NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investiga

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NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investiga

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:03 pm

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NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investigate
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The Budapest Bridge: Hungary’s Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service
April 13, 2017 1:22 pm·
Dr. András Göllner’s essay is the first installment of a two part series in HFP.

Introduction

It was during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, and for the first time in American electoral history, that a hostile foreign power, aided and abetted by one of the candidates, was able to decisively intervene and significantly influence the outcome of an American election.

American public opinion, the mass and social media, the political establishment and, the country’s secret services, are bitterly divided about the veracity of the relationship between the Russian secret services and Donald Trump’s campaign team. Most commentators claim that even if conclusive evidence of collusion were to be found, it is well nigh impossible to prove, that the relationship had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election.

This first, of a two part series, summarizes some fresh evidence about the nature of the collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. It will provide some empirically verifiable evidence of the electoral impact of the Russian leaks, in the context of the strategic aspirations of the Trump campaign.

We do not claim to have any insight into the evidence at the disposal of the FBI about the alleged collusion between the Trump team and the Russian secret service. What we have, is evidence, that the FBI is forbidden by law to investigate, because it lies outside the territory of the USA.

This series argues that the place where the FBI, Congress, and the American mass media should be looking for evidence, about the collusion between senior Trump staffers and the Russian secret service is not in America, but in far away Hungary, a member of NATO, the European Union, and a champion of Vladimir Putin in the West.


The Chain Bridge in a foggy Budapest. Photo source: piusz / muemlekem.hu
Our investigation has uncovered „the smoking gun” about the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. It shows that the connection between the Russian secret services and the Trump campaign is not a direct one. It did not run through the Russian embassy in the US or through the spies that have been expelled by Obama. It did not run through New York City or Moscow, or in conversations between campaign staff and the Russian ambassador to the US. It ran through Budapest, which is the European Headquarters of Putin’s FSB. Budapest was the „bridge” between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret service.

Some of our evidence is well known. It is known, for example, that the Russians and the Trump campaign had identical strategic interests. They both wanted to position Hillary Clinton as a „crooked and untrustworthy” candidate. What has not been known, up to now is, that the unacknowledged architect of this grand strategy was the notoriously secretive Arthur J. Finkelstein, a long time New York associate of Donald Trump, going back to the Roy Cohen days.

Finkelstein is perhaps the most bitter opponent of Hillary Clinton amongst a small circle of pro-Republican campaign gurus, and a frequent flyer to many of the capitals where Putin is seen as a hero. Finkelstein introduced Paul Manafort years ago to Putin’s pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs, who use their corporate hats, to advance Putin’s fortunes abroad. Finkelstein also had a big hand in Manafort’s addition to the Trump team. Finkelstein has also served as chief political strategist for the past 10 years, to Putin’s most loyal follower in the Western alliance – the Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán. Finkie, as Orbán is fond to call him, also works for some of the most notorious autocrats of the former Soviet Republics, and always indirectly, so his pay-masters can’t be easily identified – a skill that he passed on to Trump’s ex-campaign chairman, Manafort.

As Steven Bannon confessed to the Hollywood Reporter, after the elections, polling and visceral messaging, a Finkelstein specialty, played a critical part in the Trump campaign. It is not a coincidence, that the campaign’s senior pollster was Tony Fabrizio, who learned his craft on Finkelstein’s knees. Virtually the entire top tier of the Trump campaign, including Roger Ailes and Roger Stone, have close personal ties to the man, who is known worldwide, as „The Merchant of Venom”.

While Finkelstein has been consciously kept out of the Trump campaign’s limelight, the campaign worked from his playbook, and that playbook had an important, hitherto unseen chapter on the art of dealing with Russia’s secret services. This series argues, that the Trump campaign had not only criminal intent (aiding and abetting Russian hacking of a political opponents’s confidential data base) but benefited from its criminal activities, by cornering the political market. (As our evidence about Finkelstein’s role in the campaign began to gather momentum, Finkelstein became unreachable. His friends and associates say, that he is undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. We hope this is not yet another Finkelstein maneuver to throw people off his scent. We wish him speedy recovery so we can ask him directly, what he was doing on „the Budapest Bridge”.)

Putin’s Trojan Horse and the Trump campaign

During the past 7 years, and much of it thanks to Finkelstein’s successful Hungarian consulting practices, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s current PM, managed to transform this small Central European country into a pale shadow of it’s former democratic self. Orbán, by his own admission, is Putin’s most supportive champion inside the Western alliance and the first and only Western leader to publicly endorse Trump as a candidate. By conservative estimates, Budapest is home to approximately 1000 members of the Russian secret service, most of them in the possession of Hungarian passports provided for by Hungary’s pro-Russian Ministry of the Interior. (These passports can be had for a hefty fee -300,000 Euros a pop – and after waiting only 30 days, which allows no time for a thorough vetting of the applicant. If passports were to be given to foreign aliens under such circumstances in the US, Homeland Security would be purged from top to bottom. In Canada, the minister would have to resign. In Hungary, this „passport business” has been subcontracted out to some of the most corrupt people in Viktor Orbán’s immediate entourage.)

The Hungarian government’s corrupt passport system, enables Russia’s top operatives to work and travel without any restrictions within the EU, and more importantly, to travel to the USA without a visa. Hungary’s bank laws provide an impenetrable financial shelter to those who are dealing with Putin’s secret services. Orbán’s Ministry of the Interior provides a protective umbrella against internet and telephone snooping. It is no coincidence that Europe’s most notorious right-wing populists, anti-Semites and anti-Muslim radicals, such as Holland’s Gert Wilders and Britain’s Nick Griffin, have established residences in Hungary. It is no coincidence that Putin is a frequent secret visitor. It is also not a coincidence that Finkelstein has a home in Budapest, and was, until recently, in weekly contact with Vladimir Putin’s most loyal Hungarian surrogate, Viktor Orbán.

Finkelstein and Orbán’s top Hungarian strategist, Árpád Habony, have a London based joint company, close to the headquarters of Wikileaks. The Russian leakage of embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, was coordinated through Budapest, and London, and was designed to lower Clinton’s trustworthiness at pre-planned moments during the campaign. Clinton’s trustworthiness ratings, her public opinion support plumeted, on average, 5% points after each well timed leak, and especially during the closing stages of the campaign. These leaks dominated the news cycles at critical junctions in the campaign. Carefully orchestrated, they drove the all important pro-Trump social media (Facebook, Snapchat, twitter) that left the Clinton campaign grasping for air in the critical battle ground states. Arguing that the leaks had no concrete effect on the outcome of the election in the targeted states, is equal to saying that birds can fly without wings.

Some argue, that one of the reasons why Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Roger Stone offered to voluntarily testify before the congressional committee is, that they were not the principals in the transactions, that took place on „the Budapest bridge”. We argue, that their eagerness to testify early has an entirely different explanation. They simply wanted to get through the congressional screening process early, before the proverbial brown matter hits the fan, and before the learning curve of the congressional investigators goes up a notch.

Who were the principals on „The Budapest Bridge” the FBI and Congress should investigate particularly closely, apart from Arthur Finkelstein ? The investigations should include Jo Anne Barnhart, Finkelstein’s close personal friend, and managing director of the Hungarian government’s secretive lobby arm in the US, the „Magyar Foundation”. It should include another Finkelstein protegé, and Hungarian lobbyist, ex-congressman Connie Mack IV. The latter is the recipient of a 5 million dollar contract, through a third party, to promote Putin’s Hungarian disciple in America. The Congressional investigators should also talk to Senator Sessions’ right hand man during the campaign, J.D. Gordon, who travelled six times to Budapest, and considers Putin’s Trojan Horse as one of the finest leaders within the Western alliance. Last, but not least, the FBI and the Congressional team should investigate Sebastian Gorka, Bannon’s „terrorism expert” and a man with a 15 year connection to anti-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian radicals in Hungary.

In our second installment, we shall provide some empirically verifiable evidence about Gorka’s Hungarian associates, and his 15 year track record in Hungary as an enemy of democracy and the rule of law. That alone should make for his rapid exit from his strategic position in the White House. Our own findings fully support the call of three American senators – Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Ben Cardin of Maryland – who, on March 17, sent a joint letter to the US Justice Department asking the agency to look into whether Gorka “falsified his naturalization application or otherwise illegally procured his citizenship.” We will argue, that Trump’s senior campaign associate, failed to disclose the full extent of his neo-fascist, anti-American, anti-Democratic political ties in Hungary prior to being given American citizenship. By marrying an American multimillionaire, a Trump campaign donor with connections in high places, Gorka managed to secure access to the White House on behalf of forces, that, are diametrically opposed to America’s national interests.
In our second installment we shall provide further evidence of „the smoking gun” in the Trump campaign, and in Mr. Gorka’s closet.

To be continued in HFP on Friday…

http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/04/1 ... t-service/



The Budapest Bridge: Hungary’s Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service (Part 2)
April 14, 2017 5:59 pm·
This is the continuation of Part 1 of Dr. András Göllner’s essay, which appeared in HFP on Thursday.

Introduction

In the first part of this series, we argued, that the key players in Trump’s electoral scam have slipped under the FBI’s radar because US laws prohibit the Agency to pursue evidence outside the territory of the US. We also argued, that working with the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, an adjunct of the Russian secret service, would be the kiss of death to any American investigation.

We offered concrete evidence of the Orbán government’s payment of millions to influential Republicans, such as Connie Mack IV, with the aim of whitewashing the Orbán regime’s ties to the Russian secret service. The publicly available information that we accessed is but the tip of the iceberg, of a massive effort by Hungary to mislead Congress and American public opinion.

It is not our job to tell the FBI or US Congressional bodies how to pursue their job. But it is our duty to inform the representatives of the American people in which direction they should look in pursuing the truth. The second instalment of this report is designed with this purpose in mind.

The electoral impact of the Russian hackings

Evidence about the impact of the Russian hackings on the outcome of the 2016 US elections is so overwhelming that it’s blinding. Trump’s principal campaign message was, that Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted to fix the problems that plague America. She was portrayed day after day, as “Crooked Hillary” the woman who belongs behind bars, rather than in the White House. Every single time, the Russians released some of the DNC’s stolen e-mails, they were feeding this narrative and added oxygen to Trump’s fire.

It is important to acknowledge, that Donald Trump himself, was above board: he openly abetted Putin to disclose what Russia’s secret services stole from the DNC’s data base. The impact of the Wikileaks disclosures is irrefutable. Their impact on Clinton’s trustworthiness rating can be retroactively measured and verified. These leaks measurably increased Clinton’s negatives, played into the Trump campaign’s narrative, decreased her competitiveness at critical moments of the campaign, and especially in the marginal battleground states. While presidential candidates may lie, numbers do not.

The architects of the scam

In our first installment, we argued, that the dynamic behind the numbers was not an accident but was part of a conscious campaign strategy, developed by a trusted Trump advisor, Arthur J. Finkelstein, whose modus operandi is to remain completely out of the public limelight. Even Finkelstein’s closest associates acknowledge his genius in evading detection. Larry Weitzner, CEO of political consulting firm Jamestown Associates, says this about his mentor: “He prefers to work behind the scenes and let the candidate do the talking, unlike other [consultants] who prefer to be Fox TV stars.” A CNN report on Finkelstein had this to say about him: “He is the stuff of Hollywood: A man who can topple even the most powerful foes, yet so secretive that few have ever seen him. Finkelstein has been compared to criminal mastermind Kaiser Sose in The Usual Suspects, who lay so low that some doubted he really existed.”

Finkelstein was Trump’s pick for the anti-Hillary onslaught. Trump knew him well, and used him on previous occasions. He too is a member of the gang that admired the techniques of Roy Cohen, the brain child of McCarthyism, the man, who developed the science of making accusations stick without proper regard for evidence. Finkelstein has been instrumental in numerous Republican victories in New York state. His entire life was dedicated to demonizing Democrats and progressive ideas. And most importantly, he spearheaded the “Get Hillary” campaign in 2006 – he held a decade long personal grudge against Hillary. Finkelstein fit Trump’s aspirations like a fine leather glove fits a hand.

Finkelstein spent most of his time during the Trump campaign in Budapest, off the publicly disclosed campaign payroll. Until recently, and parallel to his “hidden” role in the campaign, he was in virtually daily contact with Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister. Leakage of the hacked documents, according to our sources was coordinated through Budapest, the European HQ of the FSB, and with Orbán’s knowledge. It is Orbán’s personal ties to the players on “The Budapest Bridge”, that makes him a liability now in the White House. He is drawing too much heat, as the Congressional investigations begin to cast a wider net. . Orbán was hoping for an early visit with Trump, as a token of the American President’s gratitude. With the Congressional investigations under way, plans have changed. In a fit of anger, Mr. Orbán recalled his Ambassador to Washington, Réka Szemerkényi.

We have learned that the London based joint company, set up by Finkelstein and Habony at the start of the Trump campaign (Danube Business Consulting Ltd) played an important role in the transfer of the hacked documents to Assange and Wikileaks. We suggest that apart from Finkelstein, his American consulting partner in Hungary, George E. Birnbaum, and Finkelstein’s Hungarian affiliate, Árpád Habony, Tamás Lánczi, the CEO of Danube Business Consulting should all be questioned under oath. The financial records of the company should be scrutinized, with the assistance of the Scotland Yard. But the net should involve all the players we have named in our first installment.

The line of questioning of those who used the „Budapest Bridge” is also critically important. One of the first questions the FBI, the House and Senate committees should ask Roger Stone, and under oath is this: Does he know of Finkelstein’s “silent” role in the campaign? Was he in contact, during his visits to London with Tamás Lánczi, the Director of Danube Business Consulting, Ltd, and did any of his discussions with Lánczi pertained to the hacked documents of the DNC and their transfer to Wikileaks ?

One of the first things the FBI should do, along with the Congressional intelligence Committees, is to examine J.D. Gordon’s Hungarian agenda book. Gordon was Jeff Sessions’ deputy during the campaign, and served as National Security Advisor to the Trump campaign. He travelled six times to Budapest, the European Headquarters of the Russian secret service. He should be questioned under oath and asked point blank: Who paid for his visits to Hungary, during the campaign? Why was it so important for him to spend so much time in this small, politically insignificant country, as a member of the Trump campaign team? Did he meet Finkelstein or Habony in Budapest, or Lánczi in London? Who were the oligarchs or officials he met in Hungary, and did he ever examine his contacts’ connections to the Russian secret services? Does he know anything about the corrupt passport business run by Orbán’s government? He should also be questioned under oath, why he would classify the Orbán regime as the Trump presidency’s “model” when Orbán, publicly declared, that his government’s “model” is Communist China, and Putin’s Russia, and Erdogan’s Turkey?

Hungary today is anything but a democracy. According to a press release, on March 21 of this year, Hungary’s Civil Liberties Union, and more than one hundred of the country’s top non-government organizations notified the world, that the Orbán regime has declared war on Hungary’s civil society. The freedom of the press is highly restricted. Two years ago, Republican Senator John McCain, referred to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a “neo-Fascist dictator”. Things have become even more desperate since then. . Last week, Hungary’s highest ranking privately owned university – the Central European University – was the victim of a retroactive law, that singled it out for special treatment and without any consultations, because its principal donor is the US financier, George Soros. By the end of year it will have to shut its doors, like its sister University in St Petersburgh. Most international experts, refer to the Orbán regime as Russia’s Trojan Horse in the Western alliance. Given its anti-democratic, pro-Russian track record, it took many Hungarians by surprise, that top Trump advisor J.D. Gordon traveled to Budapest during the campaign and declared that „The team of President-elect Donald Trump deeply admires the Hungarian leader. With Trump in the White House, a new chapter will be opened in American-Hungarian relations. Mr. Trump and Mr. Orbán will become good friends”? Could Trump’s friendship with Putin’s Hungarian disciple hold the clue to how Russia manipulated the margins in the battleground states, the margins, that according to Finkelstein’s pick for the top polling post in the Trump campaign, Tony Fabrizio, led to Clinton’s defeat?

Similar questions should be put to all the other Finkelstein operatives in the US, especially to ex-Republican Congressman Connie Mack VI who is being paid millions by the Orbán regime, to cover up the Hungarian government’s duplicitous relationship with Russia’s secret services.


Liberty Bridge, Budapest
Last but not least, Sebastian Gorka should be made to testify under oath. What was he doing in Hungary between 1992-2008, before he came to America, and became a close advisor of Donald Trump? Is he, or is he not a member of the notoriously anti-semitic Order of Vitéz in Hungary, an order created by Admiral Horthy, the man who declared war on the USA during WWII? If Gorka covered up his membership in this order, that was created to „keep out Jews” and to protect „the purity of the Hungarian blood”, he should be immediately fired from his White House post, and his US citizenship should be revoked.

Mr Gorka should be asked under oath, if he had any contact during the campaign with the CEO of Danube Business Consulting Ltd, Tamás Lánczi, an old friend of his from Budapest, and part of the shaddowy circle of people with ties to Russia’s secret services. (Tamás Lánczi’s father, András Lánczi was Gorka’s Hungarian PhD thesis supervisor.) Gorka’s questioners should begin, by asking how he got to be working for the ex-communist stooge, Ernő Raffay, who became Deputy Minister of Defense in Hungary, and is best known for snitching on democrats in the communist era, and writing anti-Semitic books after 1990? Why did Gorka work for the neo-fascist, anti-Semitic journal, Demokrata, for years, undermining democracy in Hungary? Why did he work for 15 years alongside ex-communist stooges, neo-nazis, and pro-Iranian radicals in Hungary, who spread hatred about America, and idolise Vladimir Putin to this day?

In case Gorka claims ignorance about the political views of his friend and associates, here are some public statements from two of them, who are, to this day, the closest collaborators of the Hungarian Prime Minister – András Bencsik and Imre Kerényi. We have verifiable public statements from Gorka’s other political associates in Hungary, such as Tamás Molnár, a co-founder of Gorka’s extremist Party, from Zsolt Bauer, the notorious anti-Semitic hate monger, and another pro-Iranian member of this influential circle of friends, the shadowy István Lovas, who masquerades under many an alias. Their public conduct should ban them from any travel to the US. The congressional investigations should explore the ties between these pro-Iranian, pro-Russian extremists and Sebastian Gorka.

András Bencsik, is a former communist Party secretary, and was already well known as an anti-Semitic hate-monger when Gorka worked with him. Bencsik is a member of the Order of Vitéz, an order, that has sworn to uphold the values that Hitler’s most trusted Hungarian ally, Admiral Horthy stood for, until the end of WWII. Bencsik is not only a Hitlerite, but feels, along with Viktor Orbán, that Putin’s autocracy is the way forward for humanity. No wonder, Trump thinks so highly of the Russian dictator, when one of his closest advisors is a former protegé of András Bencsik, Hungary’s best known Putin fan. This is what Bencsik had to say about Vladimir Putin, and this at a time, when Gorka worked for him in Budapest: “Russia has finally shut the door on a chaotic 20th century…and has now embarked on clearly delineated, collectively derived path towards its national interest, one based on tradition, faith, and strength …in a very short time, Putin and Medvedev will determine the fate of world history” (András Bencsik, Demokrata, May 14, 2008.Translation by this author.)

Gorka’s other Hungarian comrade in arm is, Imre Kerényi, who is, to this day, a senior advisor to the Hungarian autocrat, Viktor Orbán. Imre Kerényi was also a loyal communist party member prior to the fall of the dictatorship. He quickly remodelled himself into an anti-American pro-Russian, pro-Iranian advocate during the time Gorka associated with him in Hungary. This is what Kerényi has to say about America, Iran, and Putin’s Russia. “We are on the threshold a World War III, which the USA will lose…The American high-tech will be destroyed by a white powder.” (Imre Kerényi Médiaegyensúly. Budapest. Kairosz Publishers. 2003. pg. 263.Translation by this author.) In the 2006 Hungarian national election campaign, Mr. Kerényi spoke the following unforgettable words as he campaigned on behalf of his leader, Mr Orbán: “I can reassure all, that pretty soon, there will be a little mound where today, the White House stands in Washington, and on this mound, goats will be grazing peacefully” (ibid.,) While Gorka worked in Kerényi’s circle, the latter declared publicly, that “The USA is the world’s most despicable country, and even Hungary’s former overlords, the Russians are more likeable than the USA.” In the same speech, Orbán’s current senior advisor argued that Hungary’s political role model should be Iran, and the global Muslim resistance movement that is fighting the Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. (See: Tamás Bihari. “For Kerényi, the Muslims show the way” Népszava. February 28, 2006.) When Orbán, was asked for his views about Kerényi’s hatred of America, he replied, “I wish I had more people like him on my team.” With friends like Viktor Orbán, does Mr. Trump really need any enemies?

To this day, many people are puzzled why Trump and many on his campaign spoke so glowingly of Putin and his Hungarian disciple, Viktor Orbán. Many wonder why Viktor Orbán was the first and only European leader to publicly endorse Trump at the start of the campaign. This series has removed the blanket of secrecy, that shrouded “The Budapest Bridge” and the secretive “Merchant of Venom”, Arthur J. Finklestein, who swore to “get Hillary” for his master. We identified many of the players who traversed this bridge, and provided cover for the collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret service. With the backing of “Big Data” moguls like multi billionaire Roger Mercer, and an army of social media trolls, these people not only rigged the 2016 elections but delivered a fatal blow to the American body politics. It is not an exaggeration to say, that until now, they got away with murder.
http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/04/1 ... ce-part-2/


Congressman Investigating Trump Goes to Russia’s Money Laundromat, Cyprus
The House Intelligence Committee sent one of its members to the Mediterranean country where Wilbur Ross, Paul Manafort, and sanction-dodging oligarchs have all had money.
Tim Mak

04.14.17 2:05 PM ET
The House Intelligence Committee sent one of its members to Cyprus this week as part of its ongoing investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, adding a new twist to the ongoing inquiry.
“Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. “It was extraordinarily helpful in understanding how the Russians launder money and why.”
The Democratic congressman did not go into detail about what he found during his four-day trip to the Mediterranean country. But publicly available reporting hints at how Cyprus may be tied to the committee’s investigation.
The Trump administration’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was involved in a business deal with a Russian businessman with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin while he was the vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.
And last month the Associated Press reported that Treasury Department agents obtained bank transaction information involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, specifically transactions going through Cyprus, which AP described as “known as a haven for money laundering by Russian billionaires.”
Cyprus has not been a primary topic of discussion within the scope of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian influence in the U.S. presidential elections, but Quigley said that the country played a significant role.
“The fact that Turkey, the U.S and Russia and other countries are really interested in Cyprus, because of its strategic location… the fact that Russians launder their money there to avoid sanctions, and the fact that key U.S. and Russia players were there—all make it really important for the Russia investigation,” Quigley explainedhttp://www.thedailybeast.com/a ... yprus.html




The Budapest Bridge - Note that Session's right hand man-JD Gordon, went to Budapest 6 times during the campaign.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 14, 2017 8:11 pm

continuance from General Discussion

NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investigate
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&start=720



Path To Putin: Rudy Giuliani Knows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

Image

Open source data shows that Rudy Giuliani met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on behalf of a venture capital fund client in 2004.

If you’ve been reading this blog’s Paths to Putin, then this revelation will mark the 123rd path, and the very shortest route between Donald Trump and the Russian President.

Since then, his law and consulting practices have taken off, and his client list includes both Rosneft and the Emirate of Qatar; surprisingly, Giuliani also lists Russia’s Alfa Bank as a client too.

Giuliani was Trump’s right-hand man throughout the campaign and is a longtime friend of the President.

Today, Lavrov is still the Foreign Minister of Russia.

According to Giuliani’s former clients TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, the former Mayor met with Minister Lavrov in 2004 when he was newly hired, while employed by the venture capital firm.

Sergey Lavrov is still serving as Foreign Minister today.

The Giuliani/Lavrov relationship represents the highest level link possible between the Trump Campaign’s top surrogate and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

TriGlobal’s President Vitaly Pruss touted his relationship with Giuliani Partners on his firm’s website thusly:

From 2008 to 2011 Mr. Pruss worked closely with Giuliani Partners, LLC — international consulting company of former New york Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

According to TriGlobal’s website — which lists numerous events, many involving the former Trump campaign surrogate — in 2004 Giuliani also flew to meet with Russian billionaire Victor Rashnikov and flew to his remote Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works.

TriGlobal also says that Giuliani spent time in Kiev, Ukraine that year — proximate to the Orange Revolution — meeting with world famous former boxing champion, and now-Mayor of Kiev Vitali Klitschko.

****

Read my complete investigation of Rudy Giuliani’s extensive oil industry ties in the story “Is Rudy Giuliani The Mastermind Behind The Trump Russia Oil Deal?”
https://thetrumpwatchdog.com/2017/04/14 ... ey-lavrov/




Is Rudy Giuliani The Mastermind Behind The Trump Russia Dossier’s Massive Oil Deal?

Rudy Giuliani meets the former Emir of Qatar in 2002. He would later become a security client of Giuliani Partners. Image via NY Times
Did Rudy Giuliani mastermind the massive oil privatization deal in the Trump Russia Dossier?
This factual report reveals the full extent of his Russian connections, and proves that his Kremlin relationships have reached directly to Vladimir Putin for a long time.
That’s probably why he’s gone nearly silent since Buzzfeed released Chrisopher Steele’s dossier.
Time Magazine once called Rudy Giuliani an “honorary Texas oil lawyer” but his drive, his New York political image and connections, and his reach inside both the Kremlin and the Persian Gulf is what elevated Bracewell & Giuliani to be considered the leading energy law firm of the last decade, and why continues to rack up awards from its peers.
Open source information shows that both the Emirate of Qatar and state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft are clients of Rudy Giuliani’s law and consulting firm, Giuliani Partners.
Russia’s Alfa Bank has also hired Rudy Giuliani as a paid speaker.
Giuliani is widely known to have extensive FBI, NYPD and Justice Department contacts. He has been hired by three of the major principals in the Trump Russia dossier oil privatization transaction and personally knows the current Russian Foreign Minister.
According to Giuliani’s former clients TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, the former Mayor met with Minister Lavrov in 2004 when he was newly hired, while employed by the venture capital firm.
Sergey Lavrov is still serving as Foreign Minister today.
The Giuliani/Lavrov relationship represents the highest level link possible between the Trump Campaign’s top surrogate and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
TriGlobal’s President Vitaly Pruss touted his relationship with Giuliani Partners on his firm’s website thusly:
From 2008 to 2011 Mr. Pruss worked closely with Giuliani Partners, LLC — international consulting company of former New york Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
According to TriGlobal’s website — which lists numerous events , many involving the former Trump campaign surrogate — in 2004 Giuliani also flew to meet with Russian billionaire Victor Rashnikov, and flew to his remote Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works.
TriGlobal also says that Giuliani spent time in Kiev, Ukraine that year — proximate to the Orange Revolution — meeting with world famous former boxing champion, and now-Mayor of Kiev Vitali Klitschko.
Rudy Giuliani’s infamous client list includes Russia’s Alfa Bank, in addition to the two main participants in the Trump Russia dossier oil deal, seller Rosneft and buyer, the Gulf Arab Emirate of Qatar’s sovereign investment fund.

Rudy Giuliani meeting with the heads of Alfa Bank in 2008.
Alfa Bank hired Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and he traveled to Moscow to give what one can only assume was a paid speech at their “Award for Excellence in Foreign Investment in Russia” which they presented to the Intel Corporation.
That’s the same Alfa Bank with whom it’s alleged that Donald Trump’s email server was stealthily communicating with through the election period, and which ultimately became a target of an FBI FISA warrant, which the BBC confirmed in January.
Rudy Giuliani is featured prominently on page 8 of the Alfa Bank Fellowship Brochure, meeting with Alfa Bank’s owners.
In late November 2014, Rudy Giuliani’s former law firm told Bloomberg News that Russian state-run oil company Rosneft is one of its clients.
That was just a year after Rosneft had signed a massive deal with Exxon-Mobil — led by now-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — estimated to be worth half a trillion dollars, and after sanctions landed. Bloomberg noted:
The firm’s work for Russia’s state oil company didn’t stop the former Republican presidential candidate talking tough on sanctions against Russia.
Last year, Rosneft hired international law firm White & Case, LLP to represent them in their massive privatization transaction.
Coincidentally, Rudy Giuliani was a loss leader partner at White & Case for a brief time between his tenure in the US Attorney’s office prosecuting the Mafia, and during his first, failed campaign for Mayor of New York City in 1989.
Qatar has been a client of Giuliani Partners since 2005, when they hired the former New York Mayor — who became famous after 9/11 — to provide security tips to their Interior Ministry.
Giuliani also provided security services to the Qatari state-run oil company under that contract.
Notoriously, the former-Interior Minister of Qatar is both accused of sheltering Khalid Sheik Muhammad — who later became infamous for being a key planner of the attack that struck the Pentagon and brought down the World Trade Center towers — and of approving Giuliani’s work in the Gulf state.
The Center for Sanctions & Illicit Finance considers Qatar a major funder of ISIS in Syria.
Giuliani’s firm also worked with the largest Italian oil company, who happens to be an unusually close partner of Roseneft, and just completed a new transaction in Egypt’s
It’s another Italian-linked oil deal, which seems to circumvent current Western government-led sanctions against doing business with Roseneft.
Just like Ukraine-related sanctions against the state-run oil company have put Exxon’s 2012 Rosneft oil exploration deal on ice, as well as the Italian firm ENI’s 2013 venture with Rosneft to drill the Arctic Shelf.
ENI also executed a transaction with Rosneft last December, selling them a partial stake in an oil field in a deal that The Hill remarked represented a serious weakening of President Obama’s sanctions.
Bracewell & Giuliani represented Italy’s largest oil company, ENI, in a massive lawsuit, and won.
CNN revealed in 2007 that Giuliani’s firm represented Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s state-oil company PDVSA, lobbying for their American subsidiary Citgo Petroleum Corp. of Houston.

A month ago, CBS News reported that PDVSA arranged a $1.5 billion dollar loan from Russia’s Rosneft to avoid default on its other obligations, with 49.9% of the struggling company pledged as collateral. Unusually, the loan was booked in Delaware where Citgo is based, which means that US sanctions would — unless unexpectedly rolled back — prevent Rosneft from repossessing PDVSA’s Citgo shares.
PDVSA’s credit rating was just cut to junk status and ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has called their recent financial maneuverings “tantamount to default,” which means that a default and repossession event in the near future by Citgo to Rosneft is not unlikely.
Even if sanctions were released and PDVSA defaults, surrendering half of Citgo, because it would cede ownership of almost 5% of America’s oil refineries to Russia (not to mention Citgo’s gas stations and distribution deals), then Rosneft would need approval from CIFUS — a board of Cabinet members who review and must approve any major foreign asset purchases in the US — to sign off on the deal.
Rudy Giuliani’s extremely political list of foreign clients as a lawyer, a law partner or consultant is massive, global and chock full of terrorists, oligarchs and other infamous characters.
Here’s a small sample:
The former prosecutor has represented an Iranian group Mujahedin e-Khalq, that was closely affiliated with Sadaam Hussein.

Rudy Giuliani represents an Iranian terrorist group at the UN in 2012.
Giuliani gave a controversial speech in 2012 at the United Nations in New York, that some believe violated US sanctions against aiding terrorists. He’s also gone to Singapore to lobby for a casino for clients with North Korean connections.
Giuliani Partners listed TransCanada as a client in 2008, the company’s Keystone XL pipeline caused a nearly decade-long fight, but Donald Trump approved it quickly this year after President Obama declined the project, leading to a massive lawsuit against taxpayers, that the new President’s actions might have lost.
Rudy Giuliani has also represented Fox News, the government of Saudi Arabia and UST Tobacco.
And let’s not forget Guiliani’s lobbying in 2004 for private prison operator Cornell Company — whose financing caused former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay to be indicted — that was eventually bought by the public company Geo Group in 2010.
Bracewell changed its name when Rudy Giuliani joined the firm — concurrent to opening a Manhattan office to expand its practice which focuses on coal, natural gas and oil transactions — in a major push to use the exposure and political cover generated by its newest partner to vastly expand its business.
Notably, Giuliani’s former law firm did something unexpected for a law office in 2012.
That year, Bracewell & Giuliani it announced that its client Chesapeake Energy had closed an energy deal with Shell Oil
Later the Dutch oil conglomerate announced that they were also advised in a transaction with Chesapeake by… Bracewell & Giuliani.
Legal ethics typically prevent one firm from working on both sides of any transaction, but apparently those rules don’t apply to Rudy Giuliani’s former partners.
Rudy Giuliani went from being a vocal fan of Vladimir Putin since 2014, and the Donald Trump’s top surrogate — under formal consideration for the high office Secretary of State in November — to hiding under a rock ever since the Trump Russia dossier was published in January, making just a single appearance on Fox News to crow about influencing the Muslim Ban, which subsequently failed because of his racist comments.
Ironically, it was Rudy Giuliani who indicted the founder of Rosneft’s other new shareholder Glencore in 1983, because Marc Rich’s business evaded US sanctions.
But the former New York Mayor hasn’t retired, and he’s still taking more on more infamous foreign business arrangements — including his most recent job with Greenberg Traurig.
That job required Giuliani to fly for a meeting with Turkish autocrat Reçep Erdogan — to represent a Turkish gold trader accused of violating US sanctions.
But Giuliani hasn’t appeared in the mainstream media since the end of January when he bragged on Fox News about helping the Trump regime craft it’s unconstitutional Muslim Ban.

Former Bill Clinton White House staffer says that Rudy is asking prosecutors to cut a deal, but not getting a favorable response.
The rumor mill believes that Giuliani is in the FBI’s crosshairs and that his former protege James Comey has a smoking gun so obvious that he won’t give Rudy protection in exchange for testimony.
Internationally known American hacker The Jester recently said on Twitter that, “Rudy ‘Cyberman’ Giuliani is apparently in a legal quagmire and is desperate to ‘make a deal’. Comey isn’t interested.”
It’s impossible to know the validity of The Jester’s statement, but it is a fact that Trump’s former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort has said that he is registering as a foreign agent this week.
Manafort’s former partner Rick Davis was part of the Trump Campaign through election day — who served as John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager —and was also deeply involved in one of the specific transactions leading Trump’s former campaign manager to register as a Ukrainian foreign agent.
Public FBI activity and statements from former campaign advisors about wrongdoing related to foreign agents have steadily increased since FBI Director James Comey revealed the extent of his agency’s investigation last month.
The FBI Is Targeting Some Of Trump’s Known Associates
Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey recently told the Wall Street Journal that he attended a meeting with disgraced former-Trump NSA Gen. Mike Flynn, where he discussed circumventing legal due process to carry out an extraordinary rendition of Turkish President Erdogan’s political enemy Fethullah Gulen.
A week later, the FBI raided Woolsey’s casino in Saipan, which is located in a strip mall between a laundromat and a cellphone shop and rakes in massive amounts of cash, more than even the high stakes tables Chinese gamblers prefer in nearby Macao.

The South Pacific island of Saipan is a US Territory with about 50,000 residents, who just legalized casino gambling in 2014.
Woolsey’s casino was run by the former President of Trump’s casino empire.
It would seem that these two events are not disconnected, but rather show that Woolsey may be cooperating with authorities.
Also, the FBI recently conducted a massive arrest of New York mobsters with known ties to former Trump Organization senior advisor Felix Sater — himself a convicted racketeer who worked with both the Bonanno Family (who was targeted).
It’s uncertain if those arrests are directly related to the Trump Russia investigation, but Democratic Coalition Senior Advisor Scott Dworkin indicated that sources on capitol hill knew about the raid, and that it was connected to the President.
What is absolutely certain, is that Giuliani’s website has vanished since January 11th, after Trump named him Cyber Security Advisor in the wake of the Trump Russia dossier release, and after the media ripped both of them apart after discovering how horrifically un-secure his website was in all respects.
Rudy Giuliani made numerous highly unusual statements during the 2016 campaign, including sharing knowledge about Russian cyber attacks before they happened and bragging that he had foreknowledge of the FBI Director’s October surprise letter.
If he’s ultimately implicated in the Trump Russia Dossier, that should come as no surprise.
He’s been an international oil lawyer and security consultant to terror funders and consultant to oligarchs ever since leaving public office.
Giuliani has all of the relationships, and all of the connections to bring together disparate parties in a massively global real estate deal.
The former Mayor is a voluble speaker, filled with opinions and alternative facts, which makes his utter silence for the last three months even more remarkable.
When will Rudy Giuliani break his silence about the Trump Russia dossier and what was his true role in the Trump campaign?
Rudy Giuliani left Bracewell & Giuliani last year, which removed his name from the firm, and joined Greenberg Traurig as Senior Advisor to the Executive Chairman and as the Chair of the Cybersecurity, Privacy and Crisis Management Practice.
Now that the FBI’s Trump Russia investigation seems to be reaching critical mass, he’s going to be practicing Crisis Management full time, very soon.
His assistant at Greenberg Traurig did not answer a call seeking comment for this story or return voicemail at the time of publication.
https://medium.com/the-stern-facts/the- ... 53876e789e
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 14, 2017 10:10 pm

continuance from General Discussion

NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investigate
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... &start=720


Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo hangs Roger Stone out to dry over WikiLeaks
By Bill Palmer | April 14, 2017 | 0

In the latest sign that Donald Trump is struggling to hold his own political coalition together in the face of mounting pressure over the Russia scandal, Trump’s longtime close friend Roger Stone is launching an all out offensive – against Trump’s own people. Last week Stone went after Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, and now he’s going after Trump’s own hand picked CIA Director.
Roger Stone’s beef with CIA Director Mike Pompeo centers around international cyberterrorist group WikiLeaks. Donald Trump spent the election praising WikiLeaks and encouraging it to continue releasing secrets that had been stolen from his political opponents. Stone has admitted to having backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as well as communications with Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0, who supplied much of the stolen campaign info to WikiLeaks.
But with the Russia scandal now weighing more heavily on the Trump administration by the day, Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo publicly condemned WikiLeaks yesterday as being a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” This stood out as bizarre, as Pompeo had spent the campaign aligning himself with WikiLeaks alongside Trump. But now that the Trump administration is trying to throw WikiLeaks under the bus to stave off the Russia scandal, Roger Stone is erupting.
Stone now says “I think [Pompeo] should resign. I really think he should resign. This really raises questions about his qualifications and his ability to do the job” (source: Mediaite). By throwing WikiLeaks under the Russia bus, Pompeo (and by extension Trump) are essentially leaving Stone out to dry, as his connections to WikiLeaks are already well established. Stone seems to know he’s being scapegoated.
This comes just a little more than a week after Roger Stone began publicly attacking Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, openly accusing him of leaking dirt about White House rival Steve Bannon to MSNBC host Morning Joe (link). How many more of Trump’s allies will Stone attack before Trump begins attacking Stone?
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/cia-mi ... eaks/2312/



Roger Stone Calls For CIA Director Pompeo Resignation After Speech Slamming Wikileaks
by Josh Feldman | 4:59 pm, April 14th, 2017

Roger Stone said he thinks that CIA Director Mike Pompeo should step down after his speech yesterday slamming Wikileaks.

Pompeo called out Wikileaks and Julian Assange, saying they’re a “non-state, hostile intelligence service” being abetted “by state actors like Russia.”

ALSO ON MEDIAITECIA Director Slams Wikileaks, 'A Non-State, Hostile Intelligence Service'


Stone––who has been publicly questioned about whether he had prior knowledge of Wikileaks’ actions during the election––spoke to Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg and said there is “no evidence” to back up Pompeo’s statements.

As far as Stone is concerned, Pompeo is buying the “B.S. narrative”:

“I think he should resign. I really think he should resign. This really raises questions about his qualifications and his ability to do the job.”

Watch above, via Newsmax.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/roger-st ... wikileaks/
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Sat Apr 15, 2017 10:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:10 am

continuance from General Discussion

NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investigate
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=636113#p636113



Claude Taylor‏ Apr 14
@TrueFactsStated
Taylor Retweeted Melanie #GOPRefugee™
First round is from Comey's investigation. But NY AG is hard at it with a separate follow on investigation-expect RICO indictments.


Claude Taylor‏ @TrueFactsStated Apr 14

The list of who is ultimately indicted in #Trumprussia will be longer than most observers expect and will therefore have some surprises.



New York Attorney General expected to bring RICO indictments in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal
By Bill Palmer | April 14, 2017 | 0

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman busted Donald Trump’s fraudulent Trump University. He busted Trump’s phony charity. And he recently busted Trump’s favorite lender, Deutsche Bank, for Russian money laundering. But now, according to a source that’s proven to be consistently reliable, The New York AG is expected to bring RICO indictments in the Trump-Russia scandal.



Yesterday, two other reliable sources asserted that New York AG Schneiderman is looking to bring down the “entire three ring circus” and that FBI Director James Comey may begin making major arrests as soon as next week (link). That led to the question of just how Schneiderman and Comey are working together on this. Claude Taylor, a former member of Bill Clinton’s White House who has inside sources when it comes to the Trump-Russia investigation, chimed in to explain it thusly: “First round is from Comey’s investigation. But NY AG is hard at it with a separate follow on investigation-expect RICO indictments” (link). And that makes for a whole new ballgame.



RICO laws focus specifically on racketeering, which goes above and beyond the political scope of the Trump-Russia scandal. Even if the FBI is focused on the Donald Trump campaign’s illegal Russian election collusion, it appears the State of New York is focused on the organized crime aspect. This provides context for the arrest two weeks ago of ten low level alleged mafia henchmen, whose crime family has ties to convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater, who in turn has financial ties to Donald Trump (link).



These kinds of goons are typically busted for the sake of getting them to flip on bigger fish. And so even as the FBI continues to pursue Donald Trump’s campaign advisers for their improper ties to Russia, it appears Trump’s home state of New York is moving in on him by going after his mafia associations
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ne ... ndal/2314/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:27 am

Two-Bit 'Russiagate' Propagandist Bill Palmer wrote:international cyberterrorist group WikiLeaks


Seriously?

The Democratic leadership, who are not interested in ever winning another election, but who cheered Trump's cruise missile aggression against Syria, will presumably also be cheering if Trump orders the extrajudicial murder of Assange. Will Bill Palmer applaud such a crime? By applying the label that renders anyone fair game for summary killing by the state, he is effectively calling for the killing of Assange, as many others before him.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... uQW0US2sJw

Trump in 2010: WikiLeaks 'disgraceful,' there 'should be like death penalty or something'

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/politics/ ... wikileaks/

(CNN)Donald Trump called WikiLeaks "disgraceful" and suggested there be a "death penalty" for their actions during a 2010 interview.

Speaking on camera to preview Brian Kilmeade's radio show, the Fox News anchor brought up the topic of WikiLeaks. At the time, WikiLeaks had published hundreds of thousands of classified documents and videos that were leaked to the organization by Pfc. Chelsea Manning, known at the time as Pfc. Bradley Manning.

"I think it's disgraceful, I think there should be like death penalty or something," Trump said during the quick exchange uncovered online by CNN's KFile.

His 2010 comments are in sharp contrast to his decision Wednesday morning to invoke WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who claimed in a new Fox News interview that the Russian government was not the source of the hacks during the presidential campaign.
Following the interview, Trump tweeted: "Julian Assange said 'a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta' - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!"

The president-elect has repeatedly questioned the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Russia was the source of the hacks, which took place during the 2016 presidential campaign and targeted Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. During the campaign, Trump cited information released by WikiLeaks to attack Clinton and the DNC.

A Trump transition team spokesperson did not return a request to comment on the record for this story.

Last edited by JackRiddler on Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:32 am

continuance from General Discussion
NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investigated
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=636116#p636116


Image

Former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove says Donald Trump borrowed money from Russia during 2008 financial crisis
Days before taking office, Mr Trump said Russia had never had any 'levarage' over him

Mythili Sampathkumar New York an hour ago14 comments


Former head of MI6 Richard Dearlove said Donald Trump borrowed money from Russia during the 2008 financial crisis PA
The former head of MI6 has said Donald Trump borrowed money from Russia for his business during the 2008 financial crisis.

Richard Dearlove told Prospect Magazine that “what lingers for Trump may be what deals – on what terms – he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money” when other banks and lenders would not risk the money, given Mr Trump’s history of bankruptcy.

Mr Dearlove alleged the money was used by Mr Trump to prop up his real estate empire, which was hit hard by the financial crisis. It is not illegal to borrow money from Russian entities but Mr Dearlove, who left government in 2004, did not provide any evidence to support his claim in the interview.

Just days before taking office Mr Trump tweeted that Russia has never had “leverage” over him.

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!
6:31 AM - 11 Jan 2017
23,689 23,689 Retweets 86,604 86,604 likes

Mr Trump also recently said US-Russia relations may be at an “all-time low” following the US air strike in Russian-allied Syria after a chemical attack in the Idlib province.

Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer at international law firm Amsterdam & Partners with considerable experience in Russian affairs, told The Independent there was “no question” that US intelligence agencies and the FBI had information about Trump’s financial dealings with Russian entities prior to the 2016 US election.


READ MORE
Trump-Russia investigation 'now has concrete evidence of collusion'
“Trump’s relationship with Russia goes back many, many years. I’m sure the FBI was monitoring it,” he said.

Two parallel investigations into alleged ties between Trump associates and Russia during the 2016 presidential election as well as Russia’s alleged tampering with the election are being conducted in Congress at the moment.

Democrat Senator Mark Warner, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the tactics used by the Kremlin “send a chill down anyone who believes in the democratic process“.

If the FBI and or other US intelligence agencies did know about any financial burden Mr Trump had with Russian lenders, it will raise further questions over why the information was not released earlier, especially given the FBI's approach to Mr Trump's opposition candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

FBI Director James Comey infamously sent a letter on 28 October - just 11 days before Americans went to the polls - to Congress stating the agency found new, pertinent emails in its ongoing investigation into then-candidate Ms Clinton’s use of a private email server for messages containing classified information.

Mr Amsterdam said one possible explanation is “that the FBI has an informer who was once part of the Trump organisation” and that information was not released in order to protect that source.

“In my view…[the FBI] had no obligation” to share the Trump investigation but “the same rules should apply to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump,” he said.

Mr Amsterdam explained that Russian authorities likely have the same, if not “better,” information about Mr Trump’s financial dealings with Russian entities.

“One of Mr Trump’s main lenders is a bank that’s been particularly close with Russians: Deutsche Bank,” said Mr Amsterdam.

It is unknown if Mr Trump is still paying off the alleged 2008 debts to Russian lenders or which part of the vast Trump organisation took out the loans.

The Congressional investigations will also include interviews and possibly hearings with Mr Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

It has been confirmed that Vnesheconombank, a Russian state development bank, met with Mr Kushner in December 2016.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 84341.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:47 am

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NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Investigate
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=636120#p636120

The Russian Laundromat Exposed

by OCCRP
20 March 2017

Three years after the “Laundromat” was exposed as a criminal financial vehicle to move vast sums of money out of Russia, journalists now know how the complex scheme worked – including who ended up with the $20.8 billion and how, despite warnings, banks failed for years to shut it down.

laundromat/the-global-laundromat/Mateusz_Piskorski_Axis.jpg
The former Polish MP, Mateusz Piskorski, was arrested last year for cooperating with Russian intelligence services. Credit: Réseau Voltaire, Axis for Peace
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) broke the story of the Laundromat in 2014, but recently the reporters from OCCRP and Novaya Gazeta in Moscow obtained a wealth of bank records which they then opened to investigative reporters in 32 countries.

Their combined research for the first time paints a fuller picture of how billions moved from Russia, into and through the 112 bank accounts that comprised the system in eastern Europe, then into banks around the world.

Reporters can now say that much of the money ultimately found its way to Russian businessmen who own groups of companies involved in construction, engineering, information technology, and banking. All held hundreds of millions of US dollars in state contracts either with the government directly, or with state-owned entities. They are named in this project and their spending sprees on fancy autos, prep school fees, furs, and electronics are revealed.

Law enforcement in Moldova, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and Russia continue to investigate the Laundromat, but attempts to bring those responsible to justice and to recover the money have been hampered in part by the reluctance of Russian officials to cooperate.

The Moldovan bank Moldindconbank received more than $20 billion. Credit: Ion Preașcă/RISE Moldova
Money to Play With
Money entered the Laundromat via a set of shell companies in Russia that exist only on paper and whose ownership cannot be traced. Some of the funds may have been diverted from the Russian treasury through fraud, rigging of state contracts, or customs and tax evasion. Money that might have helped repair the country’s deteriorating roads and ports, modernize the health care system, or ease the poverty of senior citizens – was instead deposited in a Moldovan bank.

At the other end of the Laundromat, money flowed out for luxuries, for rock bands touring Russia, and on a small Polish non-governmental organization that pushed Russia’s agenda in the European Union. (It is run by Mateusz Piskorski, a Polish pro-Kremlin party leader arrested for spying for Russia).

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi got paid too. The Hungarian-born, California-based psychology professor is noted for naming the psychological concept of flow – a highly focused mental state.

Well-known companies unwittingly took part when beneficiaries used their Laundromat money to buy goods and services.

South Korea’s Samsung received laundered money, as did the Swedish telecom company Ericsson, and the toolmaker Black & Decker. In the United States, $500,000 went to Total Golf Construction Inc., the company that boasts of renovating a Donald Trump golf course on Canouan Island in the Grenadines. A large Japanese electronics manufacturer got €576,000 from the Laundromat in its Austrian branch on behalf of a British company run by a Russian criminal, Sergey Magin.

A Worldwide Maze of Payments

The Laundromat was ingenious.

Organizers created a core of 21 companies based in the United Kingdom (UK), Cyprus and New Zealand and run by hidden owners. A number of Russian companies then used these companies to move their money out of Russia.

To get the money out, the scheme’s organizers devised a clever misdirection. They created a fake debt among some of these core shell companies and then got a Moldovan judge to order the Russian company seeking to launder funds to pay that debt to a court-controlled account. Moldindconbank in Moldova held those accounts. The companies involved in the fake debt also had accounts at the same bank. Soon, Moldindconbank was deluged with cash sent in from the Russian companies. About $8 billion was then withdrawn directly from these accounts in Moldova and spent around the world.

Several examples of the promissory notes used to send the money out of Russia.

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Meanwhile, nearly $13 billion more was transferred to Trasta Komercbanka in Latvia. Some of the money disappeared into the maze of these same shell company accounts. Trasta Komercbanka’s location in the European Union made the transactions less likely to be questioned by other banks. The money was now considered “clean” European money that could be spent on anything the Russians wanted.

The system worked well enough to launder some $20.8 billion – which can be seen in a database ​showing who received the money:​


Distributing the Money
Between 2011 and 2014, the 21 shell companies fired out 26,746 payments from their various Trasta Komercbanka and Moldindconbank accounts. The payments went to 96 countries, passing almost without obstacle into some of the world’s biggest banks.

All of the core-group companies appeared to be owned by proxies standing in for hidden owners. Even directors and shareholders of the companies were fake.

Some payments did go to genuine companies for real goods – but the transactions were made not by their clients, but by the 21 core companies using bogus copy-pasted paperwork which specified goods the company didn’t sell.

Some payments went to another layer of shell companies, similar to the core group making the payments from Trasta Komercbanka.

Trasta Komercbanka, the Latvian bank that handled the Laundromat money, was headquartered on a quiet street in Riga. Credit: Paul Radu/OCCRP
Companies that OCCRP reporters contacted denied wrongdoing. Many said this is how their Russian clients do business – adding that they now have stopped servicing those clients. Most invoked confidentiality and refused to identify their clients.

Using company records, reporters tracked the names of some clients after executives refused to give them out. They found the heavy users of the scheme were rich and powerful Russians who had made their fortunes from dealing with the Russian state.

Among them: Alexey Krapivin, a businessman in the trusted inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin; Georgy Gens, a Moscow businessman who owns the Lanit group, one of the major information technology (IT) distributors in Russia, for Apple, Samsung, ASUS and other computer giants; or Sergey Girdin, whose Russian Marvel group is involved in the IT business and who is an important client of the biggest Russian-owned bank.

Some Laundromat money was funneled to companies owned by Russian citizens abroad, such as Trident International Corp., owned by Pavel Semenovich Flider.

Now a naturalized US citizen, Flider was indicted in 2015 for smuggling stockpiles of US electronics components to Russian defense technology firms.

The FBI reported to the court that Flider’s “apparent sales have gone to historically well-known entities in the Russian military-industrial complex, three of which have been either directly targeted or indirectly impacted by US sanctions against Russian defense technology entities.”

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The Big Banks
Finally, payments of laundered money slid easily into the world’s biggest international banks.

The Laundromat illustrates that the world’s banking system has been impotent, unable to stanch massive flows of illicit money. Bank officials offer a number of reasons as to why this is so – including that their Russian counterparts have not been helpful.

Still, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Bank of China, Bank of America, Danske Bank, and Emirates NBD Bank all ended up with tainted money.



When OCCRP first reported on the Laundromat, Trasta Komercbanka was quick to call the story “a jumble of distorted facts and speculations of journalists against the bank.” Two years later, in the spring of 2016, Trasta Komercbanka was shut down for failure to comply with money laundering regulations.

Investigations began in three countries after the news broke, but have stalled since. Moldovan-Russian cooperation on the investigation seemed off to a good start when in September 2014, a month after OCCRP published its first Laundromat story, Russian investigators Aleksei Shmatkov and Evgenii Volotovskii arrived in Chișinău to meet their Moldovan counterparts.


Viorel Morari is the anti-coruption chief prosecutor in the Republic of Moldova
They bore passports issued with consecutive numbers the day before their arrival, suggesting to the Moldovans they were dealing with secret service agents given credentials just for the meeting.

They stayed for two days and were accompanied around the Moldovan capital by a Russian embassy representative. Moldovan investigators say they got no helpful information from the two visitors – or from anyone in Moscow.

Moldovans involved who have asked to remain anonymous said they felt caught in a ping-pong game with Moscow: each time they tried to get hold of someone, they were directed to a different department of the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB), one of the main intelligence agencies and the successor to the Soviet KGB.

Earlier this month, the Moldovan Parliament lodged an official complaint saying that the farther along Moldovan investigators got in figuring out the Laundromat, the more the Russian government “harassed” and “abused” Moldovan officials trying to enter Russia.

“These abuses also intensified once the Moldovan investigators sent requests to the Russian Federation to receive information regarding the origin of the said amount… We have to mention here that our investigation revealed connections between [this] money and attempts to corrupt members of the Moldovan Parliament.”
Viorel Morari, head of the anti-corruption prosecution office in Moldova, said they had brought criminal charges against 16 judges.

“We have 14 cases in court. Four of the judicial executors are charged. One is missing and we issued a search warrant for him, too, and two cases are already in court. Seven persons from Moldindconbank are also under investigation,” he said.

FSB representatives served on the board of at least one of banks that wired billions out of Russia as did Igor Putin, Putin’s cousin. He was a manager and executive board member in the Russian Land Bank. This bank wired more than $9.7 billion to Moldindconbank in Moldova, most of which went on to Trasta Komercbanka and from there on to the world.
https://www.occrp.org/en/laundromat/the ... t-exposed/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:52 am

continuance from General Discussion
NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Invesitgate
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=636122#p636122


Dense networks
Image
Guido Georgio Lombardi and friend, from his North Atlantic League website.
A truly bizarre profile in Saturday's Times by Jason Horowitz of a Trump friend, fellow resident of Trump Tower and Palm Beach, George Guido Lombardi, aka Guido George Lombardi, aka Count of Canevaro (he's got that one wrong—the Canevaro nobility was awarded to Giuseppe Canevaro, a 19th-century guano king, I'm not making this up, who was ennobled by King Victor Emmanuel II—conte di Zoagli e duca dei Castelvari—for his part in transporting Napoleon III's army to Genoa helping the Risorgimentisti conquer Lombardy from Austria), interviewed at Mar-a-Lago

as he sat next to a whirring Boca Freeze soft ice cream machine in the Mar-a-Lago beach house as Secret Service agents lounged outside, looking out over the Atlantic.
That's poetry!

Somebody's going to have to stop me from quoting the entire thing, which treats this guy as a sort of ambassador to all the rightwing nativist mobs of Europe, the Lega Nord and the Beppe Grillo movement, Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen (“I told her right away, ‘Marine, dump your dad. He is just a dead weight. And anyway you have to make a choice. You are either with the Jews or you are with the Muslims. You can’t be with both.’” He's fond of Jews, “‘our curly friends,’ he said referring to the orthodox party that had rented Mar-a-Lago out that afternoon”). And the husband of the former Gianna Lahainer, who when her first husband died in 1993 at the outset of the Palm Beach social season had his body put into cold storage at the local funeral home instead of shipping it back to Italy so she wouldn't be compelled to miss any of the parties.

And he's also revealed to Mr. Horowitz that Trump believes his tweets saved Amanda Knox, the American former student and murder suspect in Perugia whose innocence is now established, from life in prison, and is really pissed off because he apparently heard she voted for Clinton last November, the ungrateful bitch.

But there was this one bit that rhymed with something else that stuck in my head:

Ms. Lahainer, a former office worker from Trieste who had married the real estate mogul Frank Lahainer, was already a friend and neighbor of Mr. Trump, having bought one of the first condos in Trump Tower. When Mr. Trump first considered buying Mar-a-Lago in 1985, she warned him about the noise pollution from plane traffic over the estate, prompting him to renegotiate the price.
It was that equally crazy and apparently coded story by Glenn Thrush on Paul Manafort, another Trump Tower resident, famous consultant to rightwing dictators Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Viktor Yanukovych, who took his talents to Palm Beach if you know what I mean after his Ukraine gig fell apart in the Euromaidan revolution, in which we were told that Manafort couldn't recall any particular activities before 2016 with Trump, in spite of their mutual friendships going back 50 years with Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, except for this one odd little detail:
In one of his memos Mr. Manafort refers vaguely to work he performed, years ago, to clear noisy airspace over Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.
You see what I'm saying? This 1985 struggle to keep the obnoxious planes away from the billionaire's personal air looms ever larger in Trump's life, and it was something Manafort and the future Mrs. Lombardi, his Trump Tower neighbor, worked on together.

It doesn't mean a thing! Unless, you see, it does. I don't know if you all remember, at the time of the Snowden revelations, what we learned about what can be done with communications metadata collection, but it was all about what we call "social network" analysis, a technique for establishing how a group of people are interrelated with one another by mapping their one-to-one pairwise interactions. I was hoping at the time that what the NSA was doing was establishing the interactions of international bad actors, terrorists, arms dealers, and money launderers—I wasn't thinking about Republican politicians like Rudolf Giuliani and Jeff Sessions—which it now seems to me is what they were in fact starting at least to do, and what we're now learning about the circles around Trump is that they were very densely interrelated, to a point where weird little details like this really intensify the impression.
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2017/0 ... works.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 15, 2017 11:19 am

continuance from General Discussion
NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Invesitgate
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 22#p636122


MinM » Sat Apr 15, 2017 10:16 am wrote:
@BuzzFeedNews

Why Trump’s lawyer was sued over $350,000 he says he doesn’t remember cashing
Image

In 1999, Michael Cohen, now the president’s personal lawyer, cashed a $350,000 check from an NHL hockey player
Image
From left; Michael Cohen, the president's personal attorney; Vladimir Malakhov, a former NHL player; and Symon Garber, Cohen's partner and a taxicab magnate

Long before he became Donald Trump’s feared attack dog, or began to visit the White House as the president’s personal attorney, or took a position with the Republican National Committee, or partnered with powerhouse lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs, Michael Cohen ran a small legal practice in Hell’s Kitchen.

He was a one-man show and handled a little bit of everything, from personal injury cases to a Ukrainian investment fund to a fleet of taxis to a trust account he managed for clients.

One day in 1999, a check for $350,000 was deposited into that trust account, to be disbursed to a woman living in South Florida. As the lawyer in charge of the account, Cohen was supposed to ensure that she got the money.

But he didn’t.

Why not? And what ultimately happened to all that money?

“I don’t recall,” Cohen said in a deposition.

The missing $350,000 — which has never been recovered — became the centerpiece of a 2009 lawsuit in Miami, where Cohen was accused of civil fraud. After years of litigation, Cohen prevailed, in part because the suit was filed past the statute of limitations.

Cohen, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, said he was first questioned about the money eight years after it was deposited, by which time he said he could not recall much about it. “I honestly don’t remember who gave me the deposit at the time,” he said. “This is another poor attempt to malign my impeccable reputation and attempt to connect me to a Russian conspiracy.”

But Cohen’s own testimony in the case reveals that the man who is now the president’s personal lawyer failed to execute one of the core duties of an attorney — properly handling money placed in his trust — and was cavalier about that failure.

“One of the things lawyers are most likely to be disciplined for is misusing clients’ funds,” said Deborah Rhode, a legal ethics expert from Stanford University, who said that properly accounting for and disbursing funds is a critically important obligation for many attorneys.

“A lawyer who, incident to his law practice, comes into possession of funds belonging to a client (or third person), has very clear obligations,” Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University, wrote in an email. Like Rhode, he declined to comment on the particulars of Cohen’s case, which he was not familiar with, but said that in general a lawyer “may not commingle the funds with his own. He must keep them in a separate account, sometimes called an escrow or special account. He must ‘promptly’ notify the client or third person of his receipt of the funds and ‘promptly’ deliver them.”
“This is another poor attempt to malign my impeccable reputation and attempt to connect me to a Russian conspiracy.”

New York State Bar Association records show that Cohen has never been disciplined. A spokesperson for the association said cases that were investigated but resulted in no discipline are kept secret.

The $350,000 mystery involves four other important characters: Vladimir Malakhov, a professional hockey player who wrote the original check; Yulia Fomina, a Russian woman who asked Malakhov to loan her the money and put her condominium up as collateral; Vitaly Buslaev, a Russian businessperson who was Fomina’s boyfriend; and Symon Garber, a Ukrainian-born taxi baron who was Cohen’s business partner.

In 1999, Malakhov was playing defense for the Montreal Canadiens. He would play in the NHL for a decade, win a Stanley Cup, and collect about $30 million in salary. Along the way, he attracted the attention of Russian organized crime. During Senate hearings, a former gangster testified that someone tried to shake down Malakhov at a restaurant in Brooklyn’s heavily Russian neighborhood, Brighton Beach. The man who made the threats reportedly worked for Vyacheslav Ivankov, a notorious Russian mafia boss who was later assassinated in 2009.

“Malakhov spent the next months in fear,” according to the testimony, “looking over his shoulder to see if he was being followed, avoiding restaurants and clubs where Russian criminals hang out.”

Malakhov was playing for Montreal in 1999 when Buslaev and Fomina entered the picture.

Yuri Felshtinsky, a Russian-American historian, reports that Buslaev was dating Fomina and supported her in the United States, helping her purchase a condominium, an Aston Martin, and a Mercedes-Benz. There are few public records available on Buslaev, but Russian business registrations show him as a manager of at least three companies near Moscow.

Court records show that around that time, Buslaev encouraged her to ask Malakhov and his wife, with whom she was friendly, for a loan.

Buslaev was looking for a hedge against “the instability of the Russian ruble on the foreign exchange market,” Malakhov’s sports agent wrote in an affidavit. At the agent’s suggestion, Malakhov demanded some collateral. (The agent, Paul Theofanous, did not return a message left at his office last week.)

So Fomina put up the deed to her condo and Malakhov wrote the check.

But he didn’t write it to her. At what he would later say was Fomina’s request, Malakhov wrote it to the trust account that Cohen controlled.

Two years later, claiming that Fomina failed to repay the loan, Malakhov’s wife went to court to take possession of the condo.

Fomina was in Russia at the time. When she returned to Florida, she filed suit, claiming she had been taken advantage of and didn’t speak enough English to understand the loan documents she signed. She and the Malakhovs did not return phone calls seeking comment, and Buslaev could not be reached. But Fomina’s lawsuit set off more than five years of litigation, and Malakhov’s lawyers eventually questioned Cohen about his role in the matter.

During a deposition, they showed him the check that Malakhov wrote, which had been endorsed with what appeared to be Cohen’s signature. Cohen declined to say whether it really was his.

“It could be,” he allowed.

He said that he didn’t know Malakhov, Fomina, or Buslaev.

The trust account, he explained, was used for “negligence settlements” or “property damage claims.” Perhaps the money was meant for the Ukrainian investment fund he managed, Cohen said.

Again and again — at least six times — Cohen said he didn’t recall why the $350,000 was deposited or what became of it.

Because many of the players in this deal were Russian or Ukrainian, lawyers pressed Cohen about his connections to those countries. He said that he had visited “Russia or the Ukraine” in the past but that he never sent money from one of his business accounts to anyone living there. He said that he had foreign clients and partners, including Garber, who helped him manage a fleet of taxis in America. Garber was listed as a witness in the case but was not interviewed by attorneys. Visited recently by reporters at his taxi headquarters in Queens, Garber declined comment.

“Somewhere along the line, I was asked to hold somebody’s funds for whatever the purpose was,” Cohen said during his deposition in 2007. “Whether it was A, B or C, I don’t know the reasons and I can’t even begin to guess.”

The money, according to court filings, has never been found.

https://t.co/EQ0ghwSrU6


*****



MinM » Wed Jul 08, 2009 8:05 am wrote:
seemslikeadream wrote:Image

The Web site Zero Hedge found legal documents from a 1997 civil case in California naming a Sergei Aleynikov, a charge of trademark infringement brought by the owners of the game show Wheel of Fortune.

A Kansas City site called the Pitch writes that a co-defendant in that case, Leonid Ivanutenko, also ran a firm called Express Shipping Services that was named as a front for the Russian mafia in a separate case.

That 1997 case involved an effort to copy the game show Wheel of Fortune as an online game called Fortune Wheel, which was finally shut down in 1998 after a complaint to its Web host.

A third defendant in that case, Vadim Resyev, had an alias of Vadim Arefiev. I may be talking here about a different person, but Linked In lists a Vadim Arefiev as a senior developer and system analyst at Merrill Lynch.

Small world, especially if this Arefiev is the same Arefiev whom Aleynikov previously worked with. Although it is possible neither ever met or did business with Ivanutenko a decade ago. For all I know those names are as common in Russia as Smith, Jones and Brown are here. What I have given, in the previous five paragraphs, is pure speculation based on a littie Googling.

But it makes a great story.

Security expert Bruce Schneier told The New York Times Goldman made all the right moves in this case, but if Russian gangsters got the Aleynikov code from Germany then Goldman’s trading secrets may be blown anyway.

Since the arrest happened Friday the question needs to be asked. Assuming the Sergei Aleynikov arrested at Newark is the same Sergei Aleynikov who tried to steal Wheel of Fortune with a mobbed-up partner, did President Obama bring this up with President Putin in their meetings earlier today?

If Goldman Sachs’ trading secrets are now in the hands of Russian gangsters, who benefits? How much cooperation will Russia offer in cracking the case, and what might that mean for bilateral relations?

1997 was a big year for the Russian Mob :shrug:

"Russian Organized Crime"
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Task Force Report (1997)

frontline: mafia power play: the russian mafia in north america: rcmp report
Image
Image
Image
Image
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... /csis.html

:backtotopic:


Jeff » Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:02 pm wrote:Russian Mafia in bed with Wall Street, CEO says

Daily Utah Chronicle, March 5

Every day, thousands of Americans look to invest their money in stocks, and many of them go through brokers and traders to simplify the process.

Unfortunately, according to Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a majority of those purchasers will be victims of Wall Street's criminal tactics and will help line the pockets of corrupt brokers and lawyers. Byrne, a Utahn who founded Overstock.com, talked to a crowd in the Union on Monday about how New York financial media and law firms have teamed up with big-wig business elites to create massive amounts of profit at the cost of American consumers.

Byrne said when someone purchases a stock, there is a three-day stock settlement period during which a broker or a trader must provide a purchaser with that stock. However, through loopholes in the system, brokers and traders can legally not provide you with that stock almost indefinitely, giving the purchaser an IOU instead, Byrne said.

"It's my thesis that certain people have figured out how they can abuse that loophole, and flood the market...often in connivance with a broker dealer," he said.

Through this "flooding," the brokers can essentially issue the same stock to hundreds of people at no penalty. By increasing the supply of stocks, these dealers can dramatically drop the price according to the laws of supply and demand.

Byrne showed how the "cheating parties" make money off of a stock price dropping through a process called "naked short selling."

In brief, Byrne showed that "naked short selling" is a three-step process. First, certain people (in this case journalists and lawyers in the New York financial industry) receive word from brokers that a specific corporation's stock prices are about to fall and are given a certain number of shares for that company. Next, these reporters or lawyers immediately sell those stocks at the high price. The brokerage dealers then flood the market with IOUs, tanking the price. The lawyer or journalist then buys back the same number of stocks sold, only this time at a fraction of the cost. They then cut the brokers a percentage of the profits gained.

These methods are used to create huge profits, often killing the victimized corporation in the process, and leaving the purchaser high and dry, Byrne said.

In his efforts to stop this charade, Byrne filed a $3.5 billion lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and nine other well-known brokers. Byrne said numerous publications, including the New York Post and Forbes magazine, have protested his "crusade," painting him as a crazed lunatic who is angry about Overstock.com's own stock price drop. Byrne said the Mafia has become a silent player in the Wall Street game.

"You don't have to dig very far into this before you get to organized crime," he said.

As an example of its involvement, Byrne told a story from a trip to the East Coast.

"About 15 months ago I was invited by a stranger into a greasy bar in Long Island," he said.

Claiming that he was Russian, the informant told him, "We have a message from Russia. We are about to kill you. We are about to kill if you if don't back down."

Additionally, Byrne remarked on how his business partner, Mark Mitchell, was assaulted in New York and told to stay away from author Gary Weiss, a critic of Byrne's theory on "naked short selling." Weiss published the book Born to Steal, which is about the Mafia's infiltration of Wall Street since the 1990s.

"I've been looking at this for two years, and I'm pretty much convinced this is the single biggest scandal in the history of American journalism," said Mitchell, a former financial writer for Time magazine who is involved in the lawsuit.

Byrne posted the presentation to his website, http://www.deepcapture.com, along with a blog to document his "crusade" against Wall Street.

link
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:02 pm

FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations

March 06, 2015
WASHINGTON, DC – The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today imposed a $10 million civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort (Trump Taj Mahal), for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). In addition to the civil money penalty, the casino is required to conduct periodic external audits to examine its anti-money laundering (AML) BSA compliance program and provide those audit reports to FinCEN and the casino’s Board of Directors.

Trump Taj Mahal, a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, admitted to several willful BSA violations, including violations of AML program requirements, reporting obligations, and recordkeeping requirements. Trump Taj Mahal has a long history of prior, repeated BSA violations cited by examiners dating back to 2003. Additionally, in 1998, FinCEN assessed a $477,700 civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal for currency transaction reporting violations.

"Trump Taj Mahal received many warnings about its deficiencies," said FinCEN Director Jennifer Shasky Calvery. "Like all casinos in this country, Trump Taj Mahal has a duty to help protect our financial system from being exploited by criminals, terrorists, and other bad actors. Far from meeting these expectations, poor compliance practices, over many years, left the casino and our financial system unacceptably exposed."

Trump Taj Mahal admitted that it failed to implement and maintain an effective AML program; failed to report suspicious transactions; failed to properly file required currency transaction reports; and failed to keep appropriate records as required by the BSA. Notably, Trump Taj Mahal had ample notice of these deficiencies as many of the violations from 2012 and 2010 were discovered in previous examinations.

Director Shasky Calvery expressed her appreciation to the Internal Revenue Service, Small Business/Self-Employed Division, which performed the examinations of Trump Taj Mahal, for their contributions to the investigation and for their strong partnership with FinCEN. She also thanked the Commercial Litigation Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice for their assistance with this enforcement action.

Trump Taj Mahal petitioned for bankruptcy in September 2014. That bankruptcy remains pending. The Bankruptcy Court approved of Trump Taj Mahal’s settlement on March 4, 2015.

FinCEN seeks to protect the U.S. financial system from being exploited by illicit actors. Its efforts are focused on compromised financial institutions; third-party money launderers; transnational organized crime; terrorist and other security threats; significant fraud; and threats to cyber security. FinCEN has a broad array of enforcement authorities to target both domestic and foreign actors affecting the U.S. financial system.
https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releas ... t-and-long



Russia expert: Putin has something on Trump and will use it on him now that he is no good to him
Tom Boggioni TOM BOGGIONI
15 APR 2017 AT 13:40 ET

Nina Khrushcheva on AM Joy -- (MSNBC screenshot)

Appearing on AM Joy an expert on Russian policy said that Russian President Vladimir Putin gambled on an erratic Donald Trump becoming president and will soon turn on him because he’s is no longer useful.

According to Nina Khrushcheva, who teaches at the New School and is the director of the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute, the relationship between Putin and President Trump hasn’t so much deteriorated as much as Putin is “pragmatically” moving on.

“Where do you see this relationship going?” Reid asked. “It feels like it’s deteriorating or perhaps destined to deteriorate. What do you make of it?”

“Well, I actually never thought that it’s going to go anywhere,” Khrushcheva parried, “In fact, I actually wrote last summer that Putin is a pragmatic politician. He cannot possibly not think that the disaster of Donald Trump is going to work wonders for him. He could have hoped, he thought he could manipulate it, he used it for as long as he could have. But now the reality, as I said, has kicked in.”

Addressing the recent meeting between Putin and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson where Tillerson was unable to set up a meeting between Trump and the Russian president, Khrushcheva indicated that this was a sure sign of where the relationship is headed.

“As much as the Russians want to have a relationship with the United States, they are clearly understanding that the longer that meeting doesn’t happen, the more Putin would actually return to his own devices,” Khrushcheva explained. “And that is a big, big danger.”

“Very quickly,” Reid interrupted. “The fear that a lot of Americans have is the sort of underlying undercurrent, that there is some retaliation that regime might use because it might have something on Donald Trump.”

“I’m certain,” Khrushcheva responded. “Because Putin, I keep saying on this show, he is an equal opportunity offender. If he had Hillary Clinton — then he certainly would have something on Trump and they will be very willing to act on it in an act of cyber-war, as Malcolm Nance always reminds me. That would be very dangerous and then can really can turn this relationship into the stage it is in.”

“Yeah, absolute chaos.” Reid added.

Watch the video below via MSNBC:
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/russian ... od-to-him/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 8:41 am

Exclusive: £6.6m linked to death of lawyer 'traced to Russian firm's UK account'

Image
Sergei Magnitsky
Sergei Magnitsky was found dead in a Russian prison, in what the UK government labelled an “atrocious murder”
Edward Malnick, deputy investigations editor Lexi Finnigan
13 APRIL 2017 • 10:15PM
The British arm of a firm that has employed a string of former KGB spies received millions of pounds linked to the death of a prominent lawyer, court papers have revealed.

More than £6 million from funds at the centre of a giant fraud which was being investigated by Sergei Magnitsky has allegedly been traced to a UK bank account held by Renaissance Capital, which has offices in London.

Magnitsky, who was investigating on behalf of the British victims of the fraud, was found dead in a Russian prison, in what the UK government labelled an “atrocious murder”.

Now it has emerged that the US Department of Justice has traced proceeds of the fraud to a bank account in Bournemouth held by Renaissance Capital Investment Management Ltd.

Last night Dominic Raab, the former justice minister, called for UK authorities to investigate the case. He said: “No one wants the UK giving this kind of blood money the veneer of respectability.”
Image
Alexander Perepilichnyy
Alexander Perepilichnyy was a whistleblower in the case investigated by Sergei Magnitsky
The disclosure comes amid heightened tensions between the UK, US and Russia, with Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, pushing for sanctions against Moscow over their support for Bashar al-Asaad in Syria.

A so-called “Magnitsky amendment” was passed by the Commons in February, allowing the Government to seize the assets of suspected human rights abusers. The Government said it was acting after the death of Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage, the British investment firm that was the victim of a £155m fraud in Russia. Alexander Perepilichnyy, another Russian lawyer, also died while investigating the case.

Prosecutors allege that the fraud against Hermitage was carried out by a Russian criminal organisation “including corrupt Russian government officials”, who have since “engaged in a broad pattern of money laundering in order to conceal the proceeds of the fraud scheme”. The “mastermind” of the organisation was named as Dmitry Klyuev, a convicted fraudster, who was identified in 2005 court testimony as a tax adviser to Renaissance.
Image
Igor Sagiryan of Renaissance Capital
Igor Sagiryan was president of Renaissance Capital
The prosecutors have not alleged that Renaissance was aware of or complicit in the original crime, although Hermitage’s lawyer claimed in 2009 court testimony that he believed there was circumstantial evidence to suggest that it may be “implicated in the tax rebate fraud”.

A chart produced by the US Department of Justice shows funds flowing through a series of foreign companies before being channelled into three main firms, including Prevezon, against which the DoJ is taking legal action to seize assets allegedly linked to the money, and the Bournemouth Renaissance account.

Renaissance Capital is a Moscow-based investment bank now controlled by billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.


The fraud against Hermitage, once Russia’s largest foreign investor, took place in 2007. At the time Renaissance was run by Stephen Jennings (above), known as the “Kiwi oligarch”, who has an estate in Oxfordshire, and Igor Sagiryan, a former Soviet official who owns the Ping Pong chain of restaurants and a £23 million house in west London.

The company’s deputy general director until at least 2005 was Yuri Sagaidak, a KGB spy expelled from Britain in 1989, while in 2006 Vladimir Dzhabarov, former acting head of financial intelligence at its successor the FSB, was appointed vice president.

Yuri Kobaladze, a former KGB general, was Renaissance’s managing director from 1999 until early 2007.

Igor Sushchin, until recently the organisation’s head of IT security, was one of two FSB operatives accused by the FBI last month of hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. An indictment said it was “unknown” whether the firm “knew of his FSB affiliation”. Renaissance declined to respond to The Telegraph’s questions.
Image
Yuri Kobaladze
Yuri Kobaladze, a former KGB general, was Renaissance’s managing director from 1999 until early 2007
In a claim detailed in a 2009 legal complaint and his book, Red Notice, Hermitage’s founder Bill Browder said he received unexplained approaches from both Mr Sagiryan and Mr Jennings shortly after his company told the Russian Interior Ministry it would be filing a criminal complaint.

Hermitage first uncovered the scheme in 2007 after three of its subsidiaries were stolen in a complicated scam following a police raid on its Moscow offices, when legal documents were confiscated. Individuals who had seized ownership of the companies then fraudulently reclaimed $230 m (£155 m) of capital gains tax.


US prosecutors said the scheme was “strikingly similar” to another apparent fraud in 2006 involving two subsidiaries of Rengaz Holdings Limited – a fund run by Renaissance. However, while Hermitage’s companies were stolen, Renaissance’s were willingly sold to a group that had connections with Mr Jennings and another of the firm’s executives, Hermitage said in the 2009 court submission.

In a telephone call the day after the criminal complaint was filed, Mr Sagiryan “explained he was aware of all of Hermitage’s problems”, before proposing to “arrange for the stolen Hermitage companies to be liquidated [as] doing so gets rid of problems”, the complaint alleged.

Renaissance Capital's former president Igor Sagiryan owns the Ping Pong chain of restaurants
Renaissance Capital's former president Igor Sagiryan owns the Ping Pong chain of restaurants CREDIT: KEITH ERSKINE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO/KEITH ERSKINE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The proposal appeared suspicious, given that Renaissance ostensibly had no involvement with the companies.

Now the US DoJ court papers filed on February 15 link Renaissance to the funds stolen in 2007.

Last night Mr Raab, who led the Commons campaign for the Magnitsky amendment, tabled parliamentary questions which stated that the allegedly laundered money that ended up in the Renaissance account “is estimated to be in excess of $8.3 million (£6.6 m)”.

He said: "The government has demonstrated its resolve in adopting Magnitsky asset freezing powers. Now, we need UK law enforcement bodies to start taking this as seriously as their US counterparts."

Mr Browder said: “This information from the Department of Justice is consistent with a number of our suspicions for the last eight years.”
Image
Igor Sushchin, said to be an FSB officer, was Renaissance Capital's head of IT security

In 2009 Renaissance said it had “conducted a meticulously thorough internal investigation” which concluded that “Renaissance had zero involvement in the alleged 2006 tax fraud.”

This week the company declined to answer questions about the US Department of Justice’s investigation.

A spokesman for Mr Jennings, who left in 2012, said he could not comment on the company but “strongly refutes any allegation that seeks to link him to any sort of malpractice”.

Mr Sagiryan did not respond to questions.

Prevezon is contesting the DoJ case and denies wrongdoing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04 ... k-account/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:11 am

The Russia story just keeps getting worse for President Trump
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-Large
Updated 5:48 AM ET, Mon April 17, 2017

Washington (CNN)Two stories dealing with Russia's meddling in the election broke Tuesday night. And both were full of bad news for President Donald Trump.

The first, an exclusive to CNN, revealed that a number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees who have seen classified documents see no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal, further suggesting Rep. Devin Nunes, R-California, misled Trump (and the public) when he described documents relating to the unmasking of Trump campaign officials caught up in an incidental collection operation by the intelligence community.
Write CNN's Jim Sciutto, Manu Raju and Eric Bradner:
"Their private assessment contradicts President Donald Trump's allegations that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice broke the law by requesting the "unmasking" of US individuals' identities. Trump had claimed the matter was a 'massive story.'"
The second, broken by The Washington Post, reveals that the FBI obtained a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court court warrant in August 2016 aimed at monitoring the communications of one-time Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The key paragraph:
"The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials."
Scroll up. Read that one again. It's a "wow." Page has denied any wrongdoing.
What's become clear over the first few months of the Trump White House is that we aren't in the midst of a "he said-she said" when it comes to the campaign's ties to Russia. It's more of a "he alleged-he said, he said, she said, he said, he said" sort of situation.
As in, on the one hand, we have Trump asserting that the whole story of Russia's attempts to influence the election via connections within his campaign apparatus is "fake news," and grasping at the idea that somehow, some way he will be eventually proven right in his baseless claims that then-President Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower.
On the other, we have FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the heads of both the House and Senate intelligence committees -- both Republicans -- and lots and lots of other prominent voices within the intelligence community insisting the Russian investigation is entirely justified and that no evidence exists for Trump's claims.
It's not a fair fight -- and shouldn't be presented as one. And that has zero to do with partisanship and everything to do with the facts as we know them.
The best path forward for President Trump as it relates to Russia is to pivot from his current this-is-all-fake-news stance to one in which he embraces both the congressional and Justice Department investigations into the Russian meddling into the election. Given the amount of smoke surrounding Trump's campaign and Russia, it's no longer really a question whether it merits an investigation into whether there's some fire at its center.
Simply because that's the path Trump should take, of course, doesn't mean it's the one he will choose. In fact, for someone who prides himself on zigging when everyone thinks he should zag, Trump likely won't follow this path. But all that ensures is that the Russia story will just keep getting worse for him and his administration.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/12/politics/ ... index.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:31 am

Mercer proclaim that there are no white racists in America today, only black racists. . . .”

His work at IBM was funded in part by DARPA, strongly implying that the DOD has applied some of the Mercer technology: “. . . . Yet, when I.B.M. failed to offer adequate support for Mercer and Brown’s translation project, they secured additional funding from DARPA, the secretive Pentagon program. Despite Mercer’s disdain for ‘big government,’ this funding was essential to his early success. . . .”



FTR #952 Be Afraid, Be VERY Afraid: Update on Technocratic Fascism
BY DAVE EMORY ⋅ MARCH 30, 2017 ⋅ 3 COMMENTS
One of the illusions harbored by many–in particular, young people who have grown up with the internet, social networks and mobile technology–sees digital activity as private. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even before the cyber-libertarian policies advocated by individuals like John Perry Barlow, Eddie Snowden, Julian Assange and others became manifest in the Trump administration’s were implemented by the Trump administration and the GOP-controlled congress, digital affairs were subject to an extraordinary degree of manipulation by a multitude of interests.

We begin our examination of technocratic fascism with a look at the corporate foundation of Pokemon Go. Information about the background of Pokemon Go’s developer (Niantic) and the development of the firm is detailed in an article from Network World. In addition to the formidable nature of the intelligence agencies involved with generating the corporate foundation of Pokemon Go (Keyhole, Inc.; Niantic), note the unnerving nature of the information that can be gleaned from the Android phone of anyone who downloads the “app.”

Pokemon Go was seen as enhancing the “Cool Japan Strategy” of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The “Cool Japan Promotion Fund” was implemented by Abe (the grandson of Nobosuke Kishi, a Japanese war criminal who signed Japan’s declaration of war against the U.S. and became the country’s first postwar Prime Minister) to “raise the international profile of the country’s mass culture.”

The Finance Minister of Japan is Taro Aso, one of the enthusiasts of Nazi political strategy highlighted below. The “Cool Japan promotion Fund” would have been under his administration, with Tomomi Inada functioning as his administrator for the program. Now serving as Japan’s Defense Minister, Inada is another advocate of Nazi political strategy.

Next, we turn to another manifestation of Pokemon Go. The “Alt-Right” (read “Nazi”) movement is using Pokemon Go to recruit kids to the Nazi cause. Consider this against the background of Niantic, the Cool Japan strategy and the pro-Nazi figures involved with it. Consider this also, in conjunction with the Nazified AI developed and deployed by Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica and the “Alt-Right” milieu with which they associate.

A recent “New Yorker” article by Jane Mayer concerning Robert Mercer keys some interesting thoughts about Mercer, Bannon, the Alt-Right WikiLeaks and the Nazified AI we spoke of in FTR #’s 948 and 949. In FTR #946, we noted this concatenation’s central place in the Facebook constellation, a position that has positioned them to act decisively on the political landscape.

We note several things about the Mayer piece:

She writes of Mercer’s support for the Alt-Right–Mercer helps fund Bannon’s Breitbart: “. . . . In February, David Magerman, a senior employee at Renaissance, spoke out about what he regards as Mercer’s worrisome influence. Magerman, a Democrat who is a strong supporter of Jewish causes, took particular issue with Mercer’s empowerment of the alt-right, which has included anti-Semitic and white-supremacist voices. . . .”

Mercer is racist, feeling that racism only exists in contemporary black culture: “. . . . Mercer, for his part, has argued that the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mistake. According to the onetime Renaissance employee, Mercer has asserted repeatedly that African-Americans were better off economically before the civil-rights movement. (Few scholars agree.) He has also said that the problem of racism in America is exaggerated. The source said that, not long ago, he heard Mercer proclaim that there are no white racists in America today, only black racists. . . .”

His work at IBM was funded in part by DARPA, strongly implying that the DOD has applied some of the Mercer technology: “. . . . Yet, when I.B.M. failed to offer adequate support for Mercer and Brown’s translation project, they secured additional funding from DARPA, the secretive Pentagon program. Despite Mercer’s disdain for ‘big government,’ this funding was essential to his early success. . . .”

In a 2012 anti-Obama propaganda film funded by Citizens United, Steve Bannon borrowed from “The Triumph of the Will: “. . . . Many of these [disillusioned Obama] voters became the central figures of ‘The Hope & the Change,’ an anti-Obama film that Bannon and Citizens United released during the 2012 Democratic National Convention. After Caddell saw the film, he pointed out to Bannon that its opening imitated that of ‘Triumph of the Will,’ the 1935 ode to Hitler, made by the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Bannon laughed and said, ‘You’re the only one that caught it!’ In both films, a plane flies over a blighted land, as ominous music swells; then clouds in the sky part, auguring a new era. . . .”

Next, we return to the subject of Bitcoin and cyber-libertarian policy. We have explored Bitcoin in a number of programs–FTR #’s 760, 764, 770 and 785.

An important new book by David Golumbia sets forth the technocratic fascist politics underlying Bitcoin. Known to veteran listeners/readers as the author of an oft-quoted article dealing with technocratic fascism, Golumbia has published a short, important book about the right-wing extremism underlying Bitcoin. (Programs on technocratic fascism include: FTR #’s 851, 859, 866, 867.)

In an excerpt from the book, we see disturbing elements of resonance with the views of Stephen Bannon and some of the philosophical influences on him. Julius Evola, “Mencius Moldbug” and Bannon himself see our civilization as in decline, at a critical “turning point,” and in need of being “blown up” (as Evola put it) or needing a “shock to the system.”

Note that the Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written by the libertarian activist, Grateful Dead lyricist, Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow decry governmental regulation of the digital system. (EFF is a leading “digital rights” and technology industry advocacy organization.)

The libertarian/fascist ethic of the digital world was articulated by Barlow.

Note how the “freedom” advocated by Barlow et al has played out: the Trump administration (implementing the desires of corporate America) has “deregulated” the internet. All this in the name of “freedom.”

In FTR #854, we noted the curious professional resume of Barlow, containing such disparate elements as–lyricist for the Grateful Dead (“Far Out!”); Dick Cheney’s campaign manager (not so “Far Out!”); a voter for white supremacist/segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential campaign (very “Un-Far Out!”).

For our purposes, his most noteworthy professional undertaking is his founding of the EFF–The Electronic Frontier Foundation. A leading ostensible advocate for internet freedom, the EFF has endorsed technology and embraced personnel inextricably linked with a CIA-derived milieu embodied in Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund. (For those who are, understandably, surprised and/or skeptical, we discussed this at length and in detail in FTR #’s 891 and 895.)

Next, we present an article that brings to the fore some interesting questions about Barlow, the CIA and the very genesis of social media.

We offer Ms. Sunderson’s observations, stressing that Barlow’s foreshadowing of the communication functions inherent in social media and his presence at CIA headquarters (by invitation!) suggest that Barlow not only has strong ties to CIA but may have been involved in the conceptual genesis that spawned CIA-connected entities such as Facebook.

In FTR #951, we observed that Richard B. Spencer, one of Trump’s Nazi backers, has begun a website with Swedish Alt-Righter Daniel Friberg, part of the Swedish fascist milieu to which Carl Lundstrom belongs. In FTR #732 (among other programs), we noted that it was Lundstrom who financed the Pirate Bay website, on which WikiLeaks held forth for quite some time. In FTR #745, we documented that top Assange aide and Holocaust-denier Joran Jermas (aka “Israel Shamir”) arranged the Lundstrom/WikiLeaks liaison. (Jermas handles WikiLeaks Russian operations, a point of interest in the wake of the 2016 campaign.)

It is a good bet that Lundstrom/Pirate Bay/WikiLeaks et al were data mining the many people who visited the WikiLeaks site.

Might Lundstrom/Jermas/Assange et al have shared the voluminous data they may well have mined with Mercer/Cambridge Analytica/Bannon’s Nazified AI?

We conclude with recap of Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford’s observations at the SXSW event. Crawford gave a speech about her work titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism,” the presentation highlighted the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems. The take home message? By delegating powers to Bid Data-driven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incredible power over the lives of others with minimal accountability: ” . . . .’This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Power without accountability.’ . . . .”

We reiterate, in closing, that ” . . . . Palantir is building an intelligence system to assist Donald Trump in deporting immigrants. . . .”

In FTR #757 we noted that Palantir is a firm dominated by Peter Thiel, a main backer of Donald Trump.

Program Highlights Include: WikiLeaks’ continued propagation of Alt-Right style Anti-Semitic propaganda: ” . . . . Now it is the darling of the alt-right, revealing hacked emails seemingly to influence a presidential contest, claiming the US election is ‘rigged.’ and descending into conspiracy. Just this week on Twitter, it described the deaths by natural causes of two of its supporters as a ‘bloody year for WikiLeaks.’ and warned of media outlets ‘controlled by’ members of the Rothschild family – a common anti-Semitic trope. . . .”; assessing all of the data-mining potential (certainty) of WikiLeaks, Pokemon Go and the (perhaps) Barlow-inspired Social Media world against the background of the Mercer/Bannon/Cambridge analytica Nazified AI.

http://spitfirelist.com/author/leonidas2us/


It worked for 24 hours :P

his approval rating has gone from 39% to 39% :lol:

Nordic » Sun Apr 16, 2017 6:13 pm wrote:Seems to me the establishment is now OK with Herr Trump. They've completely dropped all the stories about him
being a Russian agent since he let loose the dogs of war and became an MIC Man.

Sorry you had to do all that work, SLAD.




I really don't need you and your buddy Harvey's concern so you know what you two can do with it

It isn't hard work at all especially when the def of work is that one gets paid for it ...you certainly wouldn't be accusing me of that would you? :)

You don't want a forced vacation from here again do you? You are so brilliant at what you do I know you will continue your mission without sliding into trouble again for sure. I don't know what I would do here without you :yay

Isn't this the most beautiful chocolate cake you've ever seen?
Image

I know that if you watch this it will make you feel so much better

Concentration Clubs :lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RvfzFv3c6Y
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:25 am

New York AG Opens Investigation Into Trump’s Ties To Organized Crime (DETAILS)
By Tyler - April 15, 2017

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has long been a thorn in Trump’s side having led the state’s investigation into the Trump University scandal and the issues surrounding Trump’s charitable organization. However, now it appears that he may be getting involved in the investigation involving Trump’s possible ties to Russia.

While the issue of Trump’s ties to Russia are a federal matter that is behind handled by the FBI, the state of New York is concerned with Trump’s possible ties to organized crime which could involve RICO charges and are indirectly related to the ongoing scandal involving Trump and Russia

On Thursday, Twitter user SheWhoVotes, who is also a constitutional lawyer, tweeted that her sources had informed her that Schneiderman was working with members of the intelligence community to “take out the entire three ring circus.”

To clarify, the Mafioso who were arrested were not part of the Russian mob, but rather were members of the Bonanno crime family, which is one of New York’s five Italian Mafia families. However, Scott Dworkin, of the Democratic Colation Against Trump, reported that the Bonnano Family has ties to Felix Sater, a longtime associated of Trump’s.

From there, we have a tweet from Claude Taylor, who once served in President Bill Clinton’s White House, explaining how the investigation intends to move forward.

Comey is focused on issues relating to Russia, but the state of New York is investigating the possible ties to organized crime. In short, the FBI is investigating the issues relating to Trump’s possible political ties to Russia while New York is investigating him in regards to his possible involvement with the Mafia.
http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/04/15/ ... e-details/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: NSA Chief Russia Hacked '16 Election Congress Must Inves

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:44 am

Russia could soon take over a chunk of U.S. oil infrastructure
By Greg Walters on Apr 15, 2017
Russia may soon take control of American oil and gasoline infrastructure in a deal U.S. lawmakers warn represents a threat to energy security.

Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil company, could end up with a majority stake in Texas-based Citgo after the entity that owns Citgo, Venezuela’s state-owned oil and natural gas company PDVSA, used almost half of Citgo’s shares as collateral for a loan from Rosneft.

In the midst of Venezuela’s ongoing economic crisis, PDVSA is reportedly in danger of defaulting on that loan. That means Rosneft, a company specifically named in U.S. sanctions levied against Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea, is poised to become one of the biggest foreign owners of American oil refining capacity.

Rosneft is headed by Igor Sechin, a powerful crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and is often seen as a proxy for the Kremlin’s energy policies.

PDVSA put up as collateral about 49.9 percent of Citgo shares in exchange for a $1.5 billion loan from Rosneft in December. It had used the other half of Citgo as collateral for a bond deal two months before that. Should PDVSA default on its Russian loan, the Russians could relatively easily end up with a majority stake in Citgo by acquiring more PDVSA bonds on the open market.

While the exact details and time-frame of the Rosneft loan remain murky, PDVSA successfully made $2.2 billion in payments on notes that matured April 12, sending ripples of relief through financial markets.

Still, the possibility of default has set off alarm bells in Congress, where Republican and Democratic members of the House and Senate told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin they see Russia’s potential acquisition of Citgo as a threat to the country.

“We are extremely concerned that Rosneft’s control of a major U.S. energy supplier could pose a grave threat to American energy security, impact the flow and price of gasoline for American consumers, and expose critical U.S. infrastructure to security threats,” six senators wrote in a letter to Mnuchin dated April 10. Those senators include Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.

The senators asked Mnuchin, who also chairs the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the interagency body that investigates the national security implications of foreign investments, to pursue a “thorough, conflict-free, and expedient review” of the deal in the event PDVSA defaults.

“We cannot play Russian roulette with America’s energy infrastructure.”
Another letter sent to Mnuchin and signed by Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and Democratic Rep. Albio Sires of New Jersey warned that “this situation, if left unchecked, could undermine U.S. national security and energy independence.”

Citgo owns three large U.S. oil refineries in Louisiana, Illinois, and Texas with a combined capacity of almost 749,000 barrels a day, or a bit more than 4 percent of the total U.S. refining capacity of 18.6 million barrels a day. Citgo-branded fuel is available at more than 5,000 locally owned retail gas stations in 29 states. The company also controls pipeline networks and 48 oil product terminals.

Russia, one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of oil and natural gas, has frequently been accused of using its enormous state-controlled energy companies, including Rosneft and natural gas giant Gazprom, as levers of foreign policy. Over the past decade, for example, Russia has repeatedly cut natural gas supplies to neighboring Ukraine in the dead of winter, prompting fears that homes would go unheated and factories would be idled.

Though Moscow has maintained those cuts were related to gas pricing and payments, they also came in the midst of years of diplomatic and, eventually, military conflict between the two countries.

Ellen Wald, a consultant on energy and geopolitics and professor at Jacksonville University in Florida, said that while Putin may seek to use his country’s energy assets to pursue policy goals, Rosneft would have limited opportunities to use Citgo to disrupt the flow of U.S. energy.

“I don’t see there would be very much they could actually do with control of Citgo,” she said. “They could potentially shut down the refineries, and that would definitely cause a rise in gasoline prices. But other refineries would eventually pick up the slack. Rosneft would lose a lot of money, and other companies would make money. That would be bad for business.”

Energy security has been a key concern of U.S. policymakers ever since the 1973 oil crisis, when a group of Arab oil-producing countries declared an embargo against the United States in response to U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

“The risk to our national security and our economy is not one I’m willing to take,” Menendez said at a press conference Monday. “We cannot play Russian roulette with America’s energy infrastructure.”
https://news.vice.com/story/russia-oil- ... astructure


WSJ: Trump 2020 Committees Paid Trump Companies Close To $500K
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/t ... -companies



Former Trump Aide To Join Conservative Broadcasting Group As Political Analyst

ByESME CRIBBPublishedAPRIL 17, 2017, 1:45 PM EDT
Sinclair Broadcast Group announced on Monday that former White House aide Boris Epshteyn has joined the conservative media company as its “chief political analyst.”

“Mr. Epshteyn brings a unique perspective to the political conversation,” Sinclair vice president of news Scott Livingston said in a statement.

In the same statement, Epshteyn said that he was “honored and grateful” to join Sinclair.

Epshteyn worked as special assistant to President Donald Trump and assistant communications director for surrogate operations during the first months of Trump’s administration, but reportedly left those positions in March. Politico reported at the time that Epshteyn was expected to take another role in the administration.

Before his departure, Epshteyn was responsible for booking White House officials and surrogates on news networks. According to a report by the New York Times, he became increasingly combative with the latter, including Trump-friendly Fox News.

As for Sinclair Broadcast Group, Politico reported in December 2016 that Trump’s campaign made a deal with the media company for uncritical coverage in exchange for access. According to that report, Trump son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner said that Sinclair agreed to broadcast interviews with Trump without adding its own commentary in exchange for more access to Trump and his campaign.

Livingston said at the time that Sinclair offered both candidates airtime for extended interviews with local anchors.

“Our promise was to give all candidates an opportunity to voice their position share their position with our viewers,” he said, per Politico. “Certainly we presented an opportunity so that Mr. Trump could clearly state his position on the key issues.”

Sinclair-owned Washington, D.C. affiliate station WJLA was one of the few outlets that Trump took a question from in February during a series of press conferences where he called exclusively on conservative news outlets.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/b ... as-analyst
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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