why would you kick everyone out of the office?” Comey mulled in his mind.

“I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” The President said.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” He asked. “He is a good guy.”

“He is a good guy,” Comey agreed, recalling their positive interactions when Flynn was Director of Defense Intelligence but Comey said nothing of letting anything go.

The President and Comey had two other phone calls in the coming weeks. On March 30th, Trump asked if he was personally under investigation. Comey told him he wasn’t.

On April 11, Trump called to ask Comey if he could “lift the cloud” of suspicion being created by the Russia investigation, by publicly stating Trump wasn’t a target of the probe. Comey said he had referred that matter to the Deputy Attorney General.

By May 9th, as the Russia investigation began to close in on Trump’s family and Jared Kushner in particular, Trump fired Comey. The official reason for the dismissal was for Comey’s role in the Clinton e-mail investigation but the public face of the firing wore thin quickly. Within days, Trump was on TV admitting he fired Comey because of Russia.

“When I decided to just do it [fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia … is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

Now back at home as a private citizen, Comey bristled at the shifting excuses Trump had offered for his firing and the President’s labeling of the FBI as being in disarray. “Those were lies, plain and simple, and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them,” Comey testified before a Senate Committee today.

In fact, Comey himself had become “Exhibit A” for Obstruction of Justice. In firing the FBI Director, Trump had likely committed an impeachable act. “I have no doubt in my mind, I was fired because of the Russia investigation,” Comey told the hearing. What could be more obstructive than firing the lead investigator?

Up until that point, there was some evidence to suggest interference, but merely hoping someone “lets go” of something wouldn’t pass the high bar necessary for impeaching a President. Firing the FBI Director, and the Acting Attorney General for that matter, would. And by linking it all back to Flynn, Trump had also proved collusion with Russia.

In his testimony, Comey likened Trump’s request to “let go” the Flynn investigation to that of King Henry II, who was able to get Thomas Beckett killed in 1179 by asking his knights “who will rid me of the meddlesome priest?”.  The ending here looks to be far less fatal except, in all likelihood, to a Presidency without any respect for rule of law.

The post The Meddlesome Priest appeared first on Narativ.

Levashov hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city. From there, he made a small fortune peddling stolen data he gathered through phishing expeditions and building a botnet called “Kelihos,” described in his US indictment as “a network of computers infected with a malicious software that allows a third party to control the entire computer network without the knowledge or consent of the computer owners.”

Levashov allegedly controlled and operated the Kelihos botnet to, among other things, harvest personal information and means of identification [including email addresses, usernames and logins, and passwords] from infected computers.

“The Kelihos virus, which had been devised to spread spam, was used during the Russian election in 2012 to send political messages to email accounts on computers with Russian I.P. addresses. The emails linked to fake news stories saying that Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the businessman running for president against Vladimir V. Putin, had come out as gay.”

“Prison for Russian hacker accused of computer attacks during US elections.”

Citing FBI investigators, El Pais had confirmed sources Levashov was arrested for involvement in the hacking of DNC servers and other Kremlin operated attempts to destabilize the US Democracy.

“[Levashov participated] in a battery of computer attacks aimed at influencing the Presidential elections […] According to FBI investigators, Moscow organized an alleged hacking of Democratic Party computers, later filtering manipulated emails from Hillary Clinton and thus paving the way for Trump’s victory.”

Levashov’s wife, who was in the apartment with their son when the spam lord was arrested, told Russia Today: “I talked to my husband on the phone when I was at the police station and he told me that he was told something about a virus that he supposedly had created and that was related to Trump’s victory”.

The post The Pied Piper appeared first on Narativ.

The post All The President’s Men appeared first on Narativ.

Sally Yates revealed much more than you’ve read at today’s Senate Judiciary Hearing. She revealed an attempt by President Trump to cover-up his administration’s ties to Russia. She may have lost her job for it, but she could save the Republic. 

Sally Yates had no way of knowing it would be her last day on the job when she picked up the phone to call the White House counsel first thing on a cold and snowy last Monday morning in January.  The acting Attorney-General had promised WH Counsel Don McGhan she’d arrange for him to view the “problematic” evidence the FBI had on the National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s connection to Russia. She had made those arrangements over the weekend and it was her first priority on Monday to finalize those plans.

McGhan didn’t return the call until much later that afternoon.  By 9 PM that Monday night, Yates had been fired, so we don’t know if McGhan ever followed up to view the evidence. In a press release that night, President Trump said she had “betrayed” the American people.

On the face of it, Yates’ betrayal was not related to the Flynn matter but her refusal to implement an unconstitutional executive order banning nationals from 7 mostly-Muslim countries from entering the US but the newly revealed Flynn timeline, may explain why she was given 2 minutes to vacate her job after learning about her dismissal via this aggressively worded press release.

During the previous week,  Yates made two extraordinary visits on consecutive days to meet with McGhan at the White House. She had vital information to share: the National Security Adviser was not only lying to the Vice-President but was susceptible to blackmail by Russia. Appearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee today, Yates outlined the timeline and content of the meetings.

“The first meeting occurred on January 26, I called Don McGahn  and told him that I had a very sensitive matter that I needed to discuss with him, that I couldn’t talk about it on the phone and that I needed to come see him. And he agreed to meet with me later that afternoon.”

McGhan’s office was a “skiff” – intelligence parlance for a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility”. In that secure location, Yates could share confidential information about the “problematic” FBI investigation into Flynn. Yates says she went into a great amount of detail about Flynn’s potentially illegal activities and revealed Russia was in a position to blackmail Flynn because they were in possession of the identical information. “We believed Flynn was compromised by the Russians,” Yates says.

The Russians likely had the identical information because the FBI obtained it during surveillance of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.  The Washington Post would later report, Flynn was leaking sensitive information to Kislyak via phone and texts and illegally coordinating policy using this back channel to Russia’s most powerful envoy.  To make matters worse, Yates told McGhan, Flynn was lying to the Vice-President about it. She said action needed to be taken.

“We also told the White House Counsel that General Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI on January 24. Mr. McGahn asked me how he did and I declined to give him an answer to that. And we then walked through with Mr. McGahn essentially why we were telling them about this and the first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that General Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself,” Yates revealed today.

The following afternoon, Yates went back to McGahn’s office at the White House to answer 4 key questions. McGahn wanted to know why the Justice Department would care if one White House official was lying to another, even if it’s the National Security Adviser and the Vice-President? McGhan also wanted to know about the applicability of criminal statute to Flynn’s actions. He also asked if the White House acted, would it interfere with a current investigation and he requested to look at the underlying evidence. Yates said she would look into this and by Monday morning had arranged this request. Later that day, she had been fired.

It took 18 days for the president to act on Flynn.  He publicly defended his National Security Adviser’s unprecedented contacts with Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and only fired Flynn when the Washington Post obtained leaked documents revealing Flynn’s flagrant violations, even though he knew Flynn had lied to the Vice President and FBI investigators two and a half weeks earlier.

During those 18 days, Flynn participated in a call with Vladimir Putin, a dinner with the Japanese PM, was involved in national security matters related to North Korea and put Iran “on notice” for new sanctions.

Senator Al Franken at today’s hearings had this to say:

“Maybe, just maybe, he didn’t get rid of a guy who lied to the vice president, who got paid by the Russians, who went on Russia Today, because there are other people in his administration who met secretly with the Russians and didn’t reveal it until later, until they were caught. That may be why it took him 18 days, until it became public, to get rid of Mike Flynn, who is a danger to this republic.”

Flynn (and others) will be prosecuted for lying to the FBI, failing to disclose contacts with Russian officials under oath, failing to register as foreign agents and for failing to disclose payments from a foreign governments, among many other charges.

Sitting next to Yates at the Senate hearing today, the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper sounded an alarm.

“If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it.”

Why did Trump say Sally Yates “betrayed” the US? How could he call her “weak on protecting our borders” when she was the one courageous enough to sound the alarm on a clear and present danger within his administration? How could he fail to act on this information until the Washington Post revealed it? And how long does it take for what he calls a “hoax” to turn into a cover-up? Not long, thanks to Sally Yates.

The post The Sally Effect appeared first on Narativ.

Unnamed sources say the FBI now has details of how the operation to elect Trump colluded with Russia to win. Here’s what to expect.

Back in the Spring of 2012, the campaign of the incumbent President of the US offered one lucky supporter a “Dinner with Barack”.  Not just any dinner, mind you. Dinner with former President Barack Obama was going to take place at the West Village Brownstone of Sarah Jessica Parker with the “Sex and the City” star and other celebrities in attendance.

This extraordinary intersection of pop culture and US political power was no accident. It was the result Obama’s extraordinary data machine figuring out that some his supporters had an affinity to certain celebrities, Jessica Parker among them. The dinner contest was just one example of how the Obama campaign utilized “big data” to galvanize support for the president in a way no other president had ever done before him.

To be fair, Facebook was only 4 years old when Obama was elected the first time, 8 years-old the second time around, so being first was good fortune as much as foresight.   But to his campaign’s credit, they realized social media was a way to upend the establishment and win an election. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” declared then campaign manager Jim Messina.

As President Obama took a victory lap for his wins in 2008 and 2012, a team of geeky data crunchers were doing their own high-fiving for their role in winning and re-winning the White House.  Time Magazine revealed this effort after the election in a story about how data won the election for Obama.

What they revealed was:

“a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

Flash forward to 2016, and reality TV star and property mogul Donald J. Trump was eyeing the White House. As a “self-funded” campaign the billionaire was not utilizing much of his own cash to power his campaign but now it has emerged, he was relying heavily on a big data campaign of his own.  Not funded by his own wallet, but by the coffers of a foreign nation.

Trump had little to no celebrity support and he certainly wasn’t organized enough to build a date machine in the Obama mold but with Russia’s help he was able to create a data machine with impressive results. Central to their operation was a server housed at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The server, was described as “odd” by FBI investigators.  The server made regular check-ins with two other servers owned by Russia’s Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health.

Alfa Bank outwardly operates independently of the Kremlin but is largely believed to be a front operation for Vladimir Putin. Spectrum Health is a medical facility chain run by Dick DeVos, husband of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Brother-in-law to Erik Prince, The Blackwater CEO and Trump ally who is believed to have held a secret meeting in the Seychelles between UAE officials and Russia, on behalf of Trump.

“From May 4 until September 23, the Russian bank looked up the address to this Trump corporate server 2,820 times — more lookups than the Trump server received from any other source,” according to CNN. This accounted for 80% of connections to the server. The remaining 20% (714), were look-ups by Spectrum Health servers.

Now a few online bloggers, including Tea Pain and Conspirador have concluded that the server was reconciling a SQL databases – basically updating a giant spreadsheet of voter information, contact info and social media data so Trump and his Russian partners could spam, intimidate and influence the election.

This would be just like the Obama data machine only this time the data was illegally gotten by a foreign government.  Here’s a sample of the IP look-ups which has led analysts to believe what was going on here was a reconciliation of voters data.

The post Dial ‘C’ For Collusion appeared first on Narativ.

A terror attack on St. Petersburg and a chemical attack in Syria. Two events intricately connected to Vladimir Putin’s appalling intentions for the world. What you need to know about why Putin needs to be stopped.

Russia’s winters are said to be spellbinding and cruel. Nowhere is this true more than in in St. Petersburg, where the Telegraph says you can find the ‘proper’ form of the coldest season. “Frozen lakes, white sculptural landscapes, startling blue skies, snowdrifts groping the windowsills, a dry, sharp cold that crackles and snaps and presses your nostrils,” says the Telegraph.

St. Petersburg bears the name of its founder, Peter, the Great. Peter was the Czar who turned Russia from a country, into an Empire. It was after just one such empire-building offensive against the Swedes in 1703 that Peter dismounted his horse alongside the Neva River and carved a cross in the ground with his sword, declaring “here will be a city”.

St. Petersburg was born. An extraordinary port city emblematic of Russian architectural prowess and its global imperialist ambitions but also of its geographical cruelty. Russia is the world’s largest country, linking Europe and Asia, but it is mostly landlocked save a few brutally cold ports whose waters are frozen for long periods of the year.

“Russian strategists have, over the last two hundred years, sought to remedy this through a steady, but relentless drive to the seas,” says Global Security. For Russia, access to warm water ports is the primary strategic goal with which it can expand Russian power and trade to the rest of the world. All of Moscow’s foreign exploits, including its recent genocide in Syria, the standoff with NATO and the recent interference in US democracy, are best understood when viewed through this lens.

When I’m asked why should Americans care if President Donald J. Trump colluded with the Russians to gain office? This is the reason. The world’s nations have always measured their greatness through trade. Most of the world’s goods are still carried over seas and ships need accessible warm water ports to disembark their cargos. The US has quite a few, conveniently straddling Europe and Asia and two oceans. It’s given America an unprecedented edge over other countries. That’s been good for America and good for freedom, justice and equality. Conversely, Russia has suffered. Until now, America has won, Russia has lost.

If President Trump allows President Vladimir Putin to pursue his strategic objectives unfettered, he allows America’s greatest nuclear adversary to increase its global dominance. This will rebalance the scales of human justice and freedom away from Western-style democratic freedoms and towards a backwards leaning autocracy of kleptocrats with little concern for human rights. Russia wants to equal or supersede the US and become a true global superpower. Imagine a country which slaughters innocent children, rounds up people based on sexual orientation and executes political opponents with that kind of power? That is how serious the stakes of Russia’s interference in the U.S. really are.

Considering the brutality of Russia and its winters, it’s no wonder the country loves one of the world’s roughest sports: Ice Hockey.  I’m an occasional fan of the sport, and am always gripped by the “power play” – when a fouled player is taken off the ice – allowing the opposing team two minutes to do their best against a team short one player. The power play is a good analogy for what is going on right now geopolitically. With the cloud of suspicion over the Trump White House ever-growing, the mass confusion in US foreign and domestic policy, Russia is left to advance its geo-political interests unfettered.

This was likely not the outcome Putin was looking for when he influenced the U.S. elections, probably preferring his efforts would lead to détente between Washington and Moscow, but the current chaos still plays into his strategy.  While the Trump administration is weighed down by a domestic agenda and a looming scandal. Putin is able to continue his global game of chess, lining up access to warm water ports and aligning spheres of influence without a countervailing American presence.

And it’s already happening right now while no-one is paying attention.

Russia already has a naval base in Tartus in Syria, as a result of its alliance with Bashar al-Assad and in Sevastopol in the Ukraine, after its annexation of Crimea.

Russian troops are now focused on Libya. Moscow has deep ties to General Khalifa Haftar, a warlord who is in control of large parts of Western Libya, says Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the commander of U.S. Africa Command.

The port city of Tripoli in Libya used to be an access port for Russia under Muammar Gaddafi so it seems likely Putin is looking to bolster Haftar as a Libyan leader to regain access to the port and Libya’s large oil reserves. The U.S. says it also has evidence Russian troops are in Eastern Egypt supporting Haftar but also potentially growing their influence over Cairo.

Russia’s Mediterranean strategy has not been secret but that it is playing out in such dramatic fashion is spectacularly ballsy of Vladimir Putin. In 2015, the Russians openly declared their plan when they released the “Maritime Doctrine of Russian Federation 2020”, without of course revealing they also intended to hijack US and other democracies to pursue their goals.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly at the time that “…the Atlantic has been emphasized because of NATO expansion, the need to integrate Crimea and the Sevastopol naval base into the Russian economy, and to re-establish a permanent Russian Navy presence in the Mediterranean.”

Russia has also strategically aligned with Turkey, as that country is poised to leave the NATO. Turkey has the 6th largest air force in the world, the second largest army in Europe, after Russia, and the most powerful navy in the Mediterranean. In the past, Syria and Turkey have been adversaries but Moscow has been able to turn the tide in Istanbul by concocting a deal between itself, Syria and Turkey.

Iran remains the big question. Moscow can’t get land-access to Syria’s ports without crossing over Iran, which lies between the two countries. Now that we know Trump associate and funder, Blackwater CEO’s Erik Prince, held a back channel meeting with Russian and UAE officials in the Seychelles, it’s become clear that Iran is the pivot on which the Trump-Putin pact turns.

The thrust of the meeting in the Seychelles was, according to reports, to see if Russia would drop its support for Iran, in exchange for a more normalized sanctions-free involvement with the global community. That realignment will come at the cost of disrupting U.S. democracy and increasing Moscow’s presence in Libya, Syria, Turkey and wherever else Putin has his sights. If President Donald J. Trump can’t deliver a dropping of sanctions, Russia will remain loyal to Iran. Either way, Russia wins or at least forces the U.S. to play catch-up in this game of global 3D chess.

It may not seem it, but the world is at war. While the American presidency has been pulverized by Putin’s power play, our democracy is faced inwards while Putin and his corrupt allies can trample over the globe.

The good news about power plays, in hockey at least, is they only last two minutes. America can reclaim its footing if it also reclaims the moral high ground. This means mounting a serious opposition to Russia’s flagrant human rights violations and global ambitions. No-one wants a world full of injustice and genocide. Freedom has always been the source of U.S. power as leader of the free world. If we don’t continue to champion human rights, we risk plunging the entire planet into a long dark winter without hope and justice built in the image of its Russian architect.

The post Putin’s Power Play appeared first on Narativ.

How Vladimir Putin’s ‘Kremlin, Inc.’ is pulling the levers of power in the next White House and why President-elect Donald J. Trump doesn’t mind.

To understand the relationship, we need to understand how Putin rules. The Russian President controls his country through his party, the congress (Duma) and the liberal civil service which oversee the day-to-day operation of the government. He also wields power through a handful of Russian billionaires, commonly referred to as “the oligarchs” or as one Russian magazine calls them, “Kremlin, Inc.” As a unit, they represent one fifth of Russia’s annual economic output.

Putin inherited the oligarch system from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Under Putin, the faces have changed and power has been consolidated but its vast control over all of Russia’s key industries remains. He is the undisputed Chairman who blesses any deal made by the oligarchs and retains the right to hire and fire any oligarch at any time.

The Russian President meets with his heads of business often, either at regular evening parties at his dacha in Barvikha, West of Moscow, or at his Black Sea home, near Sochi. While Putin still controls the day to day operations of the government, he largely exerts power through the oligarchs, often using the companies as foreign policy instruments of power, as he did with Gazprom in the Ukraine.

Trump’s Secretary of State appointee and outgoing ExxonMobil CEO, Rex Tillerson’s relationship with Putin goes back almost two decades. Tillerson has been jockeying for power in Putin’s inner circle since. His break came in 2012, in an apparent coup of Russia’s oil industry co-ordinated with Putin’s Energy Tsar and ally, Sergei Sechin.

At the time, Russia’s oil output was controlled by two entities, state-controlled Rosneft and privately-held TNK-BP (a joint-venture between British Petroleum and a group of oligarchs led by Mikhael Fridman).

At this point, it may be useful to give you a bit of history on Mikhael Fridman. Forbes ranks him as Russia’s second richest man, valued at more than $15.3 Bn dollars. In the years following the demise of the USSR, he went from owning a window washing company to purchasing a biscuit factory and then, with his friends, launched Alfa Bank. He recruited Pyotr Aven, a Russian insider who back in the 90’s was able to help Vladimir Putin avoid corruption charges in the St. Petersburg government. Fridman climbed the ranks and was an undisputed oligarch at “Kremlin, Inc.”

As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, after considering a libel suit filed by the bankers, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”

Fridman was at once a Moscow insider and a thorn in Putin’s side. As TNK-BP was unraveling, Fridman and his partner began to lose influence at “Kremlin, Inc.” One former Alfa Bank employee recalled a ceremony a decade ago at which Putin awarded Aven a government honor. In typical Putin style, he couldn’t resist a wry remark as he presented the award.

Putin: “Remind me, why am I giving this to you?”
Aven: “Because I haven’t done anything you can put me in jail for.”
Putin: “No, not yet.”

In 2012, Fridman resigned as TNK-BP’s CEO, after falling out with his British partners and Putin. BP began looking elsewhere for access to the Russian market, and found it in a deal with state-controlled Rosneft to develop the prized Arctic resources in Russia – but Fridman blocked the deal.

Enter ExxonMobil Chief Executive and now Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson. He threw Exxon’s weight into the Arctic deal and won it in exchange for Rosneft’s access to energy projects in the US and globally. For his work, Tillerson was awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin – one of Russia’s highest honors. He was now firmly entrenched in Putin’s oligarch circle of power at “Kremlin Inc.” Fridman was on his way out.

Mr Putin – who presided over the deal signing at his Black Sea resort – called it one of the most important deals involving Russia and the US, potentially valued at $500 Bn. The deal was subsequently killed by President Obama’s sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine. As many have noted, the lifting of Russian sanctions will not only stand to enrich Exxon, it also gives Russia a substantial stake in the global oil market including, in the US.

In 2013, Rosneft consolidated its hold over the Russian oil industry. They bought out the oligarch’s share of TNK-BP for $27BN in a $55 Bn cash and stock deal, again presided over by Vladimir Putin – this time at his mansion outside Moscow. The deal made the state-run company one of the world’s largest producer of oil.

After the collapse of TNK-BP, Fridman and his co-horts left Russia, distancing themselves from Putin and have been left largely unaffected by US sanctions. In October, Slate magazine published an article citing well-regarded cyber-security sources who uncovered what they say is an unusual regular server connection between Alfa Bank and Trump Towers.

Which brings us to Carter Page – President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s now ex-foreign affairs advisor and point-man on all things Moscow. While fashioning himself as a foreign affairs analyst, his roots are as an investment advisor with a mixed track record in Russia.

In March, Trump listed Page as one of his top foreign affairs advisers when he spoke to the Washington Post Editorial Board but by July, Trump’s team was at pains to point out that he is not a representative of the campaign.

Page may no longer represent Trump, but he remains an advisor to sanctions-targeted Gazprom, run by another of Putin’s oligarchs, Alexey Miller.  Gazprom, is the crown jewel of Putin’s resource companies at “Kremlin, Inc.” The gas corporation has been heavily affected by US sanctions, yet Page has been involved in some of its biggest deals – including the development of The Sakhalin Oil And Gas Field. Gazprom’s former deputy CFO is now an official adviser to Page’s firm, Global Energy Capital LLC.

Gazprom is more than just a gas company, it is a Russian instrument of foreign policy and power. It was Gazprom that shut off gas to its biggest and most lucrative customers during the military incursion into Crimea. The company maintains a private army, employs a half million people and runs entire cities around Russia. Gazprom’s Alexey Miller has also hosted Secretary of State appointee Rex Tillerson in public forums.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov says, “although Gazprom is an international corporation, the largest shareholder is the Russian state. There is nothing strange in the fact that the relationship between the government and Gazprom is really very close.”  In, 2001, Gazprom, led a forceful takeover of NTV, a popular television channel that was openly critical of the government.

In July this year, Carter Page – still acting as a Trump adviser – met with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and Igor Diveykin, a high–ranking Russian intelligence official.

The meeting alarmed Washington’s intelligence community and outgoing Democratic Senator Harry Reid, who scribed a letter to FBI Director James Comey asking, “whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee?”

Page has denied the meeting took place calling the accusations, “absolute garbage” but regardless of whether the meeting took place or not, Trump’s advisor has been very vocal about President Obama’s policy of exporting American values.

Page recently told the New Economic School in Moscow, “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change.”

In February 2015, Page described the West as “football team bullies” citing “condescending mistreatment” of Russia, Iran and China. He likened the treatment of these nations to the treatment of slaves and blamed the US for spurring “economic disaster” in Russia and Ukraine.

Now Senator Reid, is calling on FBI Director James Comey to be investigated, comparing him to another famed Bureau Chief with political ambitions. “I did not believe Comey was the new J. Edgar Hoover,” Senator Reid said. “I thought that he would do the right thing for the country.”

So, what we know is that Trump is now indirectly connected to at least two of the biggest oligarchs in Russia. His Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson is one of Putin’s closest non-Russian friends and tied directly to business deals with Rosneft CEO Sechin. Trump’s ex-advisor, Carter Page, reportedly met Sechin in July and  is also an investment advisor to another oligarch, Alexey Miller of Gazprom.

Retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser is also connected to Putin. Flynn appears regularly on the Kremlin sponsored English language cable news network RT. Flynn flew to Moscow last year for RT’s gala and sat with Putin.

Then there’s John Bolton, who is being touted as a potential Deputy Foreign Secretary. Bolton is connected to the group of oil oligarchs and to Dick Cheney but that’s a story for another day.

And if you’ve been keeping score, Trump’s former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, worked as an adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, who was Putin’s puppet president of Ukraine.

There’s another factor driving a deep connection between Trump and Putin and that is liquid cash. While his net-worth is estimated at $3 Bn, his debt has climbed from $350M last year to $650 m this year. To finance this ballooning line-item, Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia because US banks have mostly black-balled Trump.

According the Washington Post, “since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump isn’t denying his appreciation of all things Putin. It’s his calculation that closer ties with Moscow are a benefit to Washington. He believes America’s policy of advancing human rights ahead of economic benefit is working against US interests. In a Trump world, anything that advances the country’s power is worth the price of doing business – even if it’s with autocratic rulers with a poor human rights record.

It should be noted, Putin’s aggressive stance on US politics comes at a time when sanctions have left him with a large deficit. Last week on Wednesday, the state sold off a 19% stake in Rosneft to Swiss Commodity firm, Glencore, with a sovereign wealth fund in Qatar as secondary funders. The $11 Bn dollar deal will help Kremlin pay for the growing deficit but it won’t turn the tables on the US.

Putin is betting “Kremlin, Inc.” can do that with its new ally in the West, President-elect Donald J. Trump. With Tillerson at State and Flynn as National Security Adviser, Putin will have direct influence over world affairs and the country’s military strategy, potentially working around the President-elect. This would represent an unparalleled intrusion into the most important levers of foreign influence and give Putin unprecedented power to not only benefit Russia, but to exert pressure on any nation on the planet.

The post THE RUSSIA HOUSE appeared first on Narativ.