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.

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The post A Bear in Our House appeared first on Narativ.

The War We’re In. Part Two.

Exclusive. Erik Prince was building a weapon of mass disinformation intended to attack Iran over social media in 2015. His former business partner believes he deployed the WMD targeting the U.S. instead. Zev Shalev searches for the invisible weapon and wonders if it’s still operational today.

Every day for the last four years, I’ve woken up, poured a cup of coffee, typed several keystrokes on my laptop, hit enter, and headed into combat in the most surreal of battlegrounds: Twitter.

There is no comparison between Twitter and actual physical war, but that doesn’t mean the stakes are not the same. In fact, as we’ve been discovering, the consequences of an information war may be far greater than conventional warfare.

For decades, global anti-Democratic forces have been waging war against the US: A battle for the hearts and minds, a clash of ideologies and narratives, fought by hacks and lies, fueled by data, and existential consequences.

I began writing this blog a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016. I’d been on Twitter since 2009 but only casually. People began appearing in ever-growing numbers after the election searching for answers, and they found each other.

Suburban moms by day transformed into narrative warriors by night. Activists, screenwriters, lawyers, and academics researched until their eyes hurt. They shared data nodes within groups and organized them in threads until complex factual narratives came into focus. It was by far the most significant crowdsourced investigation ever conducted. And it was spontaneous.

That’s how we learned how Russia helped win the election for Trump: with cash laundered through the NRA, and a Facebook manipulation tool called Cambridge Analytica. It’s also how we discovered Russia’s alliance with a group of Middle East nations, domestic white supremacists, and Christian fundamentalists.

Something else had slipped unnoticed into Twitter at around the same time. A formidable stealth weapon of mass disinformation. 

No one knows what this WMD looks like, what makes it so powerful, and where it’s based. But the weapon’s ability to project messages and ideology across social media with such volume and presence is inexplicable. No matter how definitively the volunteer squadron of social media researchers and journalists proved something, the other side could swamp it with a counter-narrative. It’s almost like they had a perception-shifting machine pointed directly at us, which turned whatever we proved into a dull, far-away voice.

In The Wizard of OZ, it’s hard to see the wizard hiding behind the curtain, but if you look carefully enough, you can make out his outline. That’s what this story is about, so let’s go see The Wizard.

A WAR BY ANY OTHER NAME…

Once Trump was elected, many of us assumed the volume and ferocity of the social media attacks would die down, but the exact opposite happened,

While the media covered him like any other president, Trump plundered our democratic institutions. The intelligence community was insulted, the state department gutted, the FBI questioned, and the media decried as fake. His tweets about former president Barrack Obama seethed with contempt. 

Trump’s assault on democracy accompanied a Wagnerian-like flood of pro-Kremlin and anti-American propaganda. 

It was all designed to stoke our primal instincts and drown out reason.

A few may have felt a stirring they hadn’t felt before, of belonging to something bigger than themselves, but for most, it was fear—each tweet triggering a binary emotion.

Every morning, Trump launched an incendiary tweet about an already red-hot situation, then retreated to his private office in the Oval to watch the ensuing hysteria engulf the nation. Cable anchors were happy to comply, secretly flattered the most powerful man in the world was watching them. The bot networks amplified all of it.

No one had ever witnessed the weaponization of social media on this scale, and as far as I could tell, American agencies were not responding. 

It was an impossible fight of David and Goliath’s proportions. The Twitter crowd of investigators was small. We’d duke it out with the other side’s formidable machine and their army of real-life digital soldiers in what I can only describe as a whack-a-mole of narratives.

Nothing in my twenty-five years as a journalist (which included a baptism by fire in the dying days of Apartheid) had prepared me for the onslaught of propaganda, agents provocateur, intelligence assets, double-agents, swarms of digital bots, and the complexity of organization that we confronted.

I wrote my stories in long-form posts on this blog. 100+ chapters are all told, like a novel unraveling in real time. Russia House, Confirming the Kompromat, Dial C for Collusion, Facebook the Nation, Meet Me at The Mayflower, Facebook’s Dirty Little Secret, and For Guns and Country, to name a few.

There were no guides or rules. I thought about walking away but just couldn’t.

STATE DEPARTMENT WARNING

When Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine in April 2014, a forward-thinking diplomat typed a memo to his superiors at the State Department: 

[The Russians] unleashed an unprecedented social media propaganda campaign to shore up domestic support for President Vladimir Putin’s policy and to support anti-Kyiv protest activity on the streets of Southern and Eastern Ukraine. Official and allegedly unofficial social media accounts have spewed forth an unceasing stream of disinformation and gained more and more online followers. Russia may be swaying people through sheer volume or at least discouraging people from participating.

Unknown diplomat in State Department memo, Dec 2014

The diplomatic cable mentioned two social media accounts, Artem Klyushin and Konstantin Rykov – two Billionaire loyalists of Vladimir Putin. Considering their outsized role in the social media campaign of Ukraine in 2014 and their proximity to Putin, they should have been on the radar of US officials investigating 2016, yet we’ve heard very little about them.

Rykov is a Kremlin propagandist. 

Klyushin and his now ex-wife owned a bot development company, The Agency for Development of Innovative Technologies (APRIT), which was under contract for the Russian government in 2015 when many Kremlin-sanctioned campaigns to support Trump began.

Both men have ties to the Internet Research Agency – a social media content factory in St. Petersburg quixotically helmed by Putin’s former chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which carried out disinformation assaults on the Us in late 2016.

Another close connection to Vladimir Putin is another oligarch who shares the lasts name of Prigozhin. Iossif Prigozhin is a well-known Russian music producer. He is regularly on Klyushin’s Instagram feed, as is Emin Agalarov. That’s how the 50-year-old bot-maker met Trump at the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow. Agalarov introduced them, and reporters spotted them regularly that week.

Klyushin boasts of an ability to “alter emotional and logical perceptions of situations” and claims his company could produce and amplify content through 1,000 accounts and millions of subscribers.

He doesn’t claim an ability to see into the future, yet somehow Klyushin’s wife knew enough to tweet this in January 2015, months before the world learned Trump was running, and yes, while under contract to the Kremlin.

“I’m sure @realDonaldTrump will be a great president. We’ll support you from Russia! America needs an ambitious leader”.

Klyushin celebrated Trump’s victory at an election night party in Moscow for Trump supporters. He bragged on Instagram that Trump would not have won without his help. Still, it’s hard to know where the bravado ends and the hubris begins. 

Klyushin often tweets advice to Trump, which days later often became presidential policy while Trump was in office.

The Senate Intelligence Committee said it believes Klyushin and Rykov were involved in manipulating social media perceptions in the 2014 Ukraine and the 2016 US elections.

Of course, achieving mass dissonance in the US is on a very different scale than in Ukraine. 

This may explain why Klyushin spends so much time in Dubai. That location shows up most on his Twitter posts, perhaps intentionally, but more likely because he forgot to turn off his geolocation.

POWER BROKER

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, gets the bulk of attention regarding Trump’s sordid relationship with Middle East countries, but it was the UAE’s crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed who was the power broker between the Trump campaign and the Gulf countries.

MBZ flew to New York City in Dec 2016 without informing the State Department, which is standard protocol. Obama officials were even more surprised when MBZ arrived at Trump Tower to meet Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn.

A month later, MBZ hosted a meeting in Seychelles – this time with Erik Prince and Russian envoy Kiril Dmitriev. Also present was George Nader, a senior advisor to the crown prince and a regular fixture on the Trump campaign (and current convict for human trafficking).

Prince represented the Trump Administration in the Seychelles talks, although he’s been on MBZ’s payroll for over a decade. Prince’s company Reflex Response (R2) was headquartered in Abu Dhabi and 51% owned by the Emiratis. Abu Dhabi is Prince’s official place of residence.

In 2015, The CEO of another of Prince’s companies was in Abu Dhabi and said he heard Prince discussing a psy-op that would weaponize social media to effect regime change in Iran.

Gregg Smith was the CEO of Frontier Services Group between 2014-16 and has a long history with Prince. Smith says he overheard a conversation between Prince and two former CIA agents working for him.

“Prince had a couple of former CIA officers that he employed, and they would sit there and talk about that psy-op running against the Iranians to try to get them to overthrow the regime there,” Smith told me on a recent Narativ podcast, “He just took the same psy-op and brought it to America.”

How could they target the US with a psy-op and evade detection? The answer is both macro and micro. Let’s begin with the macro. The CIA does not physically spy on the UAE, meaning there’s no human intelligence, which, as one former official told Reuters, amounts to a “dereliction of duty”.

While MBZ has been close to American presidents (notably Republican ones), he’s also maintained a close working relationship with Vladimir Putin, and his head of intelligence services, Sheikh Tahnoun Bin Zayed, maintains close ties with both the Russians and Israelis. The UAE has expanded its regional ambitions greatly in recent years operating militarily in Yemen and Syria and running covert military ops in Libya, notably under Prince.

In a sign of how sour the US-UAE relationship has become, President Joe Biden is yet even to call the crown prince almost two months into his administration. A significant diplomatic slight for what was until recently a major Middle East ally.

The micro answer to the above question is even more surprising.

PROJECT RAVEN

The US used UAE as a base for covert operations since the 1970s. The relationship was so close the US helped the Emiratis launch their own version of the National Security Agency. Today it’s called the Signals Intelligence Agency (SIA).

Dubbed “Project Raven” by the Americans, the NSA contracted out former NSA staffers to the Emirati agency beginning in 2008. They spied on thousands of people on behalf of the Emiratis, including some enemies of the crown prince.

“Raven” was based in an Abu Dhabi villa. The ex-NSA contractors trained SIA officials on top-secret technology and used protocols very similar to those used by the NSA.

“The incentive was to help in the fight against al-Qaeda. The UAE is a very good counterterrorism partner. You need to remember the timing back then, post 9-11,” Richard A. Clarke, a former US counterterrorism czar who helped build SIA told al-Jazeera. “The NSA wanted it to happen.”

That may have been the intention, but in 2016, one former NSA contractor discovered SIA was hacking the smartphones of American journalists.

The Ex-NSA staffers built the Emiratis an extraordinarily valuable resource. A network of remote servers allowed the Emiratis untraceable internet access to the world.

“Using fake identities and Bitcoin, the Infrastructure department anonymously rented servers worldwide. Those remote servers allowed Raven to launch attacks from a network of machines that cannot be traced back to the project.”

This seems to me to be something of extraordinary consequence. The only way to sustain a continuing social media manipulation psy-op like the one Prince was overheard describing would be to use a distributed network that would be untraceable to Twitter or any other bot detectors. For clarity, there’s no evidence to suggest the UAE used this facility for this purpose, but it strikes me as something you would need to run an operation like that and warrants further analysis.

One final note. One of Artem Klyushin’s ‘advice’ tweets to Donald Trump was a fawning endorsement of Erik Prince’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan, suggesting the two men know each other well enough to discuss military strategy.

Facebook The Nation

by Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy September 12, 2017

Psychological Warfare

by Zev Shalev and Tracie McElroy September 5, 2017

Dial ‘C’ For Collusion

by Zev Shalev April 8, 2017

Here’s a selection of three Narativ pieces about data and psychological warfare in the 2016 election, beginning with one I wrote in April 2017.

MINDF*CK MACHINE

In May 2018, Chris Wylie exposed Cambridge Analytica’s use of 50 million Facebook profiles to build what Wylie called Stephen Bannon’s “mindf*ck machine. Days later, Channel 4 revealed CA’s use of honey traps to interfere in elections. Cambridge Analytica and its parent company quickly disbanded. 

CA’s owners transferred the company’s data and technology to Emerdata, co-owned by CA’s original owners, the Mercers, a Chinese associate of Erik Prince and Ahmed al-Khatib, who has close ties to the Emirati Crown Prince. The existence of Emerdata was discovered by fellow Twitter investigator Wendy Siegelman. The name was Emerdata derives from the Emirates.

Siegelman also reported another SCL alum Nigel Oakes, calls UAE home 

It’s hard to imagine the Crown Prince, who was the first and only foreign leader to meet directly with the Trump transition team in December 2016, was collecting all these assets and gathering operatives like Klyushin, Prince, Nader, and Oakes, all while hacking the phones of US journalists, for any other reason other than some sort of political operation.

So let’s imagine you had the mind-fucking instincts of the Russians, A highly functional distributed server network purpose-built by the NSA. And access to the raw data of 50 million Facebook users. Would that be enough to launch a psy-op in the US?

Almost.

To manipulate the entire Twitter population individually, you would need Artificial Intelligence. Only A.I. could process such a vast amount of data accurately and quickly. The search for a firm able and willing to undertake such a task led me to Israel’s Fifth Dimension.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Fifth Dimension was another one of these private spyware companies that spawned from Israel’s famed 8200 division. The company’s chairman Benny Gantz was until recently considered the likely successor to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg – another Putin acolyte – was the principal investor in Fifth Dimension until he received US sanctions for meddling in the 2016 elections and other malign activity. The April 2018 sanctions effectively froze the oligarch’s assets in the Russian gas sector, but they also surprisingly caused Fifth Dimension to shut down.

It’s unusual for a company specializing in the very sought-after space of machine learning to shut down, especially one with the backing of the Israeli Defense Force – even if their biggest investor backed out. Any private equity firm would jump at the chance to invest in a tech start-up like that, but not Fifth Dimension.

Fifth Dimension’s closure coincided with the shuttering of another Israeli spy firm with ties to the Trump campaign and Erik Prince. PSY Group worked on social media manipulation for the campaign for over a year and was shut down in December 2018. Prince first approached PSY-Group for a project in 2015.

Fifth Dimension transferred its residual technology to yet another Israeli tech firm, NSO, that specialized in the hacking of smartphones – the same hacking firm involved in Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination.

Was Fifth Dimension playing a more significant role in the 2016 election, which has somehow evaded the law? Or was the company’s technology used by others after it shut down? Or might we never know because we don’t spy on our allies?

It appears that many Israeli private spy tech firms like PSY-Group, Black Cube, NSO, and more recently, Carbyne and Cellebrite are fronts for Israeli and Russian stakeholders to surveil citizens of other countries or interfere in their domestic affairs without damaging official Israeli-American relations. Whether Fifth Dimension was, too, is impossible to say but worth assessing.

That’s as far as I can take you on our journey to see the Wizard, but hopefully, I’ve provided you with enough to see his outline, so keep an eye out for him the next time you wade on to Twitter.

We battled that monstrous machine for four years, fighting a war for the heart and minds of Americans. A race against the clock to avoid a second Trump term. A war most Americans didn’t even know existed. And a war we won, for now.

You can read part one of ‘The War We’re In‘ here.

The post Erik Prince’s Psy Op On U.S. appeared first on Narativ.

Exposing Donald Trump and Bill Barr’s cynical plan to use a military clampdown against protesters to help them win the November election. Strategic Analyst @EricGarland joins Narativ’s @ZevShalev.

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

Showdown at Pikalevo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin’s secret agent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flipping Oleg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Trump, Manafort saw a way out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the start, Deripaska was tracking Manafort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Julian

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

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

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

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

Mastermind, secret agent or confidential source?

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

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

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

Deripaska remains unindicted.

The post Deripaska appeared first on Narativ.

Henry Kissinger played a significant role in getting Donald Trump elected with Russian help, and it’s not the first time he betrayed his country for a Presidential nominee.

Richard Nixon would have taken the circumstances surrounding the Chennault Affair to his grave if it weren’t for a moment in space and time which placed the archived memos of Nixon’s Chief of Staff in historian John Farrell’s hands.

It was 2016. Farrell hit the historical equivalent of winning the Powerball when the Nixon Library granted him access to some of the last documents released from Nixon’s Presidency.  He came across memos by Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, from the 1968 presidential campaign.

Farrell recognized the notes as confirmation of a rumour which had persisted for decades. The Nixon campaign had colluded with the South Vietnamese to scuttle President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks to end the Vietnam War, just as those talks appeared to be nearing a successful outcome.

In the Summer of ’68, Nixon’s election support was cratering as a result of Johnson’s overtures to the South Vietnamese. Nixon knew he’d lose the election to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president if a peace deal were struck before election day.

Henry Kissinger, who would later become Nixon’s National Security Adviser, started the whole thing. In ’68 Kissinger was a little-known, 45-year-old Republican strategist who manoeuvred his way into the peace talks as an advisor and, in an act of considerable betrayal, leaked news of the negotiations to Nixon.

Kissinger’s calculus was personal and not political, although it certainly could have been influenced by his connections in Russia and China. He knew he’d get a cabinet position if either campaign won, but as a practitioner of realpolitik, he also knew a diplomat with his skill-set would have far greater opportunity under Nixon and a much higher profile in a prolonged war. He was also covering his bases.

Faced with a choice between peace and power, Nixon made a predictable decision. Along with Haldeman, he hatched a plan which would be tantamount to treason but would land Nixon the White House. It became known as the Chennault Affair.

As Kissinger leaked details of Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, Nixon hatched a plan that would become known as The Chennault Affair

Nixon and  Haldeman enlisted the help of a prominent Republican fundraiser with connections to China. Anna Chennault struck a glamorous figure as she wielded power, money and influence in the US-China lobby and within Republican circles.

The affair was named after her because Chennault was also Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government. She convinced them to stall the Johnson talks, promising a better deal, if Nixon were elected.

In four pages of notes attached to memos from his years as Chief of Staff, Haldeman had left behind clues for future investigators like John Farrell, to discover. They proved that the Chennault Affair, which Nixon often dismissed as a “canard,” was a true story.  In the memos, Haldeman hand-wrote that Nixon ordered him to “monkey wrench” the Vietnam peace negotiations and that Nixon wanted to “keep Anna Chennault working on SVN.”

As Farrell read Haldeman’s notes, the cruelty of Nixon’s plan struck him. There is no doubt the memos were held back for as long as they were because they revealed Nixon won the White House at the cost of American lives.

President Johnson was furious when he discovered Nixon’s betrayal, calling it treason, but he couldn’t prove it.  The spy agencies had obtained intercepts of calls between Chennault and the South Vietnamese ambassador, pleading with him to “hold on,” and assuring him “we are close to winning,” but there wasn’t conclusive evidence of  Nixon’s involvement.

Even as peace talks collapsed and the election lost, Johnson never spoke publicly about the affair, although he did confront Nixon in the Oval Office. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage [South Vietnam] not to come to the table,” Nixon is heard saying on White House recordings.

Nixon had good reason not to fess up.  The affair was likely a violation of the Logan Act. That would have meant far more severe consequences for Nixon than a break-in. Watergate meant impeachment; treason spelled death.

Watergate brought Nixon down, but as far as Presidential scandals go, the Chennault Affair was far more consequential, not only because it potentially extended the war for years but because it revealed the lengths to which Nixon would go to seize power.  The deaths of 1000’s of American soldiers in Vietnam was not too great of a price for the man who would become the 37th President.

Haldeman died in 1993 without ever revealing the affair. Chennault was buried in Arlington Cemetery. She always denied her role was consequential. Of the four main conspirators,  Kissinger is the only one still alive today.

Kissinger became a towering figure in global affairs by often favouring profit and practicality over principles, even if it meant skirting the law and cost lives.

Kissinger has had his foot on the scale of global power for over half a century. Over the years he’s been accused of committing genocide in Cambodia, encouraging death squads in Chile and Argentina and more recently, of looking passed Russia’s atrocities in Syria and the annexation of Crimea.  He believes the world would be a better place if strong US and Russia relations could co-exist with the Kremlin’s global misbehaviour.

“The long-term interests of both countries call for a world that transforms the contemporary turbulence and flux into a new equilibrium which is increasingly multi-polar and globalized,” he said. “Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.”

That thinking is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears. Kissinger has had a close relationship with Putin since they first met in the early 90’s. Next to actor Steven Seagal and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Kissinger is the closest connection Putin has to Washington, D.C. and the peculiar way it handles itself.   He is also friends with Donald Trump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when it came to a political marriage between Putin and Trump, Kissinger was the inevitable matchmaker.

If Time Warner was the proposal, the Mayflower was the engagement party.

Henry Kissinger faced the prospect of a damp Manhattan reception as he made his way to the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle in March 2016. He was the star attraction at a swanky power lunch hosted by executives of the media company and was to speak about US-Russia relations.

The Center for National Interest co-hosted the lunch.  Nixon founded the Washington-based think tank in 1994 and Kissinger serves as its Honorary Chair. The Center is a remnant of a bygone era, a place where fossilizing former titans of business and politics can lay their hat when fate, age or circumstance counts them out of the game.

Dimitri Simes is the Center’s president and the publisher of its magazine, National Interest. The Center appears to operate like any other think-tank, but it has a reputation for an extremely pro-Russian ideology.

Jared Kushner sat quietly, absorbing the scene.  The soon-to-be son of the next President of the United States was invited by HBO president Richard Plepler and former Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, who both sit on the Center’s governing board (a fact which deserves greater scrutiny). CNN president Jeff Zucker, who at the time reported to Bewkes, was also present at the event.

After lunch, Kushner met Kissinger and Simes. The encounter was a formal introduction, not a chance New York meet and greet. Kissinger, it would emerge, was trying to broker a relationship between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

In the ensuing weeks, Kushner would ask Simes and the National Center to put together one of the pivotal events of the Trump campaign timeline: a foreign policy speech scheduled for April 2016, entitled “America First.”  It was to be a public announcement of Trump’s pro-Russia foreign policy platform.  If Time Warner was the proposal, The Mayflower was the engagement party.

From that moment, Kushner took over the bulk of the campaign’s foreign policy, while Simes began organizing the Mayflower event.

Simes invited Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and other foreign diplomats, he arranged for the venue to be moved from the National Press Club to the Mayflower Hotel and organized a pre-event meet and greet which would include guests like Kislyak, Michael Fynn, Jeff Sessions and Kushner (who met Kislyak for the first time at the event).

Simes is himself an intriguing figure.  He is directly connected to Putin and keeps in regular touch with Kremlin insiders.  In 2013, he sat alongside the Russian President on a panel and was effusive as one can be. “I fully welcome President Putin’s tough stance, not because I am not a patriot of the United States, but because I believe that with regard to the great powers, baby talk is not the way to agreement. You need to understand what you can expect from another country, and you need to understand where there is resistance.”

Simes also chairs the Center’s advisory board which includes Alexey Pushkov, the former head of the Duma’s international-affairs committee.

The Center has also repeatedly intersected with key Kremlin figures in Trump-Russia, Alexander Torshin is Deputy Governor of Russia’s Reserve Bank.  Torshin and suspected Russian spy Maria Butina played a significant role in influencing the NRA to become an intermediary of Russian money funnelled to Trump’s campaign. Torshin and Butina had several interactions and meetings with the Center, which remain unexplained.

After Trump was elected, Kissinger felt emboldened to come out of the shadows.   A report in the German tabloid Der Bild headlined ‘Kissinger to prevent new Cold War’, claimed the former envoy was working towards a new relationship with Russia which included the U.S. accepting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Kissinger, now 95, had proved himself just as shrewd a diplomat as he was at 45. While it is clear Kissinger played a vital role in aligning Putin and Trump’s interests, it isn’t clear if he knew anything about Putin’s cyber plans to manipulate the electorate or hack DNC emails, not that it would have changed much. There’s a good reason the New Yorker trumpeted in a headline in 2016,  “Does Henry Kissinger have a conscience?”

The post Kissinger appeared first on Narativ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Paradise Papers link Jared Kushner to Kremlin cash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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.

Exposed: The many possible crimes of Paul Manafort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Blood Money appeared first on Narativ.

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

Putin’s laundered billions, Trump and the GOP.

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

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

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

Rohrabacher has known Putin for decades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Panama Papers appeared first on Narativ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Fall Of Pompeo appeared first on Narativ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post A Dirty Little Secret appeared first on Narativ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Facebook The Nation appeared first on Narativ.

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.

Exclusive: A newly launched Russian passenger ferry was detained for carrying suspected military cargo destined for North Korea. The new evidence Moscow is supplying Kim Jong-Un with missile technology to threaten the U.S.

On May 14, North Korea sent the first of three successive chilling messages to the U.S. It was the successful launch of an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) capable of hitting the U.S. territory of Guam. The launch surprised analysts because the IRBM had an estimated range of 4,500 KM (2,800 Miles).”This range is considerably longer than the estimated range of the Musudan missile (a previous type of North Korean missile), which showed a range of about 3,000 km in a test last year,” said David Wright in his blog allthingsnuclear.

Despite sanctions, Russian ferry service to North Korea begins on May 9.

So it’s notable that as Pyongyang began the latest battery tests of missiles, a Russian ferry service was launched from the Russian port city of Vladivostok to the North Korean port of Rajin. The ferry service is billed as a cargo and passenger venture and is operated by a Russian-owned company based in North Korea. Analysts consider the ferry service unusual considering the heightened tension surrounding the Pyongyang regime, not to mention the limited potential for trade from a heavily sanctioned country like North Korea.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry says there’s nothing unusual about launching North Korea’s only international ferry service under the cloud of growing international concern about Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Reuters she “didn’t see a connection” between the new ferry service and political issues. The ferry’s Russian operator, Investstroytrest, said it was purely a commercial venture that was developed with no subsidies or involvement from Moscow.

The Man Gyong Bong is believed to have set sail on her maiden voyage from Rajin to Vladivostok on May 9 to join the World War 2 victory memorial events in the city. It undertook the return 12 hour journey the next day, May 10. The ship can carry up to 1,500 tonnes of cargo in its three dry holds and boasts 50 cabins, slot machines, a shop, a sauna and a karaoke room for “merrymaking”.

Russian ferry detained by customs officials for suspicious cargo destined for North Korean military.

Rajin is just 12 hours drive away from the May 14 IRBM launch site of Kusong. It’s at least conceivable cargo arriving on May 10 or 11 could have been used in the May 14 launch. It is notable, the more voyages the Man Gyong Bong took, the greater the leaps in North Korea’s nuclear missile program.

Barely a month after the ferry began service, on July 4, North Korea launched the second of its unexpected missile launches. This time its first successful Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) with a strike range well into the U.S. mainland. The launch pleased Kim Jong-Un so much he was quoted as saying ” [Those] American bastards would be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary,” according to Korea’s state-run news agency, KCNA.

The Man Gyong Bong continued to shuttle cargo between Russia and North Korea on at least nine round-trips unfettered until July 14. On that Friday, Russian customs officials detained the ship for 16 hours for carrying cargo that could aid North Korea’s military.

“There is a possibility of violation of the rules of the Eurasian Union and violation of Russian legislation in terms of customs procedures regarding the export of goods that contribute to the development of the capabilities of the North Korean armed forces,” said Michael Khmel, the Deputy Director of the ferry operator, Investroytrest.

The ferry was allowed to continue on its journey the next day, July 15, but it’s unclear if the suspicious cargo was allowed to remain on board. A travel agent in Vladivostok says she regularly books passengers on the voyage. “Our company sends tourists on this route every week, typically groups of three to five people. More often than not, these are scientists or those who organize visits for children to North Korea,” she said.

13 days after the ferry was allowed to continue on its journey, North Korea surprised the world again. This time with a new longer range Inter-continental missile (Hwasong-14) launched at 11:11 Pm local time, on July 28. It flew 47 minutes and appeared to be capable of reaching almost all of the United States.

North Korea makes missile advances with Russian-made engines.

This launch caught analysts by surprise – particularly what looked like Soviet-made RD-250 rocket engines which powered the missiles. “It appears that they sourced that engine from a foreign entity and they have successfully incorporated that engine into their missiles,” says Michael Elleman, a former consultant at the Pentagon.

The New York Times published a story citing the source of North Korea’s newly received RD-250 engines as being of Ukrainian origin but this was strenuously denied by Kiev who pointed the finger at the Kremlin. “We believe that this anti-Ukrainian campaign was triggered by Russian secret services to cover their participation in the North Korean nuclear and missile programs”, said Oleksandr Turchynov, the secretary of the Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. It’s worth noting, Russia denied North Korea launched the ICBMs, contradicting U.S., Japanese and North Korean claims.

Even if they were of Ukrainian origin, The Times says the rocket engines could have been stockpiled in Russia and were obtained via Russia. Considering suspicious military cargo caused a 16-hour delay in the ferry’s departure on July 14, less than two weeks before the launch of North Korea’s second ICBM which used the RD-250 engines, there’s now growing evidence that North Korea’s recent missile success may be Russian-made or obtained and perhaps delivered on an suspiciously timed ferry service.

If you liked this story, you may want to read “Wag The Dog” about Russia’s history of involvement with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

The post Ferry Service appeared first on Narativ.

This weekend’s death of 32-year-old protester, Heather Heyer, in Charlottesville, Va. plays into Vladimir Putin’s plan to sow chaos in the U.S. 

“Chaos, isn’t a pit” says Littlefinger in Game of Thrones. “Chaos is a ladder.”

“Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions”.

“Only the ladder is real,” Littlefinger says. “The climb is all there is.”

Game of Thrones is more than just a brilliant masterpiece of modern-day literature and television, it is an allegory for our times. In the same way winter came to the seven kingdoms, so we are facing the winter of our civilization.

For decades, the West has ignored the rise of despots cloaked in shields of traditional values, nationalism, guns and violence. We’ve welcomed their blood money, and allowed them to seep into our institutions. And now that they’ve gained a foothold, they are sowing chaos.

It’s no coincidence then, that our winter approaches from Russia, a country whose geographic fate has sentenced her people to the harshest season and to generations of monstrous leaders. The latest is Vladimir Putin, who views sowing chaos in enemy states as a viable tactic to gain power, to climb the ladder of global power.

This weekend, a white nationalist careened his car into a crowd of counter-protestors in Charlottesville, Va. killing 32-year-old para-legal, Heather Heyer, and injuring 19 others. As the tragedy unfolded on live TV, one man was seeing the fruits of his labor. That man is Vladimir Putin.

For Putin, chaos is a ladder.

The Russian President is not shy about his intentions to sow chaos, he openly declares it.

In the guiding strategic document of Putin’s regime, the Gerasimov Doctrine, Russia’s General Valery Gerasimov outlines a new type of war – a “hybrid war” where information and protests are weaponized to greater effect than tanks, guns and nuclear weapons. “Non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals … have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gerasimov concludes.

Russia’s Chief of the General Staff goes on to outline “the use of special-operations forces and internal opposition to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state, as well as informational actions, devices and means that are constantly being perfected.”  In other words, use propaganda and protests to polarize a population and sow chaos behind enemy lines.

This is how Russia was able to pulverize the Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, how they helped Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan come to power, how they stoked ISIS and helped Bashar al-Assad and how they support extremists on the right and left in Germany, France and the U.S.  The Kremlin bolsters the fringes to polarize an enemy’s population and weaken the middle. And while the enemy is in chaos, Russia climbs the ladder.

What do these ‘active measures’ look like in the U.S.?

1. Russia openly supported the National Rifle Association (NRA), the first major endorsement for the Donald J. Trump and a major donor to his campaign. The NRA used to be a fighter for second amendment rights but now creates ads inciting anarchy, a war against Muslims and calls on North Korea to bomb California with nuclear weapons.
2. The Kremlin fostered allies in the so-called alt-right and white supremacists like Richard Spencer, David Duke and Jared Taylor. The very same activists who found a home in Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart. 
3. Moscow fueled the flames of discord by gaming Google and Facebook’s algorithms to boost alt-right sites like Breitbart and Infowars and Russian propaganda outlets like Sputnik and RT using Russian bots and private data stolen from hacked voters rolls. Using micro-targeting, they preyed on the fears about gun confiscation, gay marriage and Sharia Law by delivering fake and hyped news to social media news feeds.
4. The Russians actively groomed Donald J. Trump, a candidate with deep ties to Russian money and money-laundering, surrounding him with Russian operatives like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.
5. Together with President Trump, the Kremlin is now sowing doubts in the institutions which have made America a shiny beacon on the hill like democracy, an independent judiciary, the FBI and the media.
6. Moscow supports the regime of Kim Jong-Un with trade and nuclear arms to raise fears in the U.S. and could even start a distracting war, conveniently on their border.

The end result is chaos and now the death of a 32-year-old protester in Charlottesville. Would we have an emboldened Nazi movement in the U.S. if it weren’t for Russia’s “active measures” and Donald Trump? It’s unlikely. Is Russia also fomenting the far left? Absolutely. From Jill Stein to California’s odd secessionist movement, the Kremlin’s pernicious puppetry is visible. Russia’s goal is not ideological (although the Kremlin is more successful with right-wing groups aligned to Russia’s own despotic policies). Putin’s goal is chaos.

Why chaos? It’s a ladder. It’s designed to distract the U.S., so Russia can continue its global misadventures and regain a global footing. Don’t take my word for it, take Putin’s Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation, General Valery Gerasimov:

“A perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”

It’s those last two words, civil war, which should worry sober-minded Americans of all political persuasions. Now is not the time to feed into the hysteria, it’s time to coalesce and fight the winter invaders. As Cersai Lannister says in another episode of Game of Thrones, “when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”

The post Chaos Theory appeared first on Narativ.

Could Donald Trump drag the U.S. into war with North Korea to save his presidency? If Vladimir Putin has his way.

In the 1997 satire, Wag The Dog, Dustin Hoffman played a political spin doctor who manufactured a made-for-TV war to rescue the flagging political fortunes of an incumbent president accused of fondling a young girl scout. The fictional scheme worked to increase the public’s support of the film’s president and turned around his political fortunes.

Fast forward 20 years and Wag’s satirical device is finding its way into the real and bizarre presidency of Donald Trump. This time, the war is real and threatens the lives of millions of people caught in the crosshairs. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is cast as villain but you don’t have to look far to see the strings connecting Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The ‘pravda’ about North Korea’s nuclear missiles.

Michael Elleman, a former Pentagon consultant, had three words to describe video of North Korea’s July 28 inter-continental ballistic test. “It shocked me,” Elleman told the Washington Post. “It seemed to come out of nowhere”. Not only does the new missile put Pyongyang’s nuclear program further ahead than anyone expected, it gives the regime a missile capable of striking most of the U.S. and Canada.

Elleman noticed something else alarming about the new North Korean ICBM. The Hwasong-14’s liquid fuel engines are very similar to a 1960’s-era Soviet missile RD-250. How did the North Koreans make these advances so quickly? Elleman and other are concerned they may have done so with Russian help.

Moscow’s support for North Korea dates back decades to the Soviet Union, a strategic alliance enabled by a shared border and ideology. As recently as 2015, Moscow allowed several North Korean nuclear scientists to work at Russian nuclear sites and study at its scientific academies. It’s also known that former Soviet-era scientists have been employed by the Pyongyang regime. In their 2014 book, “North Korea: The Politics of Regime Survival” Young Whan Kihl and Hong Nack Kim, are more definitive on Russia’s involvement:

“Some restricted arm and weapons material have reached North Korea from Russia. There is a danger that North Korea nationals working in the criminalized Russian Far East could become involved in smuggling nuclear material and technology. Russian companies have been among the suppliers of North Korea’s nuclear program”.

In 2017, Russia boosts trade and military ties to North Korea

This year, Russia has stepped up economic and military support for Pyongyang just as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have escalated. In the first two months of this year, trade between Russia and North Korea jumped 73% vs the same period last year. The Kim regime has begun talks to acquire a long list of Russian-made arms and Russia has moved its forces to its border with North Korea.

By increasing trade to the beleaguered regime, Vladimir Putin increases leverage over the isolated regime, and by extension the United States. This makes Kim Jong Un beholden to Vladimir Putin in much the same way Syria’s Bashar-al Assad is. With Donald Trump in the White House, Vladimir Putin has the kind of war he likes to wage. One in which he can play both sides off against each other so he controls the outcome.

“When you consider all the different flashpoints the United States and Russia have, this is a perfect opportunity for the Russians to sort of stick it to the United States a little bit more,” Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, told CNBC.

Fanning the flames of war.

“President Trump is really going to stand up to Kim Jong Un,” General Jack Keane told Fox and Friends this week. “It’s very scary for all of us Americans, especially when you learn that they can reach America,” the Fox News anchor opined. “Next week, it might not be a test, it might be reality.”

To be factual, nothing ‘nuclear’ could happen to the U.S. next week as North Korea doesn’t have the capability yet but the Fox News alarm seems to be building a Wag The Dog narrative for Trump. If Trump confronts Kim, Putin can play peacemaker. Everyone can be “greater” together. Former Bush ethics lawyer, Richard W. Painter, agrees. “Kim Jong Un is asking for it and Trump needs a distraction,” Painter tweeted. “China should stop Kim or this could end badly.”

What would a Korean conflict actually achieve? It would not only embroil the U.S. military in another far away place, endanger the lives of millions of people and provide a distraction for Russia to advance its troops into the Baltic states and the South Caucasus. The end result would be a disaster for the U.S. and only serve the strategic interests of Russia but it could also save the Trump presidency.

Wag The Dog ends with footage of a real war rising from the ashes of a fabricated one. The implication of this plot line is chilling in our current circumstance. Now that Trump has been forced to sign a new Russia sanctions bill, he will try blame congress for any escalation.

With an angered Russia, and an emboldened and unstable Kim Jong Un, the best laid plans of a war designed to distract can set off the tinderbox that is the Korean peninsula.  This won’t be just because Pyongyang knows how to build a nuclear missile. It will be because Russia continues to play a destabilising role in the world. When it comes to North Korea, keep your eye on the ‘khobst’.

The post Wag the Dog appeared first on Narativ.

What does the FBI takedown of a Russian money-laundering organization mean to Vladimir Putin and the man he helped install as U.S. President?

President Vladimir Putin was angry. He kept a group of his key cabinet ministers up until nearly 1 am on a recent Russian morning to lecture them on the country’s crypto-currency sector.

“I can straight-up tell you the president is completely mad about this,” recalls Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov. “The most significant issues about growth revolve around the digital economy and technological leadership,” Shuvalov told a bitcoin conference in St. Petersburg.

Putin has reason to be worried. Oligarchs have syphoned $335 Bn out of Russia since 2005. Putin himself is believed to be worth $200 Bn. When you’re stealing that kind of money, you need a fast and effective way to launder it and bitcoin is perfect for that type of money-laundering. The crypto-currency’s anonymity and global reach also makes it ideal for Russia’s interference campaigns in foreign elections.

This week, the FBI took down one of Russia’s biggest bitcoin exchanges, BTC-e.

Alexander Vinnick, 38, was arrested in Greece for laundering $4 Bn in dirty money through his bitcoin exchange. $2.2 Bn stolen from the Japanese bitcoin exchange, MtGox, and $1.8 Bn from hackers, drug traffickers and embezzlers. The FBI claims Vinnick is one of the world’s biggest crime dons.

Investigators also seized the exchange’s servers. The data on those servers could provide important evidence linking Russia’s organized crime organizations and the hacking of last year’s U.S. election.

Vinnick’s arrest comes as the U.S. has begun to systematically dismantle Russian organized crime networks around the world. Last week, they shut down dark web AlphaBay and they’ve arrested spam lord Pyotr Levashov, who has been linked to the hacking of the DNC.

Deputy PM says Putin is completely “mad” about this.

As investigators close in on the font of his power, Putin faces a real liquidity crisis.

Soon after that late-night tirade about bitcoin with his ministers, Putin met with Vitalik Buterin, the 23-year-old Russian founder of the world’s second most popular crypto-currency, Etherium, perhaps with an eye to ‘nationalizing’ it.

At the same time, Putin’s state-run Sberbank announced it intends to launch its own national crypto-currency. Sberbank CEO Herman Gref let it be known the new Russian bitcoin will be “the only cryptocurrency freely buyable and sellable in Russia” and will likely operate on its own blockchain, evading international prosecutors.

Trump loves bitcoin, too. 

Herman Gref has close ties to President Donald J. Trump. They were introduced to each other at the 2013 Moscow Miss Universe by a Russian oligarch whose deputy offered Donald Trump Jr. dirt on Hillary Clinton in June 2016. Gref and Trump are also both linked to the money-laundering Bank of Cyprus. Perhaps not too coincidentally, the Trump administration has been enthusiastic about introducing bitcoin into the U.S. government bureaucracy.

Russia’s unprecedented cyber attack on the U.S. election in 2016 was a multi-layered campaign which included disinformation, an unexplained server link to Alfa Bank in Trump Tower, hacking DNC servers, voters rolls and voting machine vendors, along with Wikileaks disclosures. (Wikileaks itself was saved by millions of dollars in bitcoin deposits despite an international blockade).

An operation of the scale of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election is not cheap and requires the very kind of anonymity and global reach crypto-currencies provide. The FBI is now surely following the BTC-e blockchain (bitcoin’s ledger) for links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

In Watergate, investigators followed the money. In Trump-Russia, they follow the bitcoin.

The post Bitcoin & Consequence appeared first on Narativ.

President Trump needs to answer questions about the Trump Organization’s ties to terrorist organizations and his support for their state-funders.

On May 10, President Donald Trump invited Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-ambassador Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office. During that meeting, he revealed to his guests key information which compromised an Israeli spy who had infiltrated ISIS.

“Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat,” Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe wrote in the Washington Post. “The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the US ally or intelligence capability involved.”

Russia has supported ISIS extensively both directly and indirectly for some time.

ISIS supplies oil to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Russian-made weapons from Assad’s arsenal regularly find their way into the hands of ISIS. A former FSB counter-terrorism specialist has revealed that Russian security forces helped recruit thousands of Russian-speaking Jihadis for ISIS, and that Russia deployed air defense capabilities to prevent U.S. air attacks on ISIS. To be clear, ISIS is secretly funded and armed by Russia even as Moscow declares the terror group an ‘enemy’ in public. It’s convenient for Putin to control both sides of the war. So much easier to win.

If all of this sounds outlandish, consider how Putin came to power and its historical echo of Hitler’s Reichstag fire. In September 1999, as the Yeltsin era was coming to an end in Russia, four apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. Putin’s response was resolute: “We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If they are in an airport, then in an airport, and, forgive me, if we catch them in the toilet, then we’ll rub them out (mochit) in the toilet…. The question is closed once and for all.”

That was then. What we know now, is that Russia’s FSB was behind blowing up those apartment buildings. According to Boris Berezovskiy, a Yeltsin-era businessman, the explosions were “intended to unite Russians in fear and in a desperate desire for a new, decisive, even aggressive leader who would spare no enemy.” Putin is quite adept at acting tough in the face of a threat he has created, even terrorism against his own people.

Trump hands Syria, Russia, Turkey and Iran a major victory.

Russia’s main mid-east ally in the war for Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria is Turkey, which has the world’s 6th largest military. On July 19th, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency leaked the positions of 10 U.S. military posts in northern Syria, drawing swift criticism from the Pentagon. “The release of sensitive military information exposes Coalition forces to unnecessary risk and has the potential to disrupt ongoing operations to defeat ISIS,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway said.

Why would Turkey, a NATO ally, compromise the U.S. and help ISIS? Under President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, Turkey has been folded into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. With Putin’s guidance, Erdo?an has quashed democracy in Turkey and openly supports the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. Erdo?an also enjoys the support of President Trump who, In May, praised Erdogan’s efforts to bring stability to Syria.

Now, Trump has handed Turkey and Russia a significant victory by ending a CIA program to arm Syrian rebels fighting Assad and working alongside the U.S. to defeat ISIS. “Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests,” according to the Washington Post.

The U.S. is also conspiring with Russia in a cease-fire in parts of Syria which analysts believe protects and emboldens a re-emerging al-Qaeda. “Current US strategy empowers al-Qaeda, which has an army in Syria, is preparing to replace ISIS .?.?. [and] is more dangerous than ISIS,” says a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It’s a play right out of Putin’s playbook and helps Russia more than any other nation state.

It’s worth recalling Trump’s former national Security Adviser Michael Flynn was on the Turkish payroll to the tune of $500,000, and also compromised by the Kremlin. Facts he failed to disclose before taking office.

Trump Organization linked to Iran, terror funding.

Azerbaijan is a former Soviet Republic which is a vital conduit between Russia and Iran. Along with Georgia and Armenia, the countries form the South Caucasus, and Vladimir Putin considers the area as a major goal for Russian expansionism.

Baku in Azerbaijan is not the type of place you’d find an ultra-luxury Trump Hotel, but there is one, although it never opened. A brilliant and exhaustive article by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker details the ties between the Trump organization and Zika Mammadov, a corrupt Azerbaijani with deep ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. While the Trumps don’t own the hotel, they did receive licensing and other fees for their role in building it. Ivanka Trump was involved in every design detail and even showed off her work on Instagram.

Davidson posits that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (which funds Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations) laundered drug and nuclear arms material trafficking money through the Trump Hotel.

“Investigators of financial fraud like to say that government corruption, money laundering, and other illicit behavior often form a “nexus” with even more troubling activity, such as financing terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction,” wrote Davidson. “This appears to be true in the Baku deal.”

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) believes the Trump Azerbaijan project needs to be investigated as a possible violation of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “The Trump Organization’s Baku project shows the lack of ‘extreme vetting’ Mr. Trump applied to his own business dealings in corruption-plagued regimes around the globe. . . . Congress—and the Trump Administration itself—has a duty to examine whether the President or his family is exposed to terrorist financing, sanctions, money laundering, and other imprudent associations through their business holdings and connections.”

Warm-water ports, by any means necessary.

This week, Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan will begin joint military exercises in the Caspian Sea. This should be viewed as a pivotal turning point in Kremlin’s expansion into the South Caucasus. If Putin continues his march into Georgia and consolidates power in Azerbaijan, the new “Russian Empire” will have direct access to the Mediterranean Sea through Turkey and Syria, and to Asia through Iran. Russia’s has long sought access to warm-water ports, in an attempt to gain dominance over liberal-leaning democracies like the U.S. and its allies.

The military exercises and geo-political realignment also underline a growing partnership between Russia and Iran – two countries actively supporting and funding terror organizations like ISIS and Hezbollah.

Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran’s involvement in terrorism and state funding of terrorism are also war crimes and warrant investigation by domestic prosecutors and the International Criminal Court in the Hague (although Russia, Iran the U.S. are not currently party to the ICC). It would be an astounding turn of events if a sitting U.S. President is openly aiding and abetting Russia and Iran and if his businesses have profited from dealings with these states.

The post Crimes Of War appeared first on Narativ.

There’s more to Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails than meets the eye.

In the shadow of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Donald Trump was feted by Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his pop-star son, Emin. “I’m in Moscow for Miss Universe tonight,” Trump tweeted on November 9. “Picking a winner is very hard, they are all winners. Total sellout of arena. Big night in Russia!”

Trump’s Russia visit in 2013 was far more than just an exercise in showmanship. Agalarov arranged at least one two-hour dinner for Trump at Moscow’s Nobu with high-powered Kremlin officials. Noteworthy among them, was Herman Gref, CEO of state-run Sberbank. “[Trump] is lively with a positive energy and a good attitude toward Russia,” Gref said in an interview. Trump was equally effusive. “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people,” Trump told Hugh Hewitt in 2015.

Post sanctions, an effort to launder Russian money.

A year after the Moscow Miss Universe, the U.S. and E.U. imposed sanctions on Sberbank after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Sberbank CEO Herman Gref began looking for a way to move roubles out of the country. He found it in 2015. Gref’s son and another oligarch bought the Bank of Cyprus as a go-between for illegal Russian funds. A Russian laundromat, if you will. The deal was overseen by the bank’s vice-chairman, Wilbur Ross.

“Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. Paul Manafort, Trump’s Campaign Manager, also used the Bank of Cyrus to launder some of his own dirty money, including $12.7m he illegally got from a pro-Kremlin party in the Ukraine. Wilbur Ross, the chief engineer of the Russian-Cyprus deal, is now Trump’s Commerce Secretary, linking a key presidential ally to the Cyprus-based ruble washing machine.

Russian oligarch offers dirt on Hillary Clinton.

A year after the Bank of Cyprus was acquired by the Russians, on June 3 last year, an e-mail popped into Donald Trump Jr.’s inbox from British Publicist Rob Goldstone. Goldstone represents Emin Agalarov, the pop-star whose father, Aras, partnered with Trump in Miss Universe. The same oligarch who introduced Trump to Sberbank CEO, Herman Gref, who indirectly owns the Bank of Cyprus. The e-mail offered the Trump campaign explosive “kompromat” on Hillary Clinton:

“The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with [Emin’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” Goldstone wrote to Don Jr.

“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin,” Goldstone said.

“If it’s what you say, I love it,” Don Jr. replied.

The eldest Trump son looped in then Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner has ties to another Russian bank and diplomats. A few days later, Manafort and Kushner attended the follow-up meeting with Russian state attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9, 2106.  Also present was Ike Kaveladze, Aras Agalarov’s US based deputy, who is suspected of laundering $1.4Bn in Russian dirty money through fake Citibank accounts in 2000.

Senate, House committees probe Trump’s role in Russian money laundering.

Donald Trump’s personal connection to Russian oligarchs, their money-laundering deputies and Wilbur Ross raises an important question. What role, if any, does the Trump Organization play in laundering dirty Russian money? Furthermore, did Trump’s Russia support come as part of a cash-fueled relationship?

Senate and House Intelligence Committees are now looking for specific ties to money laundering. This week, they finally began receiving data from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN’s mission is to combat money laundering and protect national security from illicit use. If investigators find proof of Trump’s role in Russian money laundering, it seems like the probe could reach a very different level of criminality.

The post Trump’s Role In Russian Money Laundering Investigated 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.

Vladimir Putin personally ordered an interference campaign to disrupt the 2016 U.S. elections. History will judge him harshly.

It wasn’t always like this. Not always. For a couple of years towards the end of the Second World War. The US and Russia were partners against the Third Reich. In the early 1940’s, as the world raged with war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin made a pact to defeat Adolf Hitler.

Roosevelt’s affection for Stalin was so heartfelt he dubbed the Russian leader, “Uncle Joe”. Roosevelt penned a letter to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in March, 1942. ‘I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department,’ boasted FDR. “Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better,” Roosevelt wrote.

The partnership briefly flourished and Hitler was defeated after a post-war alliance was negotiated involving Britain, the U.S. and the Soviets at Yalta. Things quickly changed after the war. A month before Roosevelt’s death in 1945, the president expressed his growing weariness of “Uncle Joe”. “We can’t do business with Stalin,” Roosevelt said. “He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” After Roosevelt’s death, Harry Truman quickly distanced himself from the Russian tyrant.

To hear director Oliver Stone tell it, the US, not Stalin, reneged on a plan to set up 5 nation post-war alliance to check the rise of another tyrant like Hitler. Keep in mind, Stone is now so thoroughly soaked in Kremlin Kool-aid, he could serve as Putin’s chief propagandist. On Charlie Rose recently, Stone gave us a window into Putin’s warped view of history.

“America should — was very grate — should have been even more grateful but because Mr. Roosevelt died. Mr. Truman didn’t have the same attitude toward the Soviets as Roosevelt did. Roosevelt saw a grand alliance between the Soviet Union, Britain, China, and the United States. That grand alliance never materialized,” says the Putin Interviews director.

Putin – through Stone – seems to be re-litigating history while at the same time, whitewashing Josef Stalin’s bloody regime, which oversaw the imprisonment and death of millions of opponents. Roosevelt and Stalin’s partnership was borne out of expediency and a shared interest in defeating Hitler even though the president wrongly believed that he could turn Stalin into a “Christian gentleman”. In reality,  US values and strategic interests could never really coalesce with the Soviet’s, considering Stalin’s iron grip.

Fast forward 77 years and another Russian tyrant, Vladimir Putin, has a grand vision of building a US-Russia alliance which could “make the world great again – together”, as billboards lining Russian highways want us to believe. What made the Roosevelt-Stalin bromance succeed, and will doom this one to failure, was their shared enemy: Hitler’s Third Reich.

Putin is well aware he needs the same type of motivating factor to build an alliance with the US.

Enter ISIS. I’ve written before that ISIS was, and likely still is, funded and armed by the Kremlin. It should surprise no-one that big countries fund insurgencies in other countries as proxies. The United States has done it, and so does Russia. For Russia, it’s Bashar al-Assad, ISIS and Hezbollah. Absent another foe, Putin now wants to help the United States defeat a monster of his own making. This isn’t just theory, it’s right out Putin’s playbook.

Gen. Valery Gerasimov is the architect of what’s dubbed “Gerasimov’s Doctrine” which is often cited as the underpinning of Russia’s asymmetrical war against the US. Put simply, it involves creating a pretext for military action, through cyber warfare, proxy insurgency and propaganda. By supporting ISIS, Putin believes he’s created the perfect nemesis for a US-Russia alliance to defeat. ‘The enemy of your enemy is your friend’, as it were.

Putin’s strategy to stoke ISIS failed with the Obama administration, so he decided to install a president with whom he could work. The Washington Post now reports, Putin personally ordered a cyber and influence attack to hack our democracy.  The effort may have elected a puppet president, but the strategy is doomed to failure. Putin is a good tactician to be sure, but like Stalin before him, he lacks a basic understanding of the most important factor of a successful partnership: shared values.

If Vladimir Putin wants Russia to be a part of the civilized world of nations, he needs to stop supporting tyrants like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and ISIS, pull out of the Ukraine and Crimea and stop inciting global tension and terrorism. If Russia is to be considered a trusted partner, she needs to look inward, modernize a struggling economy (per capita GDP has plummeted 41% from US$15,543 in 2013 to $9,057 a year in 2015) and return legitimate democracy to her people.

The world stands on the threshold of incredible promise, innovation which will cure humanity’s greatest ills, from cancer to climate change, global hunger to poverty, terrorism to warmongering. Vladimir Putin is a singular figure standing in the way of human progress at a time of vital need. He should step aside. If he doesn’t, he’ll go down as one of history’s most reviled leaders.

The post A Monster Of His Own Making 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.

Jared Kushner and his father-in-law, President Donald J. Trump, have more connecting them than Ivanka Trump. 

On April 19 last year, Donald J. Trump was taking a victory lap after winning the Republican Party nomination. In his speech, he mentioned by name a number of bold-named businessmen who were there to hear him crow. Carl Icahn, Howard Lorber and Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Trust.

“The great Steven Roth,” Trump extolled. “Steve’s building a big building on Central Park South, it’s a tremendous success.”

“I said, ‘Steve, congratulations on the building,'” The newly-minted Republican presidential nominee said.

“He said, ‘Donald, it’s nothing compared to what’s happening with you.’ Is that right? My man!”

Trump and Roth have been friends (and sometimes business foes) for over 30 years.  They jointly own the 1290 Sixth Avenue office tower. Trump and Roth became business partners after Trump threatened to sue his former partners for trying to sell it to another party without his permission. 1290 Sixth Avenue became the second largest in Vornado’s portfolio but by no means the only marquee property in Roth’s sprawling Manhattan empire.

One other is 666 Fifth Avenue, which Roth’s Vornado Trust co-owns with Jared Kushner’s family. Jared made news in Manhattan’s real estate circles when he purchased the trophy building for $1.8 billion, using mostly borrowed money. By all accounts, Kushner overpaid for the building by paying twice as much per-square-foot than any other Manhattan building sale before it, according to the New York Post. Tellingly, the deal closed on Jared’s 26th birthday, Jan. 10, 2007.

It was an expensive birthday gift by any measure but for the young real estate scion it represented a giant statement to Manhattan. Two years earlier, his father, Charles Kushner, was imprisoned for 14 months after pleading guilty for tax evasion charges and for making illegal campaign contributions. Before exiting prison, Charles turned over his holdings to his eldest son to manage a business free of an ex-convict CEO. Jared was just 25. If his father’s prison sentence wasn’t enough for the young heir to handle, the circumstances that led to it, tore the Kushner clan apart.

Before being charged in 2005, Charles Kushner heard his brother-in-law was talking to investigators about his misdeeds. To gain leverage over him, Kushner paid a “very attractive, high-end call girl $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a Bridgewater, NJ, motel after she pretended to need a ride when her car broke down,” according to the Post. Jared’s father had the whole motel encounter taped and sent it to his sister, Esther. She turned the tape into the feds. Classic kompromat.

Now it seems, Kushner family history could be repeating itself. Investigators want to know if Jared has kompromat all of his own. Only this time, the disparaging evidence is financial in nature and it’s the Russians who could be holding it over him.

666 Fifth Avenue, The trophy building Jared bought for $1.8 Bn in 2007 has proved to be a financial noose around him and the family. By 2008, the building was generating just 70 cents on every dollar it owed.  Under pressure, Jared was forced to sell the pricey store space for $525 million to a partnership in 2008 and a 49 percent stake in the office portion to Stephen Ross’ Vornado in 2011. Yes, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump share more than wife and daughter, they share a business partner. A $1.2 Bn mortgage on Jared’s trophy building is due in just two years which unpaid, could destroy the family fortune.

Congressional investigators and the FBI are now probing a secret meeting Jared had with Vladimir Putin’s banker at Trump Tower in New York in December last year. The White House and the Russian bank have offered conflicting explanations for the meeting between Kushner and Sergei Gorkov.

The post Ties That Bind appeared first on Narativ.

Russia hacked vital election infrastructure before the election. Did they rig the vote?

Some time within the week of November 3, 2016, the FBI held a hastily convened conference call with Florida’s 67 county election supervisors who operate a specific type of election voting system. They had sobering news for the officials: Russia had successfully hacked the vendor of Florida’s electronic voting machines. The FBI and Homeland Security were so concerned, a second call was organized with Florida state officials to share information on the cyber threat

The Russian hack of a voting machine manufacturer came amidst a frenzy of activity by Kremlin hackers who had successfully gained access to the State Voters Rolls in Arizona and Illinois. What gave investigators pause, however, was the fact that the Florida hack had a different target. It wasn’t just collecting voter identities; it was aimed at the manufacturers of the voting machines across the state.

Almost 20 percent of Americans vote on digital systems that don’t produce a paper trail. This includes several states such as New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina as well as several jurisdictions in swing or battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Indiana. Many of the machines are more than 10 years old and contain software no longer maintained by its manufacturers – we’re talking Microsoft XP or older – and are not updated with the latest security patches. James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology,  posed a rhetorical question in an interview with NPR:

“With the kind of stealth and sophistication that’s already out there, why wouldn’t a nation-state, cyber-criminal gang or activist group go into election systems that are completely vulnerable?”

Tampering with an electronic voting booth is fairly simple. According to a study by the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in 2012, voting machines can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education. All you’d have to do is unlock or pick the lock, switch out the memory card, and reboot the machine. This was ably demonstrated by Andrew Appel, a Princeton professor in a 2014 YouTube video. Once in place, the hacked machine could count a completely different vote than the one intended by the voter. Most polling stations are in gyms or schools and machines are set up well before voting day so it’s not impossible to gain access to them. Also, every machine needs to be reset before every poll so they have to be opened by someone.

This kind of invasion would require a carefully coordinated attack on thousands, or at least hundreds, of voting machines. Of course you could reprogram the machines in each state at once, if you gained access to the source codes for the machines allowing you to reprogram all the memory cards at once.

According to Salon:

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results.

But a determined hacker could gain access to those source codes by hacking the manufacturer’s mainframe, as Russia is suspected of doing. They could theoretically access the codes, change them, and resave them without anyone actually knowing.

And that’s not the only weak spot. Experts warn that the entire ecosystem is vulnerable. For example, once votes are cast, the data is transferred into a database for immediate counting. The tabulation equipment is also dated and doesn’t have the basic security like encryption or strong passwords, so if you didn’t rig the vote in the actual machines, you could do it at the counting point.

To be clear, the FBI only knows there were hacks of Russian origin of the voting machine manufacturer server, and hacks of state voters rolls in at least two states but no actual manipulation of data voting machines. There are clues, however, that something went awry on voting day. Data analysts have been poring over the election results and they are finding some serious head-scratchers.

Take Wisconsin, for example. President Donald J. Trump won the state by a mere 3,000 votes, but statistical analysis of the result showed Hillary Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that voted on electronic-voting machines.

There are other discrepancies, too. Exit polls, normally reliable predictors of actual poll outcomes, seemed way off compared to actual results last year. Shortly after the election, the National Association of Voting Officials, a group of polling experts, sent a letter to election officials across the country:

“Our examination of the exit data collected by Edison Exit Polling shows a large number and unprecedented discrepancy between the exit polling and the final vote count at minimum in certain states – the so-called swing states of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida. It strongly suggests inappropriate and external meddling of our nation’s most sacred act – the act of its citizens voting.” 

NAVO points to the following:

The hacking of the most recent software updates that are applied to the machines before the election.

Modifying the running code in the machine via wireless technology.

Physically hacking the machines while voting.

And…

Modifying the tallying software local to the precinct or the database at the election center.

The NAVO analysis of exit polls vs. actual results (the full letter can be read here: 2016-election-not-democratic) points to the same vulnerabilities I’ve detailed above. There’s also anecdotal evidence of votes being counted incorrectly on voting day. In Florida, for example, there were widespread examples of voting machine malfunctions, as Ruben Major points out in his blog:

On November 7, 2017 at 3:39PM, during early voting, a report came into the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section stating that there was a “paper trail showing Donald Trump” when the voter selected Hillary Clinton.  

The election results have been widely accepted as fair since the election, except by the current administration (for different reasons… I’ll go into in another post). But now we’ve seen a pattern of an extraordinary efforts by Kremlin officials to meet with Trump’s key advisors, discussing top-secret information with them, attempts to set up secret back-channel communications with Moscow, the firing of FBI Director James Comey who was in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, unexplained Trump server connections with a Russian bank, and an extraordinary fake news operation, it’s becoming harder to gloss over the hacks of voter registration rolls and equipment manufacturers.

We may never know what happened in Florida, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania to deliver the anomalies in counties that used electronic voting machines or between exit and actual polling results, because the machines don’t leave a paper trail. The FBI is still actively investigating Russia’s hacks of voters rolls and voting machines and, considering the context of the unprecedented effort by Russia to undermine the US democracy, investigators cannot be letting any of this go.

The post The Fix 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 Republican Party is imploding. Young Republicans are fleeing and President Donald J. Trump’s support is eroding as quickly as you can spell ‘Russia’. 

On the eve of Montana’s special election to elect a new congressman, Republican front-runner Greg Gianforte body-slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. Gianforte’s attack was in response to Jacobs’ question about a health care bill which threatens to rob many in the party’s base of affordable health coverage. The brutality of the assault, and subsequent lie about what happened, is a canary in the coal mine for a Republican Party falling apart, devoid of values and wholly owned by Russian autocrats.

“I’m sick and tired of you guys,” Gianforte yelled as he body-slammed Jacobs. “The last guy who came here did the same thing. Get the hell out of here. Get the hell out of here. The last guy did the same thing. Are you with the Guardian?”

All that for asking a question. Almost unnoticed in the scuffle, is evidence the Guardian Newspaper dug up about Gianforte’s investments in two Russian Index Funds which invest heavily in sanctioned Russian companies.

Both are indexed to the Russian equities market and have significant holdings in companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft that came under US sanctions in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the Crimea.

Gianforte is an independently wealthy tech entrepreneur (he’s estimated worth is $315M) but his investment in the Index funds is a clear bet on Russia’s economy. Why would he do that unless he believed Russian sanctions would be lifted?

Gianforte may be a canary, but he is not alone. The rot inside the Republican rank and file runs deep, is well-funded and operates with unparalleled sophistication in coordination with its Russian overlords. Together, ‘Russia-GOP’ prey on people’s fears and keep opponent supporters at home, by peddling fake news micro-targeted to people’s Facebook and other social media accounts.

Take Cambridge Analytica, the murky “psychographic” marketing company which figures out your personality profile and targets your fears by amplifying them with conflated or blatantly false content. The company is thought to be responsible for the unexpected ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, the inexplicable campaign of Ben Carson, the bizarre rise of Ted Cruz and of course, the election of Donald Trump.

According to Newsweek,  The company is principally owned by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supported Trump and was a leading investor in Breitbart.  Stephen Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman (after Manafort) and now chief strategist at the White House, was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board as well as the executive chairman of Breitbart before joining Trump’s team in August.

Investigators want to know how Cambridge Analytica is linked to Russia’s unprecedented cyber operation to manipulate the election, according to Time.

It’s common knowledge, Robert Mercer backed Cruz in the Republican primaries but when that campaign couldn’t seal the deal, Mercer swung towards Trump, deploying Cambridge Analytica on behalf of number 45. It’s also believed Mercer’s daughter, Bekah, was instrumental in installing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Trump cabinet. According to the Washington Post, Flynn returned the favor by granting Cambridge Analytica’s parent company a lucrative contract, during his 18 day tenure as National Security Advisor.

I’ve already reported that Flynn, Sessions, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Carter Page were all involved in a secret meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last Summer, in an effort to soften the party’s plank on Ukraine and who-knows-what-else. The photo below reportedly snapped minutes after one Trump-Russia meeting shows Kislyak, Manafort and Sessions returning from one of their sideline meetings.

Intelligence Community leaks now suggest there are intercepted recordings of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis) accepting Russian money from Kislyak during the Republican convention. And now it’s emerged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) super-PAC accepted $2.5 Million from a pro-Putin Ukrainian businessman during the last election cycle (images below). The Republican Party has, in essence, become a money-laundering operation for Russia’s murderous regime and its oligarchs.

It’s almost hard to believe the Republican Party, which was founded by anti-slavery activists built on the principles of the revolution and which gave the country Abraham Lincoln has been so thoroughly defiled by this extent of corruption. The future of the Republic – and democracy – requires a strong GOP founded on the values it holds dear. Voters – especially poor white ones – across the country have been betrayed by their leadership.

At the same time, Citizens United needs to be overturned. The Supreme Court decision to label corporations as citizens has corrupted our politics top to bottom, left and right. If Republicans are true patriots, and have any chance of survival, they will fight to return power to its citizenry.  And if any unccorupted Republicans still exist, when will they stand up to their leaders and root out the disease which is eating its way through their party? What America needs now, more than ever, is a rebirth of the Grand Old Party – the party of Lincoln – flushed of its corruption and ready to serve the people. If the politicians can’t do it, the people will.

The post What America Needs Now More Than Ever appeared first on Narativ.

President Donald J. Trump has become a clear and present danger to the republic and US lives. Trump shared classified information about an ISIS plot to blow up commercial planes using laptop bomb with our enemies, endangering US lives. But that’s only the beginning of the constitutional crisis we’re heading into.

The Washington Post and the New York Times just reported President Donald J. Trump shared secret code-word information with the Russians that could isolate the US from the free world and endanger the lives of Americans. Trump handed over the classified information to the Russians when he held a closed-door meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, on Wed May 10.  The code word intel (which is classified above top secret) was acquired by a foreign intelligence agency and provided to the US under strict intelligence rules.

The information Trump revealed would help the Russians identify a secret agent within ISIS who had revealed a plot to use “laptop bombs” aboard commercial planes. The Kremlin would be keen to eliminate or disrupt the asset because of their reprehensible support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The result could mean US lives are at risk whenever Americans fly.

Although the foreign country is not named in the reports, the United States is part of the “Five Eyes” global international community which means intelligence agencies from New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and the US share information on their common good. Other alliances exist with allies who may be less forgiving of such a lapse of judgment by the US President. Even though President Trump can declassify information “at will”,  that doesn’t extend to information gathered by non-US agencies.  In short, Trump threatens the US relationship with our key allies if he reveals information the US didn’t obtain directly.

Trump’s breach of allies’ trust comes just days after Trump potentially committed another serious crime – obstruction of justice – when he colluded with Vice President Michael Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire FBI Director James Comey.

The White House’s public pretext for the firing was related to Comey’s handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation, as outlined in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein but that memo was easy bait for a President looking for a reason to fire the FBI Director.

In a deft move, Rosenstein threatened to resign over the use of his memo as cause for Comey’s ouster. The next day, absent a pretext, Trump sat down for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and was forced to reveal the truth. The emperor, it seems, had no clothes.

“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.”

Trump also copped to Holt he asked Comey on three separate occasions if he was under investigation personally.  That’s not a question you would ask once, never mind three times, if you really believed the whole thing was “a made up story”, “a ruse” or “a hoax”, as the President has said in his many tweets.  It’s also now clear that Trump summoned Comey to the White House and asked him to “pledge his loyalty” just days after acting attorney General Sally Yates alerted the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was “compromised by the Russians”. Yates was later fired. A second count of obstruction of justice.

A just released memo written by Comey after Flynn was fired reveals President Trump asked the FBI Director to drop the entire investigation.  “I hope you can let this go,” Comey quotes Trump in the memo he wrote as part of a paper trail documenting the President’s efforts to obstruct justice. As an F.B.I. agent, Comey’s notes will be used in court as credible evidence.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It’s also been reported by the New York Times, the President and Vice-President secretly conspired to remove Comey. Vice President Mike Pence, who parroted the White House lie, could have been the next President of the US but he’s now been infected by the corruption virus by Trump. Pence should face an indictment on obstruction of justice charges and needs to be impeached. By conspiring with Trump, Pence has placed the US into a succession crisis.

However, even if the Justice Department indicts Trump and Pence along with the exhaustive list of co-conspirators, nothing can force the House, controlled by the Republicans, to begin impeachment proceedings. Up until now Republicans seem hesitant to even appoint an independent prosecutor so impeachment hearings seem unlikely, unless something else happens. And that something else is beginning to emerge.

Russia’s efforts to destabilize US Democracy ran very deep and now threaten to embroil the entire leadership of the GOP – including House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Ted Cruz and others. Ryan has been full-throatedly supporting Trump recently framing the President as “a driven, hands-on leader, with the potential to become a truly transformational American figure.” Now it’s emerging, there’s good reason Ryan is Trump’s pocket. According to “Kremlingate” watchers, Ryan also accepted money from Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to fill the GOP coffers. If Ryan and other Republican leaders are removed from office too, the balance of power and sheer political survival in 2018 should compel remaining Republicans in the House to act.

I asked Associate Professor Gary Darden, who teaches US Civil War at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey to explain how impeachment would work if such an indictment was coming:

“An impeachment is constitutionally speaking an indictment issued by the House for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” while the trial itself would take place in the Senate with senators as jury and chief justice as presiding judge. If the president were to be indicted in a court of law, then that would be, I think, the basis for articles of impeachment in the House. If 2/3 of the House votes in favor of any article (or charge) if impeachment, then it mandates a trial in Senate, where a conviction requires 2/3 of that body.”

The House could be reluctant to act but Darden believes:

“If criminal charges come out of the Justice Dept against the President, then it would be the basis for the House to act. If it didn’t it would be political negligence of the highest order.” 

Still, Darden points out Republicans who supported Trump hold a disproportionate number of seats in the house so the impeachment seems unlikely, but just the threat of it, and a potential lengthy prison sentence for the entire Trump family, could render the President impotent and force a resignation, as it did with Nixon.

If you’re keeping track, that now leaves Trump, Pence and Ryan all out of the running to take over as  President. The next in line for the White House is Senator Orrin Hatch (UT-R), the President pro tempore of the United States Senate. After Hatch, It’s the Secretary of State, Putin-buddy Rex Tillerson (likely to be indicted too) and then Jeff Sessions (clearly already compromised) and the rest of the cabinet.  This is why there are two potential outcomes to an impeachment crisis: President Orrin Hatch or the next Speaker of the House, if Ryan is implicated.

Whomever it is, would be President until 2020 as there simply is no mechanism for a snap election in the US. Even under these extraordinary times.

“Hate is a far better motivator than love,” a boastful Roger Stone told NPR this week. “It’s one of Stone’s golden rules.”  Stone is the political operative who helped put Donald Trump in the White House.  He says of the President, “I was like a jockey looking for his horse. You can’t win a race without a horse.” Stone is about to see his golden rule work against his winning horse.  Trump has now threatened American lives, betrayed the country, our allies, the rule of law and made his bed – with Vladimir Putin – the end result will enrage the American population which should have brutal consequences for both the President and the Russian autocrat.

The post Trump-Russia Is Far More Serious Than You Ever Imagined 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.

Washington is witnessing “the biggest scandal since Watergate”. President Donald J. Trump is dismissing it all as a “witch hunt” but that will not be enough to make it go away. 

Buried inside a CNN report with the headline “More Trump advisers disclose meetings with Russia’s ambassador” is this retelling by a former Trump adviser, J.D Gordon, of a meeting with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that occurred on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention which nominated President Donald J. Trump as their candidate in July last year. Also present at this meeting were advisers Carter Page and Walid Phares.

Gordon stressed to the Russian envoy that he would like to improve relations with Russia…Gordon had advocated for language in the GOP platform that the Ukrainians not be armed in their battle against pro-Russian separatists, an effort [which] was ultimately successful. But Gordon says he was simply advocating what Trump himself had expressed — that he did not wish to see major war break out over the situation in Ukraine.

The event in Cleveland on July 20, 2016, was billed as the Global Partners in Diplomacy program and was held at Case Western University and included some notable Trump officials, speaking on panels and a variety of diplomats from around the world. In that context, it’s not unusual several Trump officials broke off into side meetings. What should raise eyebrows is that the discussion with Kislyak revolved around language in the RNC platform which softened Republican opposition to Russia’s incursion into the Ukraine – the main reason sanctions against Russia exist.

Even more suspect, is that the meeting included Trump adviser Carter Page, who just 12 just or 13 days earlier allegedly met a key Putin ally in Moscow. The meeting is described in the dossier of compromising material collated by former Mi-6 spy Christopher Steele. Steele quotes a source alleging Page was offered a deal: one-fifth of Russia’s oil in exchange for the lifting of sanctions:

[Putin] was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page a 19% (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return. Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.

The context of that meeting may explain why Trump’s advisers were working overtime during the RNC to soften language in the party’s political platform on Ukraine. The original language in the RNC Platform was proposed by a Ted Cruz supporter, Diana Denman, and called for providing “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukrainians fighting Russian-backed rebels.  It read, in part:

“Today, the post-Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine. The Ukrainian people deserve our admiration and support in their struggle.”

“I was troubled when they put aside my amendment and then watered it down,” Denman told the Washington Post. “I said, ‘What is your problem with a country that wants to remain free?’ It seems like a simple thing.”  The final amendment adopted by the convention dropped the words “lethal defensive weapons” in favor of “appropriate assistance”.

All of this, in concert with Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s private citizen diplomacy with ambassador Kislyak, promising a roll-back of sanctions just as President Obama imposed them and revelations Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner also had meetings with Kislyak, can only lead you to one conclusion. Trump officials were working behind the scenes to create a less hostile environment against Russia and were planning to not only drop their support for Ukrainian independence, but also intended to work towards dropping sanctions against Russia.

What isn’t yet proven but is surely the most important question for the Trump administration is this: Was there a deal struck in exchange for this unprecedented effort? More importantly, what did President Trump know and when did he know it?

It’s entirely plausible that  Trump was merely trying to avoid “a world war 3” over Ukraine, but it’s hard to simply discard the Steele Dossier allegations that a monetary deal was struck. Especially, since one month after Trump was elected, 19.5% of Rosneft was sold off to an unknown shell company, just as Steele had alleged it would be in his dossier.

What also needs to be investigated is the enormous effort by both Russia and the Trump administration to cover-up the trail of evidence. Former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn lied and lost his job. Former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Mannafort was fired for his connections with Russia. Carter Page was dismissed from the campaign for his ties to Russia. Now, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been caught lying about his meeting with the Russian ambassador. While President Trump, continues to offer public support for these men, decrying a “witch hunt” it seems logical, he soon will have to account for the meetings and the cover up.

On the Russian side, 6 senior diplomats have died mysteriously in the last 4 months, one key source of the Steele dossier, an ex-KGB General is dead, and 4 alleged US spies have been arrested by the Kremlin for treason in Russia. While conspiracy theories abound, it seems at least possible, Putin is covering the tracks of his operation to destalbalize the US elections.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Trump’s ties to Russia is “the most serious scandal since Watergate and I don’t say that as any form of exaggeration or hyperbole.” The drip, drip, drip is taking down Trump’s key men, and it won’t be long before the the rising waters reach the Oval Office. Trump should act quickly to reveal what he knows or he’ll be in danger of being swept away, too.

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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.

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