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

Showdown at Pikalevo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin’s secret agent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flipping Oleg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Trump, Manafort saw a way out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the start, Deripaska was tracking Manafort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Julian

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

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

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

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

Mastermind, secret agent or confidential source?

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

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

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

Deripaska remains unindicted.

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Exposed: The many possible crimes of Paul Manafort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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