Scott Stedman
This YouTube channel is fake. It is a front for Israeli private intelligence Psy Group. In the videos, the leaders of
@ANTAC_ua
are slandered. This is the same group that Giuliani is now attacking. Ask yourself: Who hired Psy Group to make these fake vids?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqsvfD ... B6-R82Dzig
Storozh Ukraina
We are a group of Ukrainian citizens who are wanting to evacuate our country of corruption. We work to single out anyone who lies to our countrymen and we wi...
youtube.com
Investigation:
Psy Group ran 2017 operation against anti-corruption activists in Ukraine | FORENSIC NEWS
In September 2016, a merchandizing professional in Zagreb, Croatia named Maja Bogovic received an email from a management and consulting services company based in Hong Kong. Bogovic learned that an...
forensicnews.net
In 2017, these videos popped up and were viewed 20,000+ times. Nobody knows who hired Psy Group to do this. Everything was cloaked in secrecy. The actors you see were hired off of Fiverr.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottMStedma ... 3488154624
BY SCOTT STEDMAN ON MAY 20, 2019
Last updated on May 20, 2019
In September 2016, a merchandizing professional in Zagreb, Croatia named Maja Bogovic received an email from a management and consulting services company based in Hong Kong. Bogovic learned that an executive at the company, Francesco Gianelli, was looking for a personal assistant. She assumed that the company had looked at her LinkedIn profile and thought of her as a potential candidate for the expanding management business, Contrell.
Bogovic and her potential new boss, Gianelli, met for the first time in late September 2016. During the meeting, Gianelli handed Bogovic his business card and confirmed her interest in working for the company.
Business card given to Bogovic
Through the end of 2016 and into 2017, Bogovic completed various tasks for Gianelli, such as incorporating a company in the British Virgin Islands, and purchasing domain names.
Over a year after Bogovic’s initial meeting with Gianelli, however, Google notified her that information from a Gmail account that was set up to do work for Gianelli was being provided to a third party because of a court proceeding. She thought the message odd and told Gianelli, who brushed it off as no big deal.
messages between Bogovic and Gianelli about the Google notification
A little over a month later, Bogovic’s emails to Gianelli stopped delivering.
“I received automatic message delivery failure notifications advising that their email addresses no longer existed. I also could not reach them through WhatsApp,” Bogovic said in an affidavit. “It was at that point that, for the first time, I became skeptical about the situation.”
Co-opted by Psy Group
In early 2018, Bogovic’s world turned upside down when she was informed that the court proceeding was a case out of Canada, and Gianelli was not who he said he was. In fact, he was a covert operative for Psy Group, an intelligence-gathering and social media manipulating company based in Israel and staffed with multiple former Israeli spies.
Legal documents in Canada and reporting in the New Yorker confirm that the name Francesco Gianelli was used by Psy Group.
Bogovic has since fully cooperated in the Canadian court case where West Face Capital alleges that rival Catalyst Capital Group hired Psy Group to defame West Face. The case is ongoing. Psy Group co-opted not only Bogovic but also a number of other people to carry out their tasks, such as various advertisement groups and industrial printers.
Hundreds of pages of court documents as well as interviews with multiple people familiar with Psy Group’s operations have shown, for the first time, that the company ran a disinformation campaign targeting two prominent anti-corruption activists in Ukraine. This campaign resulted in at least two YouTube videos spreading false information about the Ukrainian activists. The videos remain online today.
The existence of the campaign to smear the anti-corruption fighters in Ukraine raises questions about Psy Group’s clients in the months following their pitches to aid the Trump campaign and their business partnership with Cambridge Analytica. As previously reported, the founder of Psy Group, Joel Zamel, met with Donald Trump Jr, Erik Prince, and George Nader in the Summer of 2016 offering election assistance to the Trump campaign. After the election, Nader paid Zamel a sum of approximately $2,000,000 for reasons that remain unknown.
The targets of the Psy Group operation
The two targets of the Ukraine operation, of which Bogovic was unknowingly apart, were Vitaliy Shabunin and Daria Kaleniuk, two well-known figures fighting against corruption in the Ukrainian government. Kaleniuk, when contacted for comment about this story, was entirely unaware of Psy Group’s involvement in her own smear campaign.
“This is first time I’ve heard about Psy Group,” Kaleniuk said. When shown the YouTube video, Kaleniuk responded, “Of course i know this video, but we did not connect it to [Psy Group].” Kaleniuk said that she and those in her orbit have faced repeated attacks, online and in person. In 2018, Shabunin, who is the co-founder alongside Kaleniuk of Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), was attacked and burned with a green liquid by unknown assailants.
Shabunin and AntAC are also key allies of Ukrainian politician Serhiy Leshchenko, who was among the first high-profile officials to promote the existance of Paul Manafort’s name and signature on former pro-Russian President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych’s so-called “black ledger”. That revelation, originally disclosed by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, led to Manafort resigning from the Trump campaign in August 2016. Foreign Policy has since dubbed Leshchenko, “The Ukrainian Who Sunk Paul Manafort”. Leshchenko subsequently became a target of prominent conservative political leaders for playing a role in the conspiracy theory that the Clinton campaign colluded with the Ukrainian government.
Leshchenko, like Kaleniuk was entirely unaware of the details of the operation. “I have never heard about this company [Psy Group]. I know AntAC leaders as fair and brave anticorruption activists. We make a lot activity together,” Leshchenko told me exclusively.
When shown the Psy Group-created video smearing Kaleniuk, Leshchenko said, “yes, I remember this video. We didn’t understand how it hapenned, now it is clear.”
Conservative columnist John Solomon named Shabunin and Kaleniuk’s AntAC group as being directly involved with an entirely unsubstantiated Obama/George Soros effort to damage Trump by revealing Manafort’s illegal dealings in Ukraine. “AntAC wasn’t just the benefactor of well-connected patrons,” wrote Russia Today summarizing Solomon’s article, “at the time it was also collaborating with FBI agents to uncover then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine.”
In 2017, Manafort continued to advise the Trump administration to “allege — albeit with no evidence to back up said charges — that the pro-Western Ukrainian government had colluded with the Democratic National Committee to try to help Hillary Clinton win…” As the previously linked Vox article mentions, the Trump adminstration did run with this talking point for a few weeks.
At precisely the same time that Manafort was advising the Trump White House to push the “DNC-Ukraine collusion” narrative that was largely based on Leshchenko’s 2016 actions, Psy Group was running an operation to smear one of Leshchenko’s closest allies — Vitaliy Shabunin.
“On May 4, 2017, Gianelli sent me an email with instructions to in to log an account on the website fiverr.com, which is another website that provides a marketplace through which users can purchase various freelance services on demand.
The two services that Gianelli directed me to purchase were: (1) the creation of a “Breaking News VIDEO Commercial Special Offer”; and (2) the creation of a “News Style Spokesperson Video in HD.'”
–Maja Bogovic in her sworn affidavit
Bogovic made the purchases and the two men whom she hired off of the freelancer marketplace Fiverr went to work creating the news videos. Both men declined to comment on this article specifically. One of the men featured as the news host, Michael-John Wolfe, said he’d rather not talk because it was stressful for his wife and family.
“Fiverr is how I support my family,” Wolfe said, but he deleted his Fiverr less than 24 hours after he sent his last message. Neither Wolfe nor anyone else involved in the videos is suspected of any wrongdoing. It appears that no one involved knew this was a Psy Group operation.
The videos attracted over 21,000 views, and shine a light on one aspect of Psy Group’s information warfare tactics. They were but one part of a bigger campaign against Shabunin, per a person familiar with the operation.
In her sworn affidavit, Bogovic said,
“On May 9, 2017, Gianelli sent me another email with instructions to purchase three items: (1) an article template, or “theme,” from WordPress, a blog site; (2) a plug-in for WordPress that enabled multilingual translation; and (3) 40 “credits” from 123RF, a website that allowed users to license images, illustrations, videos and other media for online use.”
Though the end results of the WordPress website remain unknown, the Ukrainian operation was the only Gianelli-project with which Bogovic was involved at the time. After the creation of the website, Bogovic didn’t complete any other tasks for Gianelli for over four months.
The full extent and nature of Psy Group’s campaign against the Ukrainian anti-corruption activists is yet to be revealed. According to at least one source, the Psy Group operation went beyond the YouTube videos and the WordPress website.
In various interviews, members of the small AntAC team expressed surprise that Psy Group was behind the operation. “We knew that lobbyists were engaged in a set of attacks against AntAC,” Kaleniuk said, “but I am impressed with the fact that Israeli elite ‘private Mossad’ firm was behind that as well.”
“We are under constant pressure from Ukrainian army of trolls and corrupt law enforcement agencies and we got used to that. However, hiring foreign intelligence firms to attack a 20 people NGO in Ukraine is something more profound & dangerous. It means that our activity exposing grand corruption of Ukrainian kleptocracts and their western enablers might harm also some very important and influential crooks outside of Ukraine.”
–Exclusive AntAC statement
Connections to Russia investigated by Mueller
The focus on Ukrainian anti-corruption leaders at the same time that Manafort was advising the Trump White House to spread the unsubstantiated claim that the DNC colluded with Ukraine raises new questions about Psy Group’s clientele and/or funding/ownership. Previously it was discovered that Ukrainian oligarch Vasyl Khmelnytsky used the parent company of Psy Group in his own business structure.
That parent company, Protexer Limited, has its own connections to Russian commerce and state-owned entities.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Psy Group as it related to the Russian interference in the 2016 election, but brought no charges in this area and his long-awaited report made no mention of the company. Mueller’s decision to not mention Psy Group in the report has led some in Washington, DC to believe that Mueller may have handed this case off to another DOJ office. If he could not prove that Psy Group was involved directly with the Russian effort, then he may have viewed the situation as outside of his scope, per two Congressional staffers.
“Given that Paul Manafort successfully directed the White House to target Trump’s opponents and U.S. investigators with smear campaigns, one must ask whether he or any of his associates were involved with the Psy Group smear attacks aimed at Ukrainian anti-corruption officials,” an American political operative active in Ukraine told me.
“The lesson we learned in 2016 is that Americans are vulnerable targets of foreign intelligence surveillance and intimidation tactics, regardless of whether they’re conducted by governments or private firms composed of former government spies and professional propagandists. When utilized by powerful political operatives who run in the Kremlin’s circles, no one is safe from being their targets.”
Included in his report, Mueller listed 14 active investigations that he transferred to other DOJ offices around the country after consulting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who had the power to determine Mueller’s scope. 12 of those investigations remain redacted:
“During the course of the investigation, the Office periodically identified evidence of potential criminal activity that was outside the scope of the Special Counsel’s jurisdiction established by the Acting Attorney General. After consultation with the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the Office referred that evidence to appropriate law enforcement authorities, principally other components of the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
https://forensicnews.net/2019/05/19/psy ... n-ukraine/
'Everyone' at the White House has read the whistleblower report, in another blatant violation of law
Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
2019/09/20 · 12:45
WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 20: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office while meeting with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison September 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. Trump announced that the U.S. has issued new sanctions on Iran's central bank at the "highest level". (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s morning press event was like politics brought to you by Benadryl, as everyone there seemed to be 90% asleep, and the most challenging questions were about all the wonderful things “First Lady” had done to prepare for an upcoming dinner. But before that official “press conference,” Trump did handle a few Little League deliveries from the local press, including one question about the whistleblower report that should be blowing up Washington. In response to questions about the report that he had extorted political favors from a U.S. ally by holding up the aid it needs to survive, Trump was dismissive.
He declared that he didn’t know the identity of the whistleblower. However, “I just hear it’s a partisan person, meaning it comes out from another party.” That being the party that supports the rule of law. But if Trump didn’t know the identity of the whistleblower, it’s not because the White House or the acting director of national intelligence is safeguarding this information all that closely. When it comes to the White House staff, Trump says, “Everybody’s read it, they laughed at it.” Because that’s what you do with a whistleblower report that the inspector general of the intelligence community described as “urgent” and “credible.”
The New York Times’ coverage of the report also noted, “Administration officials have shared at least some details of the accusations with the White House, to allow officials to weigh whether to assert executive privilege.”
What’s happened is exactly as if someone went to the police to report a crime, and the police responded by asking the criminal if it should be investigated and turning all the documents over to him.
A whistleblower filed a confidential report over a matter that, by definition, isn’t an issue of policy, but a serious breach of law or threat to national security.
That report was supposed to go to Congress. It did not.
Rather than notify Congress of the existence of the report, acting DNI Joseph Maguire shared the report with the subject of the report, asking if it should be withheld.
Congress found out about the report only because it was notified by the inspector general.
Maguire ordered the inspector general not to assist the whistleblower in meeting with Congress, as the law requires.
The White House and the Department of Justice moved to smother the report, claiming that it is not in the scope of an intelligence report—but the law does not allow them to make this judgment.
The report now appears to have been shared broadly across the White House, meaning that the identity of the whistleblower is deeply endangered, and Trump’s team is at this very minute getting a chance to remove evidence of wrongdoing without anyone being aware.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9 ... ion-of-law
Israeli Spies, Ukrainian Honey Traps: The Dirty Tricks Used by Cambridge Analytica, the Firm Behind Facebook Data Breach
Cambridge Analytica - that worked on Trump's election campaign and gained improper access to data on 50 million Facebook users - also used bribes to entrap politicians
Haaretz Mar 20, 2018 11:27 AM
FILE PHOTO: CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, speaks during the Web Summit, Europe's biggest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal, November 9, 2017. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes/File Photo\ Pedro Nunes/ REUTERS
Cambridge Analytica, the firm that harvested private information from millions of Facebook users in order to sway voters, used various tricks to entrap the rivals of their clients, reports in the U.K. revealed.
>> Election results are in. Subscribe now - save 30%
Britain's Channel 4 News secretly taped executives from the company admitting that they used British and Israeli spies, honey traps and fake news campaigns to help their clients – among which was Donald Trump's presidential campaign - and bring down their competitors.
>> Cambridge Analytica, Trump and 50 million Facebook accounts: What you need to know <<
“It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed,” Cambridge Analytica's CEO Alexander Nix is recorded as saying in one exchange, describing the types of tricks employed by the firm.
"We use some British companies, we use some Israeli companies," Nix was quoted as saying by British media. "From Israel. Very effective in intelligence gathering."
According to The Guardian, Nix offered details regarding the services provided by the former spies: “We have two projects at the moment, which involve doing deep deep depth research on the opposition and providing source ... really damaging source material, that we can decide how to deploy in the course of the campaign.”
FILE PHOTO: The sun rises behind the entrance sign to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park before the company's IPO launch, May 18, 2012. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach/File Photo\ Beck Diefenbach/ REUTERS
The New York Times and The Observer of London reported over the weekend that Cambridge Analytica exploited information from over 50 million Facebook users as it was developing techniques to support President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign. The newspapers reported that the data breach was one of the largest in the history of Facebook.
Cambridge Analytica has ties to both former Trump chief counselor Steve Bannon and Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale. Facebook suspended the company on Friday after finding that it had violated its data privacy policies, preventing it from buying ads or administer client pages.
According to The Guardian, the recordings were made when the executives met with an undercover reporter posing as a representative of a wealthy Sri Lankan family that was seeking to gain political clout. Initially they denied that Cambridge Analytica used entrapment techniques, but later boasted about using bribes, digging up "damaging materials" and "creating a sex scandal."
They also used Ukranian sex workers to try and entrap politicians, the report said.
Facebook said on Monday it had hired digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to carry out a comprehensive audit of Cambridge Analytica, which had agreed to comply and give the forensics firm complete access to their servers and systems.
Cambridge Analytica said it strongly denies the media claims, and that it deleted all Facebook data it obtained from a third-party app in 2014 after learning the information did not adhere to data protection rules.
Facebook said on Friday it had learned in 2015 that a Cambridge University psychology professor lied to the company and violated its policies by passing data to Cambridge Analytica from a psychology testing app he had built.
Facebook said it suspended the firms and researchers involved. It also said the data had been misused but not stolen, because users gave permission.
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/isra ... -1.5918177
ON SSCI’S INVESTIGATION: MANAFORT “CONSPIRED” WHETHER OR NOT TRUMP ALSO “COLLUDED”
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=669790&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p669790
Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40370&p=663795&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p663795
The Ukrainian Who Sunk Paul Manafort
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=662377&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p662377
Manafort trial has Ukraine freshly nervous about Trump
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=662023&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p662023
Poroshenko paid Michael Cohen $400,000 for a “drop-in” meeting with President Trump in June 2017.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41098&p=659200&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p659200
Poroshenko may not have gotten anything much for his $400k, Trump-Manafort-Cohen-et all certainly did.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=658489&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p658489
Trump lawyer 'paid by Ukraine' to arrange White House talks
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=658439&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p658439
Ukrainian politician behind controversial peace proposal to appear in Mueller probe
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40179&p=657986&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p657986
soon after the administration okayed the sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine, Ukrainian officials ended their cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and essentially suspended a series of domestic investigations which touch on Paul Manafort.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40370&p=656773&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p656773
Yuri Vanetik with Paul Manafort, February 7, 2017.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37655&p=650418&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p650418
MOB
Mueller Reveals New Manafort Link to Organized Crime
Trump’s former campaign manager didn’t just do business with accused gangsters. One of them transferred millions into a Manafort account, allegedly used for money laundering.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40370&p=646538&hilit=MANAFORT+Poroshenko#p646538
President Trump, Just the Facts
The man in 40 sentences.
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 22, 2019
Sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the full picture.
He has pressured a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 American presidential election.
He urged a foreign country to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.
He divulged classified information to foreign officials.
He publicly undermined American intelligence agents while standing next to a hostile foreign autocrat.
He hired a national security adviser whom he knew had secretly worked as a foreign lobbyist.
He encourages foreign leaders to enrich him and his family by staying at his hotels.
He genuflects to murderous dictators.
He has alienated America’s closest allies.
He lied to the American people about his company’s business dealings in Russia.
He tells new lies virtually every week — about the economy, voter fraud, even the weather.
He spends hours on end watching television and days on end staying at resorts.
He often declines to read briefing books or perform other basic functions of a president’s job.
He has aides, as well as members of his own party in Congress, who mock him behind his back as unfit for office.
He has repeatedly denigrated a deceased United States senator who was a war hero.
He insulted a Gold Star family — the survivors of American troops killed in action.
He described a former first lady, not long after she died, as “nasty.”
He described white supremacists as “some very fine people.”
He told four women of color, all citizens and members of Congress, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”
He made a joke about Pocahontas during a ceremony honoring Native American World War II veterans.
He launched his political career by falsely claiming that the first black president was not really American.
He launched his presidential campaign by describing Mexicans as “rapists.”
He has described women, variously, as “a dog,” “a pig” and “horseface,” as well as “bleeding badly from a facelift” and having “blood coming out of her wherever.”
He has been accused of sexual assault or misconduct by multiple women.
He enthusiastically campaigned for a Senate candidate who was accused of molesting multiple teenage girls.
He waved around his arms, while giving a speech, to ridicule a physically disabled person.
He has encouraged his supporters to commit violence against his political opponents.
He has called for his opponents and critics to be investigated and jailed.
He uses a phrase popular with dictators — “the enemy of the people” — to describe journalists.
He attempts to undermine any independent source of information that he does not like, including judges, scientists, journalists, election officials, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Congressional Budget Office and the National Weather Service.
He has tried to harass the chairman of the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates.
He said that a judge could not be objective because of his Mexican heritage.
He obstructed justice by trying to influence an investigation into his presidential campaign.
He violated federal law by directing his lawyer to pay $280,000 in hush money to cover up two apparent extramarital affairs.
He made his fortune partly through wide-scale financial fraud.
He has refused to release his tax returns.
He falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping him.
He claimed that federal law-enforcement agents and prosecutors regularly fabricated evidence, thereby damaging the credibility of criminal investigations across the country.
He has ordered children to be physically separated from their parents.
He has suggested that America is no different from or better than Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
He has called America a “hellhole.”
He is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.
http://archive.is/4Wfiw#selection-257.0-712.0