by Zev Shalev and Heidi Cuda

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

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

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

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

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

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

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

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

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

MEET THE MOONIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

RENDEZVOUZ IN VERONA

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

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

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

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

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

PLANNING PROTESTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The true story of Bibi Netanyahu’s role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election. How political revenge and a corruption trial endangered an alliance.

The unbelievably warm temperatures that signaled an early start to summer may have been to blame, but President Barack Obama’s famously relaxed demeanor was not on display on this June morning in 2009.

The world’s eyes were on Number 44, and his mood showed it. The newly inaugurated president took plenty of flack from Republicans as Iranians took to the streets.

I wasn’t having my best morning either. As the newly appointed executive producer of the CBS News Early Show, I was about to be late for an interview with the president of the United States.

A perfect storm roiled that morning, raining out a special broadcast live from the USS Intrepid and delaying my flight from New York to DC. Then, I was dropped off at the wrong White House gate—my DC colleagues’ idea of a hazing ritual, I thought.

With my hopes and dreams flashing before my eyes, and the temperature soaring, I ran the perimeter of the White House to find the correct entrance.

Robert Gibbs, Obama’s spokesperson, grabbed me on the way inside.

“We’ve changed things around on you,” Gibbs said, maintaining his cheerfulness, as he improvised reactions to real-time events.

“Harry is doing the Iran interview,” Gibbs said, referring to Harry Smith, the unflappable anchor of the CBS Early Show.

With those words, the interview went from casual to historically consequential in a matter of seconds.

Thankfully, Harry could handle anything, especially with this president. Harry was an early and regular reporter on Obama’s campaign.

I was drenched from the sweat or rain, or both, so much so that the White House butler offered me a napkin. I wiped my brow and made a mental note to take on less responsibility in the future. I pocketed the napkin embossed with the White House logo. I still have it today.

DEMOCRACY’S MOONSHOT

Three weeks earlier, Obama embarked on his first Middle east trip in pursuit of two critical and interconnected foreign policy initiatives: a Middle east peace deal and an Iranian nuclear solution.

Obama delivered a watershed address at Cairo University, lamenting the decades of blood spilled from proxy wars in the region, and offered the Arab world a new beginning. It was American-style democracy beginning a Middle East tour.

Democracy activists viewed the Cairo Address as a green light to confront the region’s dictatorial regimes. The series of protests, uprisings, and attempted revolutions that followed in the next few years became known as the ‘Arab Spring.’

In the end, democracy failed to usher a new era of openness into the region. While the Arab spring underlined the need for reform in the Middle East, the movement also exposed the limitations of democracy as an alternative to autocracy. 

Obama gave democracy a moonshot chance at success in the Middle East, but it didn’t work. World leaders were left wondering, “Now what?”

THE WORLD IS WATCHING

At the White House, a crew member placed a microphone on the lapel of Obama’s jacket. The president was in the zone.

A week earlier, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the Iranian election despite allegations that the vote had been rigged. Supporters of second-placed Mir-Hoessein Mousavi demanded a recount, taking to the streets in what became known as the Green Movement.

There was no question: this was an opportunity for Obama to advance the Iran issue, but if he supported the protesters, he risked losing a major nuclear deal with the Iranian regime that was already in the works.

Harry began with Iran. Obama constructed a powerful message that pressured the regime but fell short of declaring the elections stolen.

“The world is watching and is inspired by their participation, regardless of what the outcome of the election was.”

The protesters awaited additional support from Obama, but it never materialized. In New York the next morning, I felt a momentary flash of satisfaction when I saw other news networks running our interview. The banner on CNN read, “The World is Watching.”

That satisfaction subsided as it became clear that the dramatic media moment would yield very little for the Iranian protesters. It also foreshadowed an Iranian nuclear deal which would imperil a vital relationship.

BIBI AND BARACK

Perhaps not so coincidentally, something else had shifted the Middle East dynamic that week.

Benjamin Netanyahu was not Obama’s pick as a Middle East dance partner, but Netanyahu emerged victorious from the 2009 election in a coalition with religious and right-wing parties.

Obama welcomed Netanyahu to the White House in May 2009. He told the new Israeli PM he needed to stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Netanyahu bristled at the notion.

Their relationship went from bad to much worse. What began as mild irritation between the two leaders developed into animosity by the time Obama signed the Iranian deal eight years later.

In 2012, as Obama approached a second term, his advisors had all but given up on Netanyahu’s participation in a peace process. “They were never sincere in their commitment to peace,” Ben Rhodes would tell The New Yorker.

“They used us as cover,” Rhodes complained. “They were running a play, killing time, waiting out the Administration.”

Obama claimed their squabbles were like those of a married couple, but Netanyahu felt Obama’s policies threatened Israel’s national security and harmed his political prospects.

In a heated exchange, Obama reportedly said, “Bibi, you have to understand something. I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

A COALITION OF THE DISLOYAL

White House officials suspected Netanyahu secretly supported Mitt Romney in the 2012 election. A departure from the traditional neutrality with which Jerusalem approached US elections.

Romney would go on to lose the Israeli Prime Minister knew this spelled danger for his policies. 

At home, Netanyahu faced a criminal investigation into government corruption.  Sensing the power shift around him, Bibi shopped around for a political lifeline and found a willing ally in Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Putin and Netanyahu had become closer soon after Russia’s invasion of Crimea, which Jerusalem refused to criticize, despite pressure from Washington.

Soon after, Netanyahu and Putin agreed to establish a direct encrypted hotline between the Russian president’s office and Netanyahu’s home. “The Russians want to speak to Israel without anyone eavesdropping — in particular the US,” Russia expert Alex Tentzer told the news site Y-net. 

Netanyahu and Putin tested Obama’s willingness to intervene in Syria over chemical weapons. Obama was reluctant to sink the US into another war despite Syria’s crossing of the so-called red line. This, emboldened Netanyahu and Putin to step up Russia’s attack on anti-Assad forces in Syria.

Netanyahu found another willing accomplice in Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who felt Obama had abandoned Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak during a time of need.

As the second half of Obama’s term neared, it became clear that Hillary Clinton was to be his heir apparent.

The prospect of four more years of Obama-like policies under Hillary Clinton was a political death knell for Netanyahu’s policies.

Putin shared Netanyahu’s trepidation over a Clinton presidency, and recognized an opportunity to press for an unlikely and unprecedented alliance of like-minded nations with a strong preference for a US presidential candidate in a US election.

Expressing an affinity with a candidate is one thing, but coordinating an influence campaign in coordination with the candidate’s staff was tantamount to an act of war, but that is exactly what Netanyahu did. 

In 2015, Netanyahu dispatched George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman who had been a close advisor of Netanyahu since 1996, to meet with Arab leaders assembled on a yacht in the Red Sea. 

The yacht summit included Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, UAE Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Bahrain Crown Prince Salman, and Jordan’s King Abdullah.

Nader, who is currently serving a ten-year sentence in the US for trafficking a teenager and possessing child porn, unveiled a controversial proposal to remake the middle East.

It’s unclear if Nader was speaking on behalf of the Israelis or Emiratis but the proposal bore the presumed approval of both leaders. The plan involved establishing a new middle east alliance that would replace the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League and support US policy in the Middle East that countered Turkey and Iran, according to two unnamed sources quoted in the Middle East Eye.

Such a radical plan would need a US president who wasn’t as attached to traditional American policies like democracy. This ruled out Obama and Clinton. The group agreed to support the election of a unique political animal — an anti-democratic American president Donald Trump.

THE OPERATION TO ELECT

Nader promised to lobby US leaders to support the new alliance, but he did much more than that when he later became a fixture on the Trump campaign.

By February 25, 2016, key players connected to the countries represented at the yacht summit began to maneuver around the Trump campaign. Paul Manafort (connected to Russia) wrote to Thomas Barrack (connected to Saudi Arabia) for help in getting hired by the Trump campaign on a volunteer basis.

But arguably the most significant contribution to the Trump campaign came from Israel’s Psy- Group.   One of a handful of companies born out of Israel’s famed 8200 division of the Israeli Defense Force.  Netanyahu’s former national security advisor served on the advisory board of the company. 

What followed was a sequence of contacts and contracts between the Trump Campaign and Psy Group’s CEO Joel Zamel. By March, Manafort’s deputy Robert Gates had met and hired Zamel for an initial campaign.

Erik Prince met with Zamel about a mysterious project codenamed Black Jack or Jack Black, which both Zamel and Prince refused to explain to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers.

Prince and Zamel would meet again in August 2016, this time at Trump Tower with Donald Trump, Jr., Stephen Miller, and George Nader. 

Zamel outlined a plan to use Psy-Group’s algorithms to bend American sentiment ahead of the elections. The Saudis, Nader said, would foot the bill.

All told, Israel’s Psy-Group worked on the Trump campaign for almost a full year in varying capacities. Most notably, Psy-Group helped run a surveillance campaign on delegates at the Republican National Convention.

Psy-Group also worked for Oleg Deripaska in 2015 and Dmitry Rybolovlev in 2016, both oligarchs are close to Putin.

MICRO-DONATIONS

Winning a US election was an expensive endeavor with strict laws forbidding foreign funding but the alliance figured out a way to fund Trump while evading detection by the Federal Election Committee (FEC).

 Given Trump’s poor financial situation, the claim that his campaign was self-funded was hard to believe. Nevertheless, the campaign survived on a steady stream of micro-donations under the $200-per-donor limit the FEC allowed without tracking.

As much as $90 million flowed through the accounts of Trump’s digital chief, Brad Parscale, and into Facebook’s coffers for targeted social media advertising. Most of this money came from micro-donations 

The origins of this micro donations—and an equally significant amount that funded Bernie Sanders campaign—had not been scrutinized until a February 2021 article by BBC reporter Paul Woods about a Los Angeles–based smart payment entrepreneur Andy Khawaja.

According to Khawaja, the Saudis and the Emiratis illegally paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign in 2016, disguising the money by using stolen identities and ‘virtual credit cards’ or gift cards to process donations of under $200.

Nader and Khawaja were partners in another foreign funding scheme that led to Khawaja and Nader’s arrest in a $3.5 million scheme to illegally conceal donations to political campaigns.   Although Khawaja’s claims were never proven, his cooperation with Nader on this scheme lends credence to his involvement in the overall scheme to support Trump’s electoral win.

ISRAEL FIRST 

Soon after the election, the incoming administration began to signal a new posture toward Russia, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps in an attempt to smoke out Netanyahu, the US supported an Egyptian UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. 

Netanyahu viewed the vote as a jab by Obama and sensed an opportunity to test the loyalty of his new friends in the incoming administration. Even though Obama was still in office, Trump and his transition team led by son-in-law Jared Kushner prioritized scuttling or delaying the vote.

Kushner acted on Netanyahu’s request and with Michael Flynn worked with their Russian allies to influence the vote. In the end, Obama abstained, and the vote failed.

The UN vote highlighted that for all the consternation about Putin’s ties to Trump, Bibi Netanyahu carried significant sway in the Trump White House, as evidenced by increasingly radical pro-Israeli policies, such as moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

We may never know the full extent of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE’s involvement in supporting Trump’s election campaign, but prima facie, the Trump administration was decidedly pro-Saudi Arabia and pro-Israel at the exclusion of former Palestinian partners and in opposition to fundamental human rights.

Netanyahu, like Putin and Mohamed bin Salman,  got much of what he wanted during the Trump years. 

Netanyahu’s involvement in electing Trump would eventually drive a wedge between America’s left-leaning Jewish population and Israel’s government. That rift grew even deeper with the election of Joe Biden. It soon became apparent to Israeli politicians that the US-Israel alliance would be at risk, if Netanyahu stayed in charge.

As Netanyahu successor Naftali Bennett was being sworn in, defense secretary Benny Gantz said of Netanyahu:  “No political move justifies the conflict you create[d] with the US.” 

The post Bibi’s Revenge 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Precipice appeared first on Narativ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Divide & Conquer appeared first on Narativ.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Operation Battleship 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.

As Russia attempts to pry Qatar out of America’s sphere of influence, there are new questions about Moscow’s role in global terrorism.

The world shuddered on Monday, as a major rift tore apart the seemingly stable US alliance in the Middle East, known as the Gulf Cooperation Council. Qatar, the small and extremely oil-rich Middle East, was cut off by the council’s ruling members. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and two other countries suspended diplomatic relations with the tiny Emirate, cut off air land and sea travel. All but Egypt ordered their citizens to leave within 14 days.

The stunning move was precipitated by what Qatari and US intelligence officials said was a fake news story planted by Russian hackers in Qatar’s official news agency. The fake article attributed quotes to Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Aal Thani as supporting fundamental terrorist organizations and Iran and called relations with the Trump administration “strained”. The article may have been fake but it highlights very real, seemingly opposite goals of the tiny Emirate.

Qatari foreign policy is, to put it simply, a study in contradictions. While the Emirate supports revolutionary movements, it also plays host to the largest US military base in the region at al-Udeid, south-west of Doha. Doha is the home of Al-Jazeera, which for years has been outwardly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and often rebroadcasts audio messages from al-Qaida leaders but until Monday was still allied to Saudi Arabia. Doha also still maintains diplomatic ties with Tehran, much to Riyadh’s chagrin. In the Middle East, you’re either with the mostly-Sunni Saudis or with mostly Shiite Iranians. Qatar has tried to do both.

Russia, in its pursuit of warm water access to the Mediterranean and dominance in the region, has been trying to ply the Emirate away from US influence for years. So far,  Qatar has been quite amenable to Moscow’s advances. In January this year, Qatar’s Emir visited Russia and exalted Vladimir Putin for “playing a leading role in stability in the world”.

Moscow has been heavily investing in Qatari interests over the last few years and Qatar has been heavily investing in Russia. The relationship cemented itself last year when Moscow sold 19.5% of Rosneft, the giant Russian state-run oil company, to a Qatari-led partnership with Swiss oil firm, Glencore. Little else is known about the deal because it is shrouded by Bahamian registered shell corporations but it’s suspected of being the same deal mulled in the Steele Dossier, in which Russia offered a 19.5% in Rosneft to Trump campaign official Carter Page, in exchange for a lessening of Russian sanctions.

Was Russia’s hack of Qatar’s news agency a not-so-subtle attempt to provoke the Saudis to isolate Qatar and in so doing, move the Emirate even closer to Tehran and Moscow’s orbit? A trick played on the Saudis to drive a wedge between them and Qatar? Quite possibly. This scenario seems even more likely when viewed in the context of President Donald J. Trump’s tweet which applauded the Saudi move. “They said they would take a hard-line on fundamental extremism and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end of the horror of terrorism!” Even as the US Military and Diplomatic corps were trying to rebuild the Middle East coalition, President Trump was nudging the break-up along. Moscow’s sleight of hand would be at once evil and brilliant, if it weren’t so apparent.

The most troubling aspect of all this is that Moscow itself, has long been suspected of being backers of fundamental terrorist groups like ISIS. Russia “provided material support to ISIS to manipulate the war in Syria and Russian media has long alleged that Russian security forces helped recruit for ISIS, which now has thousands of Russian-speaking jihadis in its ranks,” said Molly McKew in Politico in 2015.

“The arrival of the first group of several hundred Russian-speaking fighters was a key turning point in the Syrian war — turning the war away from Assad and toward Iraq. The largest current source of ISIS revenue, according to US and European officials, is from selling oil to Assad — and Assad cannot act without Russian approval. ISIS requires Russian ammunition to fight, readily acquires it from stocks sent to Assad, and seems to find fortuitous resupply when necessary.”

Yes, the same ISIS which has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Ariana Grande Concert in Manchester and ran over and stabbed citizens and tourists on London Bridge was, and likely still is, an arm’s-length instrument of Moscow’s foreign policy.  In December 6, 2015, Ukrainian TV aired an interview with a former FSB counter-terrorism specialist who alleged Russia was “directly and indirectly complicit” in global terror attacks.

When asked if Russian agents could be involved in the [November 2015] terrorist attacks in Paris, Yevgeniy said there was “complicity in acts of terrorism.” He continued, “And the complicity could be direct or indirect. By analyzing their connections, one, of course, will be able to see the ties leading to Russia. Primarily Russia could benefit from this, and the Russian security services had all the possibilities to organize this.”

The 2015 Paris attack claimed 130 lives and, as with the recent tragedies in Manchester and London, ISIS claimed responsibility for it. While ISIS gets some upside from these attacks, it’s really Russia which gains the global leverage. It forces democratic electorates to choose more conservative governments, fosters fear and intolerance, creates chasms in the existing alliances but also forces the world to view Moscow as part of a solution to a mess it covertly created. Viewed in this light, the Trump administration’s assertion that it will fight ISIS with Russian help just seems like another covert ploy by Moscow to play an international game of cat and mouse when in reality, it is both.

The post An Unholy Alliance 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What they revealed was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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After years of unprecedented support for LGBT rights under President Barack Obama, gay activists are unnerved at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Should they be?

Well before Donald J. Trump was hiring an apprentice on his NBC show of the same name, he was an “apprentice” himself – to one of the most feared lawyers in America. Roy Cohn was gay but he did not share the modern-day liberal values of the gay movement.

Cohn was famously fictionalized by Tony Kushner in “Angels in America”, as a self-loathing, power-hungry hypocrite who is haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he lies dying of AIDS.

“I hear Roy in the things [Trump] says quite clearly,” said Peter Fraser, Cohn’s lover for the last two years of his life. “That bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth — that’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”

Cohn was born February 20, 1927, in New York City, and grew up in Manhattan. His father, Albert, was a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. At 21, he was hired by the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, after graduating from Columbia Law School at twenty.

In 1951, Cohn’s interrogation of a witness at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sent the couple to the electric chair. Two years later, Cohn became chief legal counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis) during the torrid days of communist-hunting that bore the Senator’s name.

After McCarthy was condemned and Cohn faced charges, he left politics and started his private practice in Manhattan. It’s there he met a young Donald J. Trump and began molding his protege into a real-estate mogul. In the heady 70’s Cohn and Trump were inseparable as friends – Cohn introduced Trump to New York’s elite. They plotted together, celebrated birthdays together and spent nights partying together at the famed Studio 54. The relationship was close and complicated.

Cohn’s sexual identity was a closely guarded secret but Trump was one of the handful of people who knew Cohn was gay. When Trump married Ivana, it was Cohn who insisted on the pre-nup. The Trumps frequently hosted Cohn and Fraser at Trump Towers.

In 1986, Cohn was disbarred for “unethical,” “unprofessional” and “particularly reprehensible” conduct. He died of AIDS in August of that year, though until his end, he insisted it was liver cancer. Trump summed up his former friend in one word, “loyalty”.

Their friendship conveys Trump has no personal prejudice against gays. In the tradition of his mentor, he has never believed LGBT rights deserves public utterance or broad protections – except for basic anti-discrimination legislation. Those openly gay and lesbian men and women who’ve worked with Trump, describe a man who shows no hostility to LGBT staffers

“First of all, I live in New York. I know many, many gay people. Tremendous people. And to be honest with you, as far as civil unions are concerned, I haven’t totally formed my opinion. But there can be no discrimination against gays,” Trump said in 2011.

The president-elect’s personal principles however, haven’t stopped him from hiring operatives who’ve grown up in the anti-gay movement and there are no out gay or lesbian members of his cabinet.

Communications czar, Kelly-anne Conway, found her national profile as a spokesperson for the National Organization for Marriage – an anti-gay marriage lobby group. Trump’s Chief Strategist, Stephen Bannon urged his writers to take anti-gay stances when he presided over Breitbart News. He even allowed them to use terms like “faggot” in a derogatory way. Trump’s VP, Mike Pence’s anti-gay positions during his term as Indiana Governor is the stuff of legend. Trump’s attorney-general appointee, Senator Jeff Sessions, is opposed to the expansion of hate crimes to include LGBT victims. Then there’s, Dr Ben Carson, who once said: “a lot of people … go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay”.

Alarmingly, as the President-elect ushers in a new administration, there are those who hope his new cabinet will launch a cleansing of some US departments which have turned gay rights into a policy of foreign activism.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a Trump supporter, said recently, “the incoming administration needs to make clear that these liberal policies will be reversed and the ‘activists’ within the State Department promoting them will be ferreted out and will be replaced by conservatives who will ensure the State Department focuses on true international human rights like religious liberty which is under unprecedented assault.”

Not everyone in Trump’s circle is openly hostile to gay rights. Founders Fund chief and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, was a key contributor to the campaign and also received a highly coveted speaker position during the GOP National Convention. The first time in 16 years a gay person was given such a platform.

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom,” Thiel told the Convention in Cleveland. “This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”

Trump himself dismissed his personal views on the topic as irrelevant during an interview with 60 Minutes. He told Lesley Stahl, he did not support reversing the historic Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage. “It’s done,” he said. “These cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And I’m — I’m fine with that,” he said.

Despite filling his cabinet with socially conservative appointees, gay rights have been one notable exception to Trump’s “go back to the old days” strategy. In fact, the President-elect had done what no Republican president has ever done. A week before the election, Trump held up a rainbow flag with the words “LGBT for Trump” written on it to a cheering crowd of thousands in Colorado. No other Republican Presidential nominee in history has embraced the LGBT community in that way.

Trump is not the first Republican President to privately support gay rights. Ronald Reagan, who is broadly criticized for his failed handling of the AIDS crisis, was privately non-judgmental of homosexuality.

In 2003, Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, wrote in a Time magazine her father explained homosexuality to her while watching a Rock Hudson movie on TV in the 60’s.  He told her, certain men, like Rock, were more interested in kissing men than women. Davis recalls the exchange in a completely positive, non-judgmental way. Like the Trumps, the Reagans had close gay friends throughout their lives, including their years in Washington.

One has to wonder, did the years with Cohn soften Trump’s stance or did political expediency suggest LGBT rights were not a battle worth picking in a year where every vote counted? Maybe both. Relative to the extraordinary advances under President Obama, Trump’s positions are prosaic at best, but he could be the most pro-LGBT Republican presidents in recent history.

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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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