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Finally, Michele Bachmann announces that she has "concerns" about the Iran peace agreement but she is giving President Donald Trump "credit" for the deal because "we've never had a better president for Israel." rww 6 26

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How Israeli firm’s ‘zero-click’ malware attack poses global security risk | Cybersecurity News | Al Jazeera

10 26

NO LNX GFX

Federica Marsi

Published On 16 Oct 2026

16 Oct 2026

Just visiting a page or refreshing an app can be enough to fall victim to a malware attack in which your personal data is stolen from a laptop or phone, researchers have found. You are not even required to “click” on anything.

An Israeli spyware firm has been found to be behind the first-known instance of “zero-click” targeted advertising in which fraudsters or spies can steal private data and send it to external servers, with Al Jazeera journalists among the victims.

Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It’s Working.

Nick Cleveland-Stout

Posted onJuly 28, 2026

Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.

The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.

And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.

Full piece in DropSite News

Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.

Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.

And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.

Investigations take resources. Subscribe or make a tax-deductible gift today.

When Drop Site asked Perplexity “Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?” the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: “Yes.” The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.

Screenshot from Perplexity.

Allyvia is one of 10 different websites created by Clock Tower X, a boutique digital influence company owned by Parscale. Each website is dedicated to promoting a different Israeli narrative. FactSignal.org, for instance, fashions itself as fact-checking website tackling anti-Israel information, containing articles discrediting slain journalists as Hamas terrorists and rejecting the notion that Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute a genocide. Paxpoint.org, meanwhile, promotes the narrative that Israel is a nation of peace.

All of Parscale’s websites contain a statement at the bottom which states “this material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.” This statement is a mandatory disclosure requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Despite this, when Drop Site asked prominent chatbots about the latest news from Paxpoint.org, Perplexity and Copilot did not flag that the site was created as part of an Israeli influence operation. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini did flag the caveat.

“Perplexity is built to give people cited, linked answers from a range of sources so they can go directly to the original reporting and reach their own conclusions,” spokesperson Beejoli Shah told Drop Site News when reached for comment.

Parscale’s websites—referred to throughout this article as the “Clock Tower network”—get cited by chatbots, but they also are successfully infiltrating the underlying training data.

The Clock Tower network started to get archived by Common Crawl—a nonprofit that oversees a massive repository of data used to train large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—earlier this year. Common Crawl is the backbone of the artificial industry, training 80% of the tokens of OpenAI’s GPT-3, making it a useful proxy for understanding if malicious actors successfully infiltrate AI training data.

READ MORE from Nick Cleveland-Stout at the Quincy Institute: “The Eighth Front: Inside Israel’s $1 Billion Influence Campaign.”

LLM Poisoning

In the examples above, users can at least trace the sources that chatbots are pulling from when they search websites directly, such as in the screenshots above. Infiltrating the training data itself, on the other hand, can lead to Israel-influenced responses that are nearly impossible for users to trace.

To measure how deeply the network had penetrated the data used to train AI models, Drop Site used Claude Fable to query Common Crawl to count how often Parscale’s sites appear in its monthly snapshots. According to that analysis, a sample of which was manually fact-checked by Drop Site, between January and June 10 sites were crawled by Common Crawl 912 times. While this is a drop in the bucket of Common Crawl data, emerging research suggests a very low number of documents can successfully manipulate AI chatbots, no matter the data volume.

The 10 sites are:

Paxpoint.org (crawled 220 times): Website dedicated to showcasing the narrative that Israel is a nation of peace. “Paxpoint highlights Israel’s ongoing commitment to peace and coexistence, sharing historical accords, humanitarian initiatives, and grassroots projects that bridge divides.”
Allyvia.org (crawled 158 times): Website dedicated to strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance. “Allyvia showcases how the US and Israel alliance directly benefits Americans through joint security, cutting-edge technologies, job creation, and shared values of liberty.”
Factsignal.org (crawled 108 times): Mission is to “prove that Hamas’ terrorist designation reflects global consensus and undeniable evidence of violence, not conspiracy”
Cognitura.org (crawled 106 times): Website claims to be a “research and education platform” dedicated to exploring how extremist groups such as Hamas operate.
Justorium.org (crawled 93 times): Website dedicated to arguing that Israel’s military actions in Gaza “follows international law and reflects the democratic ethics shared by the US and Israel.”
Culturavia.org (crawled 76 times): Website focused on celebrating cultural ties between U.S. and Israel.
Compassionpulse.org (crawled 57 times): Website dedicated to sharing stories, data, and eyewitness accounts of “how Israel protects civilians, delivers humanitarian aid, and upholds moral values shared with the US.”
Econora.org (crawled 49 times): Website dedicated to highlighting U.S.-Israeli trade relationship.
Innovascope.org (crawled 45 times): Website dedicated to highlighting U.S.-Israeli technology partnership.
Feedingyoufiction.com (crawled 1 time): Website featuring videos that claim footage coming out Gaza is staged and denying famine.

These sites are being crawled more and more. In January 2026, the sites were only crawled twice. In May, the sites were crawled 376 times, before a notable dip in June. To check the accuracy of Claude Fable, Drop Site manually searched for a sampling of 50 of the Clock Tower X URLs archived in Common Crawl’s CDXJ index, and did not detect any errors.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/i8UTh/2/

Hervé Letoqueux, Chief Executive Officer at Check First, an organization that combats digital disinformation, explained that Common Crawl’s status as the go-to source for training chatbots opens it up as a target for manipulation. “Common Crawl is widely used in the world of data science for training LLMs, which also means that actors want to manipulate the answers in their favor, which some studies have indicated are fairly easy to do.”

It only takes about “250 malicious documents to produce a ‘backdoor’ vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size of training data volume,” according to an October Anthropic study. The authors of the study note “this means anyone can create online content that might eventually end up in a model’s training data,” and that malicious actors “can inject specific text into these posts to make a model learn undesirable or dangerous behaviours, in a process known as poisoning.”

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab published a similar study earlier this year on Russia’s disinformation network’s attempts to influence LLMs and noted an important caveat. Because artificial intelligence companies have their own process of quality control when they incorporate data, “Inclusion in Common Crawl does not guarantee inclusion in any given model’s training data.”

Drop Site also performed a demo alongside Letoqueux to test five different chatbots—Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude AI, and Perplexity—on whether they could produce articles using only their training data. Of the five, the Parscale network consistently appears in the training data of Gemini and Copilot. Claude and ChatGPT did not appear to contain the websites in the training data, though these chatbots can still search Clock Tower X websites when responding to queries. Perplexity, meanwhile, appeared to be trained on some of the Clock Tower X websites.

Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

‘It is easy to prove that these models were trained on the Clock Tower X websites, though it is difficult to know the degree to which that influences the response a chatbot gives to a query,’ said Letoqueux.

Optimizing for AI

Parscale’s team has credited their success with a softer approach to selling Israel’s narrative. Scott Stouffer, Chief Technology Officer of Market Brew—a company that specializes in influencing LLMs that Parscale invests in—told Axios that information written in a “factual tone and tightly organized” is more likely to be cited in AI platforms. “What you can do is make sure that your information is structured, sourced, and aligned in a way that those systems are more likely to retrieve it when someone asks a question. It’s less about changing the conversation and more about making sure your facts are eligible to be part of it.”

Many of the blog posts on the Clock Tower network contain at least a few sentences of nuance, which disinformation researchers say make it more palatable for chatbots. For instance, the FactSignal blog post about how journalists in Gaza are supposedly secret terrorists states that, “Distinguishing between legitimate reporters and militant operatives is not always simple, but accurate reporting requires careful investigation and transparency.”

The author of many of the blog posts is Israel-based digital marketer Mark Ginsberg, according to the source code. Ginsberg, who registered as a foreign agent for Israel in March, advertises his expertise in Generative Engine Optimization—or LLM grooming—on his Linkedin profile. In a June article for The Times of Israel, Ginsberg laid out the argument for Israel investing in efforts to influence chatbots. “Israel needs to invest seriously in the defense of truth…It means ensuring that accurate information appears not merely in government archives but in search results, educational resources, encyclopedias, social media feeds, podcasts, documentaries, and AI training datasets,” Ginsberg wrote. Trying to influence AI training data, Ginsberg argued, is not “embracing disinformation” but rather stating “reality itself.”

Letoqueux, who reviewed the Clock Tower network sites, confirmed that because chatbots have a built-in preference for presenting a balanced view, websites that are sourced and present a lighter touch might be more successful. “These websites could probably be quite useful at doing damage control on questions such as ‘Is Israel committing a genocide?’ because they provide the Israeli narrative, which chatbots can then repeat as representative of one side of the debate,” said Letoqueux, who is the former head of operations at VIGINUM, the French agency responsible for identifying foreign digital interference.

Alice Lee, an analyst at NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking company, explained in an interview with Drop Site that the Parscale network sites have all the hallmarks of sites that would be successful at influencing chatbots. “The websites have bullet points, key takeaways at the top of the page, aggressive sourcing, digestible information, all of which increase the likelihood that this content is picked up by AI chatbots.”

While Russia’s Pravda network overall is far larger, Parscale’s sites have a far higher rate of successfully being archived. The Clock Tower network contains 900 different pathways—individual blog posts, fact sheets, etc—and 85% of them have been archived in Common Crawl, compared to Russia’s network at an average rate of around 2.5%.

Lee, who specializes in Russian disinformation, explained that whereas Russia is churning out easily debunkable propaganda at scale, Israel’s more targeted approach appears to be geared more toward conveying the Israeli narrative on half-truths, opinions, and disputed facts, which is more difficult for LLMs to dismiss. “It’s harder to put guardrails around opinion,” she explained.

Parscale appears to have created several other websites related to Qatar that did not end up being published. On the same IP address as the Clock Tower network, Drop Site identified domains for websites including “qataritracker.org” and “qatarfacts.com.” These sites are currently inaccessible.

The Clock Tower network is responsive to Israel’s shifting priorities. When the sites first launched in October, many of them posted frequently about how Israel is a peaceful nation. “While critics portray Israel as resistant to compromise, history shows the opposite: Israel has repeatedly made territorial and strategic concessions in exchange for peace, only to face renewed hostility,” reads one website page published in October, cited by Microsoft Copilot below. That page was archived by Common Crawl twice.

Screenshot of Copilot citing a Clock Tower X site.

Part of this effort included shaping the narrative over Israel’s military actions in Gaza. For instance, a page on Justorium.org titled “How Israel Reduces Civilian Harm in War Against Hamas and Hezbollah” claims that Israel went above and beyond international legal requirements to reduce civilian harm. The post says that Israel “used short warning strikes on rooftops, known as roof knocking, to signal imminent danger without causing casualties.” The New York Times has reported that Israel “significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks” from the first day of the war, and has often opted for 2,000 pound bombs that cause greater damage rather than more precise munitions.

That post has been archived by Common Crawl once, and is also cited below by Perplexity.

Screenshot of Perplexity citing from a Clock Tower X site.

Most recently, as debate in the U.S. erupted over a Congressional measure that could further intertwine the U.S. and Israeli military sectors, the Clock Tower network published a series of posts framing the move as a positive development. The House version of Section 219, as it’s known, passed as part of the annual defense spending bill this week.

When Drop Site asked prominent chatbots a question containing similar language from one of the Parscale sites, “how does technology collaboration between the U.S. and Israel benefit both nations?” Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity once again cited websites from the Clock Tower network without noting these sources are created on behalf of the Israeli government.

Screenshot of Gemini citing a Clock Tower X site.

Screenshot of Copilot citing two Clock Tower X sites.

$4.5 Million a Month

Public opinion of Israel has cratered in the U.S. after its U.S.-funded military siege of Gaza has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, including across key demographics such as conservatives and evangelicals that have long supported the U.S.-Israel relationship.

According to a new Quincy Institute report by the author of this article, Israel has spent well-over $100 million on foreign lobbying efforts under FARA in the U.S. since 2023, hiring 17 new firms in 2024 and 2025 alone. Although Israel has historically avoided hiring official contractors under FARA, it is now on track to become the largest single spender in 2026.

Parscale, who gained national attention as Trump’s campaign manager for hiring the controversial microtargetting firm Cambridge Analytica, is the largest recipient of Israel’s massive influence investment. Parscale’s intention to influence chatbots was first reported by Responsible Statecraft in September, when he signed a $1.5 million a month contract with the Israeli government to integrate pro-Israel messaging into conservative media, carry out a mass texting campaign, and influence chatbots. Since then, the contract has tripled in size to $4.5 million a month.

Despite this increased investment, Israel does not appear satisfied with Parscale’s results so far. “We pissed at Brad Parscale,” one Israeli official familiar with the contract told Time. “We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse,” they said.

Stephen Walt, author of the “Israel Lobby,” suggested to the Quincy Institute that Israel is not seeing a return on investment because these kinds of influence operations are counterproductive. “Once a country gets the reputation for spinning constantly, and gets repeatedly caught making things up, then doing ever more of it just sends the message to listeners that more BS is on the way,” Walt said.

Parscale and Clock Tower X did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

The Clock Tower network serves another purpose. Parscale is also leading a mass texting campaign that reaches out to Americans under the auspices of supposed “peace” organizations. “Hi, I’m John with Friends for Peace. Quick question for folks in Illinois about Israel and Iran. Got a second?”

Then, after a back and forth, these chatbots frequently send links to the Clock Tower network, websites like Allyvia.org.

Text messages from “Friends for Peace.”

“Friends for Peace” is not a registered nonprofit or LLC and does not appear to exist as an organization, meaning Americans wanting to know who is behind the text operation would have to click the link and scroll to the bottom of each page to see the disclaimer that it is an operation funded by the Israeli government.

When the Wall Street Journal asked Parscale about if “Friends for Peace” was a real organization, Parscale replied, “What do you define as an actual organization?”

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rww

Michele Bachmann is now co-hosting an "Israel Live" podcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

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AN 8 26

Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Monday called on Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, to resign after repeatedly failing to condemn mistreatment of American citizens by the Israeli government.

In a video posted on social media, Van Hollen (D-Md.) recounted instances of US citizens being detained or abused by Israeli security forces, along with Huckabee’s lack of response.

“On his watch, we continue to see American citizens being mistreated, wrongfully detained,” Van Hollen explained, referencing the recent detentions of 20-year-old American citizen Sama Safi and 16-year-old Adam Karakrah.

Van Hollen added that he and more than two dozen fellow US senators have urged Huckabee to hold Israel accountable for “the killings of nine Americans over just the last four years” by either Israeli settlers in the West Bank or members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

“And yet, no accountability,” said Van Hollen. “No justice.”

The Maryland Democrat further called out Huckabee for failing to abide by his professed compassion for the Palestinian Christian community.

“We’ve seen an increase in violent settler attacks on Christian villages in the West Bank, and we’ve seen those attacks conducted with impunity,” he said. “And when asked about this, Ambassador Huckabee said, ‘Well, look at me. I’m a Christian and I think I’m doing OK here in the Holy Land.’”

“And that exposes the entire problem,” Van Hollen continued. “Because what Ambassador Huckabee is talking about is visitors to the Holy Land, Christian visitors, including evangelicals who come on the kind of tours that Ambassador Huckabee used to lead. Well, what about the Christians who have lived in the Holy Land for thousands and thousands of years?”

The senator then speculated that Huckabee simply “doesn’t care” because “he’s become a complete apologist for the most extreme Israeli government in history.”

“He should be defending Americans and defending American interests,” Van Hollen concluded. “He’s failed to do so. He should resign today.

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MMA

### Piers Morgan tells Tucker Carlson that Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin are “propagandists for a government that is making Israel increasingly globally unpopular”

06/18/26

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Inspiration

An article in Haaretz describes how Ben Carson personally presented Trump with a plan from Israeli-based company Inspiration, run by former IDF intelligence officers. The plan was for voter manipulation in swing states using information Inspiration collected from a Super PAC, “which it then used to compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’ about Hillary Clinton.”

The original report from Walla describes Ronen Cohen, a former Central Command intelligence officer who founded Inspiration in 2012. The article says Inspiration was not directly hired by the Trump campaign but was introduced by Ben Carson and funded by a PAC and hired three months prior to the election. Inspiration received voter data from the PAC and analyzed the data with another unnamed Israeli company. The messaging created by Inspiration was then passed to an American counterpart for review, revision, or distribution.

HEBREW

https://news.walla.co.il/item/3160166

Russia Entities...

Michael Flynn-related entities

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Trump, Russia, Mueller: The Countless Israeli Connections

U.S. News

Analysis The Countless Israeli Connections to Mueller’s Probe of Trump and Russia

The Israel-lobbyists, Netanyahu cronies, psyops manipulators and well-connected oligarchs — could it all be just one big coincidence?

Chemi Shalev

May 26, 2018

The Israeli media usually takes scant interest in Robert Mueller’s investigations. It prefers to dwell on Donald Trump’s supposedly pro-Israeli policies. Last week’s report in the New York Times about the participation of Joel Zamel, the Australian-born “Israeli specialist in social media manipulation,” in an August 3, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York was an exception to the rule. The FBI, the Times reported, had even come to Israel to search the offices of Zamel’s company. Here was a direct Israeli link to the scandal that has bewitched much of America since Trump was first elected.

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Ha'aretz reports on Israeli ties to Trump Probe | Israel Palestine News

there are billionaires aplenty with Kremlin ties who funneled political contributions to Donald Trump and top Republican leaders. So many are Israel lobbyists, Netanyahu cronies, and well-connected oligarchs — could it all be just one big coincidence?Read two articles below:*

#1 – Analysis: The Countless Israeli Connections to Mueller’s Probe of Trump and Russia

Chemi Shalev, Ha’aretz

The moment of fleeting interest was followed up by a report, published by Walla! News, that another Israeli-based company called Inspiration, run by former IDF intelligence officers, had been employed by a super PAC that supported Trump’s election. The report alleged that after retiring from the race, Housing Secretary and then-candidate Ben Carson personally presented Trump with Inspiration’s plan for voter manipulation in swing states. A source in the company told Walla! that Inspiration had received “enormous amounts” of information from the Super PAC, which it then used to compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and “float all kinds of things” about Hillary Clinton.

The two separate cases of Israeli involvement fed into sometimes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that seek to place Israel on the same level as Russia in its intervention in the 2016 presidential elections. In Israel’s case, however, there is no indication or allegation of direct government involvement or of Mueller’s interest. Nonetheless, beyond Zamel and Inspiration, a disturbing number of the main players implicated so far in Mueller’s investigation, many of them of Russian origin, have a direct link to Israel in their past or present.

There could be myriad reasons for the preponderance of actors with ties to Israel. In recent years, Israeli political strategists have developed an international reputation for election campaigns; many are employed by foreign political parties. Israeli intelligence services have certainly developed an expertise in psychological warfare; both Zamel and Inspiration are said to have employed former intelligence officers. And an estimated 10-15 percent of the million or so Russian immigrants who came to Israel from the 1970s onwards are known to have used the country as a way station to immigrate to the United States and other Western countries – but not before picking up Israeli citizenship, which remains with them for life. These included so-called Russian oligarchs, some of whom made their fortunes on the wrong side of the law.

National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

Nonetheless, there is no denying that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was overjoyed at Trump’s election – if not before the fact, then certainly after. According to reports published in November and December of last year, Mueller is investigating lobbying efforts made in December 2016, before Trump’s inauguration, by former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and presidential adviser Jared Kushner against the Obama administration’s intention to refrain from vetoing UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Flynn’s indictment included an admission that he had lied to the FBI about his approach to Russia’s U.S. Ambassador Sergei Kislyak to delay the Security Council vote.

And while no direct link has been established, there was certainly a confluence of views and interests in the recently uncoveredefforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to assist Trump’s campaign. According to the New York Times, in the August 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, the UAE representative, George Nader, told Donald Trump Jr. and other participants that Obama had left a “power vacuum” in the Middle East. The report also states that Nader had concocted a secret plan to destabilize the Iranian regime, an objective now being pursued, despite their denials, by both Israel and the United States.

The question of whether the Israeli involvement was merely coincidental or an indication of something more sinister could become clearer if and when Mueller presents his findings. In the meantime, here is a necessarily incomplete catalog of the numerous Israeli connections to some of the people named so far in Mueller’s probe:

George Nader

George Nader, the convicted pedophile who worked on behalf of UAE, is a Lebanese businessman who has worked for decades in the shadows of Middle East diplomacy. He has often been accused in the Arab press of being an agent for the Mossad. In the 1980s, Nader reportedly mediated between Israel and Lebanon. At the same time, he established the journal Middle East Insight, which often arranged meetings in Washington between Israelis and Arabs. In July, 1996, Nader hosted Netanyahu shortly after his first election as prime minister. This video shows both on the same stage.

Two years later, Nader forged even closer ties with Netanyahu and his bureau: he served as Ronald Lauder’s assistant in the cosmetic tycoon’s failed efforts to secure a peace deal between Netanyahu and Syria’s president at the time, Hafez Assad. Netanyahu’s advisers have acknowledged their contacts with Nader, who is said to have been especially close to Dore Gold, the prime minister’s aide and former UN ambassador.

Elliott Broidy

Nader’s partner in representing the UAE – and in pressing Trump to take a hard line on Qatar – was Elliott Broidy, the Los Angeles venture capitalist and GOP fundraiser. Broidy made headlines in recent weeks for his lucrative lobbying efforts on behalf of the UAE, which included two personal meetings with Trump, as well as for his alleged role in Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s payment of $1.6 million to former Playboy Playmate Shera Bechard. Many commentators assume that it was Trump who actually had an affair with Bechard and got her pregnant, with Broidy volunteering to serve as his cover.

Broidy also has a long history with Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular. Together with Sheldon Adelson, he is a prominent member of the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has taken hawkish positions on the Iran nuclear deal and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Fifteen years ago, Broidy set up Markstone Capital Group which operated in Israel, investing in Israeli companies and attracting Israeli investors. In 2003, then-Finance Minister Netanyahu took credit for convincing the New York State pension fund to invest $250 million in Markstone. It later emerged that Broidy’s bribes to former New York State Comptroller and now-convicted felon Alan Hevesi also played a role in the pension fund’s largesse. By the time Broidy pled guilty to a misdemeanor after cooperating with Hevesi’s investigators in 2012, Markstone’s Israeli branch had essentially collapsed, taking with it the many Israelis’ investments.

In January 2017, Nader took part in a meeting in Seychelles, which is also being probed by Mueller. In attendance were Erik Prince, Trump confidante, brother of Education Secretary Betsy Devos and founder of the security company Blackwater, as well as Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian government’s sovereign wealth fund Russia Direct Investment Fund. Dmitriev’s fund has in recent months been negotiating with Israeli government ministers on a $100 million project to open Israeli-run dairies in Russia.

Natalya Veselnitskaya

Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, who features in the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, in which she is alleged to have offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton, represented Prevezon Holdings Ltd. in the money laundering case brought forth by former New York Southern District Attorney Preet Bharara. After Bharara was dismissed by Trump, Prevezon was allowed to pay a $6 million fine in May 2017 to avoid criminal prosecution. The owner of Prevezon is Denis Katsyv, another Israeli citizen, whose father Pyotr was a high municipal official in Moscow. In 2005, the same Katsyv reached a similar settlement with Israeli authorities, paying a fine of 35 million shekels after being indicted for money laundering at a Tel Aviv branch of Bank Hapoalim. The Cyprus-registered Prevezon was managed for a while by a Tel Aviv lawyer, who also represented the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Lev Leviev

Katsyv partnered with the Dutch branch of Africa-Israel Ltd., which belongs to Russian-Israeli diamond and real estate mogul Lev Leviev. Leviev’s apartments in New York were alleged to have served as a conduit for Prevezon’s money laundering. In 2015, Leviev sold four stories of the old New York Times building in Manhattan to Jared Kushner for $295 million, secured through a loan from Deutsche Bank, which is also being probed by Mueller.

Roman Abramovich

Leviev and Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club who has recently run into visa problems with British authorities, teamed up in 1999 to set up the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (FOR). They were responding to a request by Vladimir Putin to set up a group that would rival the Russian Jewish Congress, headed by Israeli-Russian oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, who was close to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The head of the FOR is Italian-Russian Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar. In April 2017, Politico alleged that Chabad and FOR were used by the Kremlin as conduits for their efforts to influence the U.S. elections. The report was denied and even dismissed as anti-Semitic. Interestingly, a BBC story published this week about payments made to Michael Cohen by Ukraine in order to secure a long White House meeting with Trump for Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko notes that the approach to Trump’s lawyer was made via the Chabad branch in Port Washington, New York.

Tamir Sapir

Mueller is also said to be investigating connections between Russian oligarchs and Trump’s businesses in the years before he became president. One such partner in Trump’s failed Soho tower was the late Israeli-Georgian tycoon Tamir Sapir. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, with Rotem Rosen, then the director of the North American branch of Leviev’s Africa-Israel. The same year, Netanyahu listed Sapir as one of the potential donors to his Likud primary campaign in a handwritten note uncovered by the Yedioth Aharonoth daily.

Another partner in the Soho project, and possibly the architect of Trump’s ties to Russia, was Felix Sater, who worked closely with Cohen. Sater is also an Israeli citizen, having passed through the country on his way to the United States with his father Mikhail, whom the FBI has named as a lieutenant for Russia mafia kingpin Sergei Mogilevich. Mogilevich came to Israel in 1990 and lived there for a few years. According to press reports, Mogilevich participated in a 1995 meeting of Ukrainian master criminals convened in Tel Aviv by another Russian oligarch with a shady reputation, Boris Birshtein. After several years in Israel, Birshtein left the country for Canada, after learning that he had turned into a target of the Israeli police. Subsequently, he partnered with Trump in a building project in Toronto.

Mueller is also said to be investigating a $150,000 contribution to Trump’s inaugural committee, in which Broidy played an active role, made by another Ukrainian billionaire, Victor Pinchuk. Cohen, it is alleged, was the middleman. Pinchuk is a significant contributor to religious institutions, but is also well connected to its politicians. In 2008 he served as co-chairman of the Israeli Presidential Conference convened in Jerusalem by the late Shimon Peres.

Viktor Vekselberg,

* Another purported target of Mueller’s investigation is Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, an Israeli citizen with investments in Israel, for payments allegedly made to Michael Cohen. Vekselberg partnered with Israeli-Russian billionaires Len Blavatnik, who is invested in Israeli media, connected to Netanyahu and is also under Mueller’s spotlight, as well as Russian-Israeli billionaire Mikhail Fridman. One of their joint holdings was Alfa Bank, which, according to the Steele Dossier, owned a mysterious internet server found in Trump Tower. Fridman is also the main contributor to the Genesis Prize, in which Netanyahu regularly plays a prominent role, and which featured recently in the brouhaha surrounding Natalie Portman’s decision to decline the prize after she had earlier accepted it.

#2 – Ha’aretz Report: “Know Your Oligarch: A Guide to the Jewish Billionaires in the Trump-Russia Probe”

:{*:{by JTAand Ron Kampeas, Ha’aretz}:

The special prosecutor’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election offers an unsettling journey for anyone steeped in Russian Jewry, and the transition from the repression of the former Soviet Union to the relative freedoms of the RussianFederation.

Of 10 billionaires with Kremlin ties who funneled political contributions to U.S. President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders, at least five are Jewish. (The Dallas Morning News has a handy set of interactive charts.)

There’s Len Blavatnik, the dual British-American citizen who dumped huge amounts of cashon Republicancandidates in the last election cycle, much of it funneled through his myriad investment firms. (The same Len Blavatnik who funds scholarships for IDF veterans and who is friends with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.) Alexander Shustorovich is the president of IMG Artists, a titan among impresarios, who gave Trumps’ inauguration committee a cool $1 million. He arrived in 1977 with his penniless family in New York at age 11, fleeing Soviet persecution of Jews.

The list goes on — we explore some of the names below. But first: What was going on in the Soviet Union as it headed towards collapse in the late 1980s that led to the proliferation of Jewish names among its oligarch class?

“Not all oligarchs are Jewish, of course, not the majority, but there is a significant number,” said Mark Levin, the CEO of the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, who joined its predecessor, the National Council on Soviet Jewry, in 1980 as a staffer. “They were in the right place at the right time.”

Here are some of the factors that put them in the “right place at the right time.”

You can go home again

Many Soviet Jews left the country because bigotry and punitive Soviet policies kept them, among other indignities, from getting jobs in their preferred professions. But with the collapse of the USSR, and with opportunities opening up at home, a number of these younger emigrants drew on the entrepreneurial strain, training and connections they found in their new countries, be it the United States, Britain and Israel.

In the late 1980s, when they heard that the policy of glasnost was loosening up markets, a number of them traveled back to their homeland seeking opportunity, armed with savvy and with moneyed connections in their new countries. They were in place after 1991 when Russia and its former republics rapidly privatized everything from mines to media.

“I know people who left the Soviet Union, it imploded, they went back, they had friends and acquaintances who were telling them there were great opportunities,” Levin said. “There were business people who were partnering with people in Russia and other countries because they had the connections to complete business deals.”

Networks

The Jews who stayed behind kept in touch with friends and family who were succeeding overseas and were able to tap them for investment opportunities.

“Jews in the ex-USSR had a ready-made network of trusted contacts in the U.S. and Israel who they could go into business with,” said Oliver Bullough, a British author and journalist whose expertise is Russian history and politics. “It was harder for Russians who had no contacts abroad to achieve this. This also, in my opinion, explains why ex-KGB people did well since they had a network of former spies in other countries.”

Mikhail Gorbachev

Glasnost opened doors

Glasnost, or openness, instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, included opening up plum government jobs to minorities that had previously been marginalized. That accelerated Jewish entry into higher ranks of the bureaucracy just when it was opportune to be in a position to know what sector was about to be privatized, and which government-owned business was about to be broken up.

It helped that unlike communist regimes in eastern Europe, Levin said, in Russia and the former Soviet republics, the elites remained in place — only the ideology of communism was jettisoned.

“Russia and most successor states of the Soviet Union went through a much different transformation than the former communist Europe nations,” he said. “Most of the governing elite didn’t change.”

Moreover, the very professions to which Jews were restricted under the old Soviet system were the ones that proved useful in the new economy. Jews, Levin said, were likelier to be entrepreneurs.

“There were Jews who were helping to make the transition from a command economy to a market economy,” he said.

Author Michael Wolff, profiling tech entrepreneur Yuri Milner in 20111, wrote, “The Jews in Soviet Russia, often kept from taking official career paths, came to thrive in the gray and black markets. Hence, they were among the only capitalists in Russia when capitalism emerged.”

Bullough said the scientific disciplines that accepted Jews under the old system were suddenly in demand under the new.

“Jews were often excluded from the kind of universities that produced diplomats, and therefore pushed more towards pure sciences, which meant there was a disproportionate number of Jewish mathematicians who were able to engage with the new banking industry,” he said.

But who really knows.

Most of all, said Levin, it was chaos. Massive sectors of the economy were up for grabs. At times, there seemed to be no controlling authority. When the dust settled, Russia had entered the age of the oligarchs. “In the beginning, it was like Chicago in the 1920s,” he said. Connie Bruck, profiling Blavatnik in The New Yorker in 2014, quoted a new Russian phrase: “Never ask about the first million.”

Here are some of the businessmen with Soviet Jewish roots who have been named in stories about the Trump-Russia investigation.

Access Industries chairman Leonard Blavatnik.Credit: Bloomberg

Leonard Blavatnik, 60

Oligarch factor: U.S.-British citizen. Forbes lists him as the 48th richest man in the world. Access Industries, which he founded in 1986 while he was at Harvard Business school, exploded in its earlier years through investments in uranium and oil in the collapsing Soviet Union. It has since expanded into massive media holdings.

Trump factor: Gave more than $6 million in the 2016 election cycle, virtually all to Republicans, after a pattern of relatively modest donations to both political parties. Longstanding business ties to Viktor Vekselberg, the oligarch allegedly linked to secret payments to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Blavatnik donated $12,700 last year to a Republican party legal fund that has helped to pay Trump’s lawyers in the Russia inquiry.

Jewish ties: He has served on the board of Tel Aviv University, the Center for Jewish History and the 92nd Street Y. His family foundation funds a Colel Chabad-run food bank and warehouse in Kiryat Malachi in Israel, which sends monthly shipments of food to 5,000 poor families in 25 Israeli cities. He is friends with Netanyahu, and has been questioned by police in connection with the investigation into gifts the prime minister allegedly has received from wealthy benefactors. He funds scholarships for Israeli army soldiers.

In 2017, Israeli police investigatedwhether Prime Minister Netanyahu was involved behind the scenes in the sale of Channel 10 to Leonard Blavatnik (a partner in RGE Communications, which owns 51 percent of Channel 10).

Andrew Intrater

Andrew Intrater, 55

Oligarch factor: A cousin to Vekselberg, who has a Jewish father but does not identify as Jewish. Intrater, a U.S. citizen, is the CEO of Columbus Nova, the investment company with close ties to Vekselberg’s Renova. An SEC filing from 2007 lists Intrater as the chairman of the board of CableCom, a Moscow-area cable TV provider.

Trump factor: Columbus Nova funneled payments from Renova to Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer. Intrater also donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Jewish ties: Intrater, the child of a Holocaust survivor, has given more than $500,000 to the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation and has donated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation Committee. Intrater’s brother, Frederick, the design manager for Columbus Nova, bought up a batch of domain names with associations with the “alt-right” in the summer of 2016, when support for then-candidate Trump on the far right was rising and Get Out the Vote drives were intensifying. Frederick Intrater said he made the purchases without Andrew’s knowledge, and later regretted it, allowing the URL names to wither. “To conclude that I support white supremacy or anti-Semitism is unreasonable given what I’ve described above and also taking into consideration that I am a Jew and son of a Holocaust survivor,” Frederick Intrater said.

Alexander Shustorovich

Alexander Shustorovich, 52

Oligarch factor: Shustorovich, a U.S. citizen, traveled to Moscow in 1989, a year after graduating from Harvard, and immediately became a player in media there, starting scientific publications. He unsuccessfully sought to get his company, Pleiades Group, into the $12 billion deal that sold Soviet nuclear fuel to the United States. He is now CEO of IMG Artists, a company that manages talent in classical music and dance.

Trump factor: Shustorovich gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Notably, his attempt to give the George W. Bush campaign $250,000 in 2000 was rejected in part because of his ties at the time to Russia’s government.

Jewish ties: Shustorovich arrived in New York at 11 in 1977 with his family, who did not have enough money to buy food. His father, Evgeny, pushed out of work in Russia as a chemist because of his hopes of emigrating, joined Kodak in Rochester, N.Y. and soon rose to prominence in his field. For a period in 1986-1987, Evgeny Shustorovich was one of the faces of the Soviet Jewry movement as he became an ardent advocate for the right of his brother — also named Alexander — to emigrate from the former Soviet Union.

Simon Kukes

Simon Kukes, 72

Oligarch factor: Kukes, a U.S. citizen, left the Soviet Union in 1977, settling in the Houston area. A chemist, he was for a period an academic, and then worked in the Texas oil industry. He returned to Russia and became an executive in the post-Soviet oil industry there. In 2003, he became head of the Yukos oil company after another Jewish oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was jailed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin for tax evasion and theft — but mostly, most observers think, for funding opposition parties.

The Guardian in 2003 uncovered CIA documents linking Kukes to bribery, charges which he has denied. Prior to his year-long gig helming Yukos, Kukes was from 1998-2003 the president of TNK, another oil company, whose principal stakeholders were Blavatnik and Vekselberg. In 2012 when he headed the Russian arm of Hess, Forbes reported that Kukes’ former chauffeur, who had risen through the company ranks, was a Russian mafia boss. The man denied the charges, but Kukes pushed him out of the company. Last year, Kukes was a U.S.-based CEO of Nafta, a consulting firm for investors in Russia’s energy sector. Nafta’s website has since been scrubbed.

Trump factor: With no major history of GOP giving, Kukes suddenly funneled $285,000 into the Trump reelection effort — much of it after June 2016, when Russian interest in the possibility of a Trump presidency intensified.

Jewish ties: Kukes does not have apparent formal ties with the organized Jewish community, although he tells interviewers he left the former Soviet Union because he was Jewish. In 2015, he bought a 12.5 percent share in Leverate, an Israeli-founded company that develops brokerage software.

Yuri Milner

Yuri Milner, 56

Oligarch factor: Milner never fled the Soviet Union — his parents still live in Moscow. He was the first non-emigre from the Soviet Union to attend Wharton business school, and was for years involved in Russian banking before entering tech. He is well known as a Silicon Valley investor, owning one of the most luxurious houses in ritzy Los Altos Hills, valued in 2011 at $100 million. Last year, it was revealed through leaked documents that Russia’s government funded substantive stakes in Twitter and Facebook that were for a time held by his company, DST Global. In 2013, Milner joined Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sergey Brin and 23andme’s Anne Wojcicki in establishing the multi-million dollar Breakthrough prize for scientists.

Trump factor: After last year’s revelations, Milner scoffed at the notion that Russia was plowing money into social media efforts to influence elections, noting that he never sought a seat on the board of the companies he invested in. Milner in 2015 invested $850,000 in Cadre, a real estate startup launched by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Kushner’s brother Josh. Milner has said that he met Jared Kushner only once. Kushner’s stake in Cadre was one of many that he initially failed to disclose when he became an adviser to his father-in-law.

Jewish ties: Milner attends a synagogue when he is in Moscow. Somewhere along the line, he appears to have acquired Israeli citizenship. Speaking with Forbes in 2017 after the magazine named him one of the 100 “greatest living business minds,” Milner said he was “humbled and honored” to be “the only Russian or Israeli citizen on the list.”

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news

Army and security

The secret connection between Trump's presidential campaign and former intelligence officials

Daniel Dolev

:{:{23.5.2018}:

Walla Exposing! NEWS: Inspiration Company, which operates from Kfar Shmaryahu and is run by a former senior officer in the Intelligence Branch, worked behind the scenes to elect Donald Trump as the most powerful man in the world. FBI agents recently arrived in Israel as part of an investigation into foreign interference in the US elections.

IFrame Content

Photo: Reuters, Video editing: Nir Chen

The highlight of the company's activities in recent years has been working towards the election of Donald Trump as US President.

Kfar Shmaryahu, noon. Outside the offices of the company operating in one of the sprawling buildings, there is no information sign or direction to suggest that a company operates there. Anyone passing by the building would not guess that it is no longer a residence. Even an attempt to find information about the mysterious company's activities on the Internet is a complete failure. The information presented on its website reveals nothing about its founders or employees, and only describes in general terms the work process for clients.

Only conversations we have had in recent weeks with people familiar with the company's activities - past and present - have allowed us to reveal for the first time what exactly the company is doing in the mysterious building in the center of the country. This is Inspiration, a company headed by a former senior officer in the IDF Intelligence Division, whose highlight of its activity in recent years has been working to elect Donald Trump as president in the last election campaign in the United States.

The company's offices in Kfar Shmaryahu, this week / Yotam Ronen

Col. (res.) Ronen Cohen held a series of senior intelligence positions during his military career: he was head of the terrorism scene in the Military Intelligence Research Division, deputy head of the Research Division, and in his last position, he was the intelligence officer of the Central Command. In 2012, after his retirement, he founded Inspiration. In the past, the company dealt with various types of intelligence and security consulting, but today it focuses on campaigns to influence public awareness.

In the first stage, the company analyzes the client and the area they want to influence - whether it's a business or political client. Based on the analysis, a campaign is built. "It can be online - setting up websites, working on Facebook or working in more conventional media," says a source familiar with the company's activities and similar companies. "It can also be on-the-ground completion. From the simplest thing, which is a kind of lobby, to more complex things that complement the campaign and create credibility for it and the narrative you wanted to achieve."

The company was not directly employed by the Trump campaign. Ronen Cohen / Walla Editorial Team, Nir Kedar / Haaretz

The company was not employed directly by the Trump campaign, but rather through "super PACs" - entities that collect donations and work on behalf of candidates, but are supposed to be separate from them and the official campaign headquarters. This is a very common method in American politics, designed to circumvent the fundraising restrictions imposed on candidates, and has been approved by the Supreme Court of the United States.

According to a source at the company, where other officers who previously served in the Intelligence Directorate worked, the person who connected it with Trump was Ben Carson, one of the candidates in the Republican presidential primaries, who at one point withdrew and transferred his support to Trump. Carson currently serves as the housing secretary in his administration. "He personally put our plan on the table for Trump," said the source, who explained that Carson got to know the company after previously "working with a research organization that also worked with us." Thus, Inspiration began working towards Trump's election as the most powerful man in the world, about three months before the 2016 election.

"Overflow of things" about Clinton

The company was not involved in distributing the messages. They were merely passed on to their American counterparts, who used them as they saw fit.

In the first phase, the company received huge amounts of information about voters from the "super PAC" people. The information was analyzed, apparently in collaboration with another Israeli company, to try to understand which voters were more or less likely to vote on Election Day. The company focused, naturally, on trying to predict the behavior of voters in internal segments in "swing states," those that, according to estimates, could ultimately vote for Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton. Based on this assessment, various content was prepared that was intended for different types of voters, in a targeted manner.

"The strategic plan went both the vector of strengthening the candidate, and the vector of flooding all kinds of things about Clinton," a person involved in the activity told Walla! NEWS. "It went over all kinds of things on issues that are burning for citizens - the economy and immigration. Everything that actually concerns citizens. And all of that really came down to campaign details of certain content ideas." The company, contrary to its normal activity, did not distribute the messages. They were merely passed on to their American counterparts, who used them as they saw fit. Some of the messages were distributed according to Inspiration's plan, and others were modified.

Hillary Clinton / Reuters

The company's work is reminiscent of the scandal that erupted around the Trump campaign, and is currently being investigated in the United States and the United Kingdom. Last week, Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, testified before the US Senate. Wylie exposed the affair that bears the company's name, and is currently being investigated in the United States and the United Kingdom. As part of the affair, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica managed to collect and store the details of tens of millions of users from Facebook. Using this information, psychological profiles of them were built, and later, according to suspicion, they were used to direct messages that would most effectively affect the target audience, among other things, in the Trump campaign and the campaign for Brexit.

"Cambridge Analytica's Relationships with Former Members of Israel's Security Forces"

During the hearing, Wylie was asked by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse whether the company had any connection to Black Cube, a corporate espionage firm run by Israeli intelligence veterans that has been implicated in several scandals around the world. He replied in the negative. According to him, the company did not have a contract with Black Cube, but he said that he had learned of "relationships that Cambridge Analytica had with former members of the Israeli security forces." Wylie did not name any names, and a source at Inspiration told Walla! NEWS that the company did not work with Cambridge Analytica. However, he said that he did not know the source of the information that came from "the super-PAC" and served as the basis for the analysis.

Last weekend, the New York Times reported that as part of the FBI investigation into foreign interference in the US election, agents also arrived in Israel . According to the report, they collected materials and testified about employees at a company called Psy-Group, owned by Yoel Zemel. The company's profile is very similar to that of Inspiration: it employs Israelis with security and intelligence backgrounds, and focuses on campaigns to influence public opinion. As far as is known, the investigators have not contacted any of Inspiration's employees.

Inspiration did not respond to requests for comment.

More on the same topic:
Donald Trump
inspiration
Ronen Cohen

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