patten, sam c anal

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coop witness mueller (also brit kaiser? why not more damning?]

see fara, ukraine

apparently did support nemtsov, but 180'd on anti --> pro putin side?

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wendy s 2018?

Sam Patten

Journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported that Sam Patten worked for Cambridge Analytica in 2014 at the Oregon office of SCL Group, “when the firm was actively fine-tuning its methodologies in 2014 before the presidential campaign.” Carole Cadwalladr reported that Patten also worked with Cambridge Analytica on their work inNigeriain 2015. Transcripts of interviews conducted by Emma Briant with Sam Patten describe work he did in Kosovo for Cambridge Analytica: “And they said: ‘Can you be ready in one day if this happens?’ I said yes, without even… I assumed it was the dirty bad guys, the mafia guys. You know, the gangsters?”
In 2015 Sam Patten created a company called Begemot Ventures with Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort’s business associate and a suspected Russian intelligence agent, who was recently indicted by Special Counsel Mueller and charged with “conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice.” Kilimnik had worked for Patten at the International Republican Institute in Moscow from 2001 to 2003. The mission of their company, Begemot Ventures, was to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences,” however little is known about their work or clients.

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open deoc

...

Nix had teamed up in 2013 with the alt-right entrepreneur Steve Bannon and the family of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer to launch Cambridge Analytica. Their mission was to arm a rising populist right to defeat the big data machine built by Obama.

Kaiser’s decision to work for Nix and Bannon was hard for her former Obama colleagues to understand. Looking back, she told me with a measure of irony that she had been guided by the first African-American president’s creed: “It is important to sit down with rogue actors, without preconditions.” Like others of her millennial generation, she also felt dispossessed, impatient with the status quo and hungry for adventure.

I first met Brittany Kaiser in February 2017. She was shockingly frank about her company’s role in the right-wing political revolutions of 2016, but it was clear that she knew even more. We spoke on several occasions over more than a year, before I suggested that she blow the whistle publicly to myself and Paul Lewis of The Guardian. She readily agreed.

She testified against her former colleagues, providing arresting new evidence about their unpaid data work on Brexit for the controversial businessman Arron Banks (now under investigation by the National Crime Agency) and his Leave.EU campaign, as well as possible abuses of Facebook and insurance data. She provided the first real proof of Steve Bannon’s role in setting up these deals for Nix, and of Cambridge Analytica’s exclusive data relationship with Bannon’s alt-right propaganda platform, Breitbart News.

In April 2018 Kaiser testified before the British parliament’s ‘fake news’ inquiry. She covered a dizzying array of topics alongside Cambridge Analytica, including her friends’ cryptocurrency-powered telecommunications schemes in Mexico, and her time working with WikiLeaks’ British lawyers at Doughty Street Chambers on “prisoner of conscience” cases.

The parliamentarians wanted to know more about a group of hackers – alumni of Israeli intelligence – who she had introduced to oil-billionaire clients, and who had infiltrated the Nigerian political opposition as part of a 2015 campaign by Nix’s firm. But when it came to the inflammatory content of that campaign, Kaiser pointed the finger firmly at Sam Patten, a long-standing fixture on Cambridge Analytica’s roster of globe-trotting political strategists.

According to whistleblower Chris Wylie, Cambridge Analytica/SCL used the campaign video in this report from The Guardian to influence the Nigerian presidential election of 2015.

Immediately after running the controversial Nigeria campaign for Nix, Patten went into business with the Russian operative Konstanin Kilimnik. His new partner was not only the right hand of indicted Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in Ukraine, but also a suspected Russian military intelligence asset. Patten has recently pleaded guilty to channelling donations from a Ukranian oligarch into Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Kilimnick himself is wanted for questioning by special counsel Robert Mueller, and has recently fled to Moscow.

One of the British parliamentarians asked Kaiser the obvious question: “Have you ever worked for, paid or unpaid, or provided information to, any country’s intelligence agency, their representatives or associated organisations?” Her answer was “No;” but pressed, she acknowledged having been “approached” in the past, before her time at Cambridge Analytica, “although they wouldn’t properly identify themselves... I’ve been taught what to look out for: my grandfather was a military intelligence officer for 27 years, and knew when I was young that would be a possibility, and told me what to look out for… and to say no.”

...

Dr Kogan – who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan – is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn’t know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he’s received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” says Wylie. “I didn’t understand either the email or the pitch presentation we did. Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?”

Mueller’s investigation traces the first stages of the Russian operation to disrupt the 2016 US election back to 2014, when the Russian state made what appears to be its first concerted efforts to harness the power of America’s social media platforms, including Facebook. And it was in late summer of the same year that Cambridge Analytica presented the Russian oil company with an outline of its datasets, capabilities and methodology. The presentation had little to do with “consumers”. Instead, documents show it focused on election disruption techniques. The first slide illustrates how a “rumour campaign” spread fear in the 2007 Nigerian election – in which the company worked – by spreading the idea that the “election would be rigged”. The final slide, branded with Lukoil’s logo and that of SCL Group and SCL Elections, headlines its “deliverables”: “psychographic messaging”.

Lukoil is a private company, but its CEO, Alekperov, answers to Putin, and it’s been used as a vehicle of Russian influence in Europe and elsewhere – including in the Czech Republic, where in 2016 it was revealed that an adviser to the strongly pro-Russian Czech president was being paid by the company.

When I asked Bill Browder – an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a Magnitsky Act to enforce sanctions against Russian individuals – what he made of it, he said: “Everyone in Russia is subordinate to Putin. One should be highly suspicious of any Russian company pitching anything outside its normal business activities.”

Last month, Nix told MPs on the parliamentary committee investigating fake news: “We have never worked with a Russian organisation in Russia or any other company. We do not have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”

There’s no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, microtargeting, data, election disruption.

https://www.nytimes.com:{/2018/08:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/31/us/politics/patten-fara-manafort.html

Lobbyist Sam Patten Pleads Guilty to Steering Foreign Funds to Trump Inaugural

By Kenneth P. Vogel, Sharon LaFraniere and Adam Goldman

Aug. 31, 2018

WASHINGTON — An American lobbyist on Friday admitted brokering access to President Trump’s inauguration for a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch in a scheme that highlighted the rush by foreign interests to influence the new administration.

As part of a plea agreement under which he pledged to cooperate with federal prosecutors, the lobbyist, Sam Patten, pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent for a Russia-aligned Ukrainian political party, and to helping the Ukrainian oligarch who had funded that party illegally purchase four tickets to Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Although the charges were not brought by the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Robert S. Mueller III, they stem from his team’s work, and overlap substantially with its continuing investigation, suggesting that Mr. Patten could be a useful witness.

The case sketched out by prosecutors encompassed Mr. Patten, a respected Republican operative and consultant whose family was once part of Washington’s social elite; money transfers from a Cypriot bank; and a Russian national who had also worked for Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, and been accused of maintaining ties to Russian intelligence.

The charges against Mr. Patten also represented the first public acknowledgment that prosecutors are looking into efforts by foreign interests to funnel money into Mr. Trump’s political operation, including his inaugural committee.

Prosecutors did not present any evidence that the inaugural committee was aware of the scheme. Questions to representatives of the inaugural committee on Friday about the illegal purchase of tickets went unanswered.

Mr. Trump’s inauguration came at a moment when some international figures were paying large sums to Mr. Trump’s associates in an effort to curry favor with an administration that came into office with few ties to established players on the world stage, and with an uncertain foreign policy agenda. That was particularly true in matters related to Russia and its neighbors.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump flouted traditional foreign policy by praising President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and suggesting that if elected he might be willing to ease sanctions levied against Russia over its aggression against Ukraine.

That alarmed allies of Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, who is generally regarded as more pro-Western, and it emboldened his pro-Russian opponents, who had held power from 2010 to 2014 partly through the efforts of Mr. Manafort and his former right-hand man, Rick Gates.

Forced into the opposition, the oligarchs formed a political party called Opposition Bloc, which worked with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates in 2014, before largely shifting its political consulting and lobbying business to a company started by Mr. Patten and Konstantin V. Kilimnik. He is a Russian national who had worked closely with Mr. Manafort in Ukraine and is suspected by the United States of having ties to Russian intelligence.

The company was paid more than $1 million through an offshore Cypriot bank account to advise the party and its members, including a “prominent Ukraine oligarch” between 2014 and this year, according to a court document filed on Friday.

Prosecutors contend that Mr. Patten should have disclosed the work, which included lobbying and public relations assistance intended to “influence United States policy,” with the Justice Department pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Mr. Patten also attended an unspecified inaugural event with the oligarch, according to prosecutors. They contend that Mr. Patten arranged for the purchase of four tickets for$50,000 by funneling the oligarch’s money through an American “straw” purchaser in violation of rules barring the inaugural committee from accepting money from foreign nationals.

Mr. Patten intentionally withheld documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee that could have revealed that foreign money was used to purchase the tickets, according to court filings.

Mr. Patten’s lawyer declined to comment after a Friday court hearing in which Mr. Patten entered his guilty plea. He faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He was released after the hearing and awaits sentencing.

Prosecutors did not identify the American who purchased the tickets, the oligarch or Mr. Patten’s Russian business partner by name.

But people familiar with the work said the Russian is Mr. Kilimnik, who formed a company calledBegemot Ventures International with Mr. Patten in February 2015, according to corporate records filed in Washington.

Roger Stone and Everyone Charged in the 2016 Election Investigations

Roger Stone is the sixth Trump adviser who has been found or pleaded guilty of crimes stemming from the Mueller investigation.

And the description of the oligarch matches that of Serhiy Lyovochkin,who serves in the Ukrainian parliament and is an official in the Opposition Bloc, according to interviews and documents. Prosecutors say that Mr. Patten arranged meetings with congressional officials for the oligarch, and one former congressional aide recalled being introduced to Mr. Lyovochkin by Mr. Patten.

Prosecutors also said that Mr. Patten helped the oligarch draft and place an op-ed in an American media outlet in February 2017 “to address concerns regarding Ukraine’s ability to work effectively with the new United States administration.”

An op-ed under Mr. Lyovochkin’s name appeared in U.S. News & World Report at that time arguing that Mr. Trump could be good for Ukraine, while accusing elements of Mr. Poroshenko’s government of trying to boost Hillary Clinton, including by “manufacturing” allegations against Mr. Manafort related to his work for the ousted pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.

A representative of U.S. News said editors had not been contacted by anyone in law enforcement about the op-ed.

Mr. Lyovochkin surfaced prominently in the financial fraud trial last month of Mr. Manafort. Mr. Gates, Mr. Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman and Mr. Manafort’s former right-hand man, testified that Mr. Lyovochkin was one of a clutch of oligarchs who paid Mr. Manafort more than $60 million to promote pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine.

With Mr. Manafort’s help, Mr. Yanukovych was elected president of Ukraine in 2010, a position he held for four years until he fled to Russia amid a popular uprising against his regime’s corruption.

Mr. Gates testified that Mr. Lyovochkin wired millions of dollars to Mr. Manafort’s secret bank accounts from bank accounts in Cyprus held in the names of two shell companies to Mr. Manafort’s secret bank accounts. Like the other Ukrainian oligarchs who financed Mr. Manafort’s work, Mr. Lyovochkin was one of the top officials in Mr. Yanukovych’s government.

After Mr. Yanukovych was forced out of office, the oligarchs regrouped into an opposition force, continuing to pay Mr. Manafort for a time to help promote their views in the West.

Mr. Manafort was convicted in August of financial fraud and is scheduled to go on trial in September on other charges, including violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act for failing to disclose his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych and the Opposition Bloc.

Mr. Patten traveled in the same lucrative foreign consulting circles as Mr. Manafort, but people who know them said their primary connection was through Mr. Kilimnik.

Mr. Patten was born into elite Washington, as a grandson of the Georgetown socialite Susan Mary Alsop.

He worked in Washington Republican politics, including for the State Department under President George W. Bush, and briefly for Senator Susan Collins of Maine.

But Mr. Patten really made his name in international political consulting, coming to specialize in representing clients in former Soviet states. He worked with Mr. Kilimnik in the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute in the early 2000s.

In Ukraine, Mr. Patten and Mr. Kilimnik worked on the 2014 campaign of the former boxer Vitali Klitschko for mayor of Kiev, which was also supported by Mr. Lyovochkin.

And Mr. Patten also worked extensively for interests in Kazakhstan.

Among his associates on work related to Kazakhstan was Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-born Washington lobbyist who attended the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting at which Kremlin-linked insiders had promised to provide the Trump campaign with damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Patten also had a yearslong business relationship with Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm that worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Starting in 2014, the firm used Mr. Patten as a consultant for election campaigns and other projects in Africa, Europe and the United States, according to a person with direct knowledge of his activities.

During the same year, Cambridge Analytica sought to drum up business in Russia, approaching the Russian oil giant Lukoil.

In a Facebook post, Mr. Patten said he deeply regretted his failure to register as a foreign agent and was “ashamed” that he had undermined much of his life’s work, which he said had largely focused on promoting democracy abroad.

atl mo nat b

A longtime Republican operative with ties to the controversial data firm hired by President Donald Trump’s campaign team also has a nearly two-decade-long friendship and business relationship with a suspected Russian intelligence agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, who has landed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s crosshairs.

The Washington-based operative, Sam Patten,would not tell me whether he has been interviewed by Mueller’s team as part of their investigation into Russia’s election interference and potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. But Patten said that his relationship with Kilimnik—a former officer in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) who worked closely with Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, for over a decade—has “been thoroughly explored by relevant government entities.”

Patten’s long friendship with Kilimnik—which stems from their time working together at the International Republican Institute in Moscow between 2001 and 2003—would likely be enough to draw scrutiny from Mueller, who appears to have homed in on Kilimnik as a potentially significant link between the Trump campaign and Russia. The special counsel’s office alleged in a court filing late last month that Kilimnik still had ties to Russian intelligence services in 2016, and that his conversations with Gates in September of that year are relevant to the investigation. Manafort and Gates’s arrival to the campaign team coincided with the most pivotal Russia-related episode of the election: the release of emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee by hackers working for the GRU, Russia’s premier military-intelligence unit.

A Suspected Russian Spy, With Curious Ties to Washington ...

https://www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2018/04 › a-dc-operative...

:{:{Apr 6, 2018 - :(style="color:#70757aff"):}:Dmitry :{Firtash:(style="color:#6a6a6aff"):}:, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Manafort ... the Oregon office of :{Cambridge Analytica's:(style="color:#6a6a6aff"):}: parent company, :{SCL Group:(style="color:#6a6a6aff"):}:, ...}:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/fara-law-explained-794340/

RS andy kroll

Last year, American Media, Inc., the scandal-plagued parent company of the National Enquirer, produced 200,000 copies of a special-edition magazine called “The New Kingdom.” On its cover was the new crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. The glossy magazine championed the young Saudi leader and touted his supposed “reform” agenda in the wake of bin Salman’s March 2018 visit to the United States.

Before AMI published “The New Kingdom,” it consulted with the Department of Justice. According to the Wall Street Journal, the media company asked the DOJ if it would need to register as a foreign agent for the purposes of publishing its unabashedly pro-Saudi mag. DOJ lawyers ultimately said no, but the fact that AMI felt the need to ask at all shows how much a once-obscure law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), has been revived in recent years as part of the government’s larger effort to expose foreign influence operations on American soil.... ...has used it repeatedly in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The DOJ’s more aggressive enforcement of the law has led to more political consultants disclosing — voluntarily or not — their work to influence American politics and public opinions on behalf of foreign governments."

Congress passed FARA in 1938 to expose those believed to be behind pro-Nazi propaganda in the United States. The law requires people working on behalf of a foreign official to influence American policy, politics or public opinion to disclose a wealth of information: How much they’re getting paid, who they’re meeting with, the tactics they’re using to push their client’s message and how they’re spending said client’s money. All of that information is posted online, giving journalists, members of Congress and regular citizens the ability to see how foreign governments are trying to influence this country and its government.

But for much of FARA’s existence, the law resulted in few criminal prosecutions. Between 1966 and 2015, there were only seven FARA-related prosecutions. A 2016 DOJ inspector general’s report concluded that the unit overseeing the law “lacks a comprehensive FARA enforcement strategy.” It was treated, as one foreign lobbyist recently put it, like “a stop sign in the desert.” There have been almost as many criminal prosecutions under FARA brought in the last 18 months — five — as there were in the preceding 40 years.

In late 2014, David Laufman, a career DOJ lawyer, became the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section in the department’s national security division, which includes oversight of FARA enforcement. Laufman tells Rolling Stone that, soon after he took over, he realized that “there was a great deal more we could do to enforce the statute appropriately and in a more muscular way.” Under his watch, he says, the DOJ began to enforce FARA more aggressively. (He says the inspector general’s 2016 findings were “outdated and inapt.”)

Mueller’s investigation is a big reason for this. Almost one year ago, a D.C. grand jury convened by Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency and 13 Russian nationals for carrying out an assortment of tactics to sow discord in American elections, including the use of fake American identities and social media platforms to organize rallies and spread disinformation. The first count in that indictment accused the Russians of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by failing to register as foreign agents under FARA.

As Laufman, who left the DOJ last year and now advises clients on FARA compliance, writes in a recent Law360 analysis, Mueller’s case against the IRA and its agents may be the first time foreign nationals on foreign soil were charged with criminal acts under the act. Laufman says this is a signal that the DOJ intends to be more aggressive with FARA prosecutions, especially as the weaponization of social media becomes more commonplace in our elections.

“We’re living in an era where foreign influence operations present novel and sometimes destabilizing threats to the United States,” Laufman tells Rolling Stone.“The manifestations of that are not always transparent. The whole purpose of the statute is to effect and maximize transparency through registration and disclosure with respect to who the real parties and interests are behind lobbying activities and content that is propagated within the United States.”

A week after the IRA indictment, Rick Gates, the former Trump deputy campaign chairman and Paul Manafort protege, pleaded guilty to a similar conspiracy charge, this time for failing to register for lobbying work he did on behalf of the government of Ukraine and the pro-Russia Party of Regions. Last fall, Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, also pleaded guilty to not registering as a foreign agent for Ukraine, the Party of Regions and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Mueller’s investigation has also apparently led to two other FARA-related guilty pleas brought by other law-enforcement offices. In August 2018, Samuel Patten, a political consultant and ex-Manafort associate,pleaded guiltyin D.C. federal court to violating the law for not registering for political work he did for the Ukraine’s Opposition Bloc party and an anonymous “prominent Ukraine oligarch.”Last December, in what appeared to be another spinoff from the Mueller investigation, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginiacharged two men with ties to former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for acting as foreign agents for the government of Turkey without registering under FARA.

The Justice Department has also ramped up its FARA enforcement in the form of more demands for information from potential foreign agents, and in some cases pressuring people and companies to register under the act. In the past two years, for instance, at the DOJ’s insistence, Russia Today (RT) and RIA Global, two TV networks with ties to the Kremlin that operate in the U.S., registered as foreign agents. This month, CGTN America, the U.S. affiliate of a Chinese state-owned media organization, begrudgingly registered under FARA as well.

maine press herald

Patten, left, speaks with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Saleh Mutlaq in Baghdad in April 2014. As Patten advised him in his bid to become prime minister that year, the Maine native had to protect himself with armored glass and security guards. Patten, 47, pleaded guilty last month to failing to register as a foreign agent related to his lobbying work in Ukraine. He also coordinated with a Russian national to help a Ukrainian citizen donate $50,000 to President Trump's inaugural committee. ]

Four years before working to boost participation in Iraq’s first democratic elections in generations – and nearly two decades before his lobbying for foreign clients drew scrutiny from special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigators – Sam Patten was helping lead a political ground game in Maine.

“Pulling in some kind of a big-league speaker at this point is not going to change the nature of the game,” a 29-year-old Patten, then George W. Bush’s campaign coordinator in Maine, said one day before the historically close 2000 election. “In order to win, we’ve just got to concentrate on getting out our voters and also making our very best possible effort at making our case in the remaining hours to independents, undecided voters and fair-minded Democratic voters.”

For nearly a quarter-century, the Camden native and grandson of a well-known Washington, D.C., political socialite embedded himself in campaigns from Bangor to Baghdad. Patten worked with congressional candidates, nonprofits espousing democracy in troubled nations and also mega-corporations and foreign political parties willing to pay big bucks for access.

He advised opposition leaders in Russia and helped elect a pro-NATO president of Georgia (only to help elect his Russian-backed replacement eight years later). An international adviser pledging to deliver “commitment, discretion and high-impact solutions” to clients, Patten has also worked in multiple countries where on-the-ground political consulting requires a cadre of heavily armed security guards.

“People like me are not agents of change,” Patten told The Washington Post in 2014, when he was being paid $20,000 a month to advise an official hoping to be elected Iraq’s prime minister. (He wasn’t). “We’re helpers, perhaps enablers, of a historical process that is going to happen eventually, one way or another.”

Yet playing the enabler or foreign power broker – in political environments with few rules but plenty of available cash – can also be a risky, messy business. And for Patten, the mess has turned very real, with potentially damaging consequences.

FASCINATED BY RUSSIA EARLY ON

Last month, the 47-year-old pleaded guilty to failing to register as a “foreign agent” while lobbying members of Congress and the executive branch on behalf of Ukrainian political clients. He also arranged for an illegal donation from a Ukrainian citizen to President Trump’s inaugural committee – and then misled the Senate Intelligence Committee about the arrangement.

Patten’s partner in the lobbying business and in arranging for the “straw donor” donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, Russian citizen KonstantinKilimnik, is a business partner of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman at the center of the swirl of allegations over Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

Patten was even listed as a potential witness in Manafort’s second trial before Manafort pleaded guilty earlier this month to conspiring to defraud the U.S. of taxes and conspiring to obstruct justice.

It’s a long way from Camden-Rockport High School, where Patten graduated in 1989, and his early political years working for the likes of Republican Sens. Bill Cohen, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine.

News of Patten’s Aug. 31 guilty plea and potential involvement in the high-profile Manafort case caught the attention of some in the Camden area, where his father, Bill, once occupied a prominent position as the former owner of the Camden Herald weekly newspaper.

Doug Hufnagel, a former Camden Herald columnist who worked for Bill Patten, said he was surprised the son would “fall into” that sort of situation. Hufnagel remembered Sam Patten as studious and bright but also the type of child who benefited from his family’s wealth and political connections.

“Sam would be a perfect example of someone who comes from money,” Hufnagel said. “How did he end up working for Susan Collins or working for William Cohen? The door was opened because of his father.”

At the same time, Hufnagel recalled an interesting – and enlightening, given recent events – conversation sometime after Sam Patten had graduated from college. Patten talked about plans to try to work in the oil industry in Russia or other former Soviet bloc countries – a concept that Hufnagel said “seemed absurd to me at the time.” But Patten followed through on his plans, eventually creating an advisory firm in Kazakhstan in the late-1990s that “provided public and government relations” services to such clients as Texaco, Coca-Cola and the Fortune 500 power company AES Corp., according to his website.

“Even back then, he had his eye on that part of the world,” Hufnagel said.

Patten and his attorney both declined to talk about his career or his current legal situation.

“Neither I or Mr. Patten will be making any statements or answering questions at this time,” Patten’s attorney, Stuart Sears, said earlier this month. “Should that change, I will let you know.”

The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram also reached out to multiple campaign or political staffers who worked with Patten in Maine as well as a number of Washington, D.C., consultants who knew Patten, but all either did not return phone calls or declined to comment.

However, previous media accounts in Maine and around the world illustrate Patten’s career path from a congressional intern from Maine to a highly compensated consultant providing advice – and access – to foreign clients.

After graduating from Camden-Rockport High School, Patten attended Georgetown University in the same affluent D.C. neighborhood where his grandmother, the late Susan Mary Alsop, entertained Washington’s political and social elite.Alsop’s second husband was the nationally syndicated political columnist Joseph Alsop.

FOSTERING DEMOCRACY ABROAD

After graduating fromGeorgetown, Patten worked as press secretary during Collins’ failed gubernatorial campaign in 1994 and then served as finance director for her successful Senate bid two years later. In 1996, according to a story in The Washington Post, Patten suffered a knife wound to the hip while trying to protect his grandmother when the two were mugged while walking home from dinner in Georgetown.

After his stint advising corporations interested in investing in Kazakhstan, Patten returned to Maine to work as a spokesman and campaign coordinator for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.

Dwayne Bickford, a former executive director of the Maine Republican Party, said he crossed paths with Patten numerous times during those years as the young politico worked on campaigns in the state, although they never worked closely together. Bickford said he periodically followed Patten’s work as he shifted his focus overseas.

“He seemed like a smart, intelligent and nice guy,” Bickford said.

Patten would spend much of the next decade working on democracy-related issues in countries around the world.

From 2001 to 2004, he led the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute, a nonpartisan organization funded by Congress – along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs – that works on “democracy development” in more than 30 countries. Patten worked with nongovernmental organizations as well as democracy-promoting political organizations and candidates – including thepro-capitalism opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was later assassinated.

Later in 2004, Patten was working for the International Republican Institute in Iraq as that country prepared for the first open elections since the U.S. invasion helped topple Saddam Hussein. As the organization’s political director in Iraq, Patten strove to educate Iraqis about the election process as the country prepared to create a new parliament and to bring together different political groups, or factions, to start the coalition-building process.

He told the Press Herald at the time of the January 2005 elections that it was the type of basic “get-out-the-vote” efforts that he and others employed in political races in Maine and throughout the U.S., including focus groups and producing television commercials. But rather than showing up at the polls with the “four or five foreign, heavily armed” security guards that had to accompany him around Iraq, Patten watched the results from his Baghdad building and was delighted by the massive turnout despite the threats of violence by extremist groups.

“There continues to be gunfire throughout tonight, and I think that insurgents are going to want to make some kind of statement … to punish people for having voted,” Patten told the Press Herald. But “the fact that so many Iraqis went out and voted today is an extraordinary act of courage and a very strong reflection on these people. It reflects very well on the future.”

‘CHASING JEFFERSONIAN SUNBEAMS’

As it turned out, Iraq’s transition to democracy was not smooth. A decade later, in 2014, Patten was still having to surround himself with armored glass and security guards as he advised Saleh Mutlaq – then Iraq’s deputy prime minster – as he ran for prime minister. As The Washington Post put it in a profile of this American advising an Iraqi candidate, Patten was still “chasing Jeffersonian sunbeams in a country where bombs keep going off” but was getting paid $20,000 a month to do it, although the consultant said that didn’t cover all of his enormous expenses.

Sam Patten talks with lawyer Riad al-Samarrai in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2014. Patten was a political force in his home state as well as abroad, playing key roles in Susan Collins’ Senate bid and George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. The Washington Post/Khalid Mohammed

“It’s one thing to be a star adviser to a campaign in, say, the United Kingdom,” the Post piece reads, “and another to ’embed,’ as Patten puts it, in an untidy, austere apartment in Jordan for four months and shuttle regularly to Baghdad, requiring an armored SUV to visit his candidate.”

A year later, Patten would form another international consulting firm –Begemot Ventures International, offering “influence without borders” – with a Russian citizen he worked closely with while heading the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute. It was that person, Konstantin Kilimnik, who would later become Paul Manafort’s close business associate while working in Ukraine and who special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s team reportedly views as having close ties to Russian intelligence.

Between 2015 and 2017, Begemot Ventures received more than $1 million from the Ukrainian Opposition Bloc and for other Ukrainian consulting work, according to Patten’s plea agreement with federal prosecutors. Patten pleaded guilty to failing to register as a “foreign agent” for his lobbying work to “influence United States policy” and efforts to set up meetings between Ukrainian political figures and members of Congress or their staff.

Additionally,Patten admitted to working with a Russian national – widely believed to be Kilimnik – to help a Ukrainian citizen donate $50,000 to President Trump’s inaugural committee. The pair reportedly used a “straw donor” to secure inaugural tickets because foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing. The three men plus a fourth unnamed person then attended the inaugural celebrations.

PATTEN FACES FIVE YEARS IN PRISON

Patten faces up to five years in prison for the charges to which he pleaded guilty, although he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in hopes of leniency during sentencing. The timeline for those events is unclear, given Manafort’s recent guilty plea.

But in a Facebook post immediately after his guilty plea – which is no longer publicly available but was preserved by a “friend” on the social media network – Patten apologized “for the embarrassment this lapse in my own high professional standards has caused my family, my friends and my past and present work associates.” Patten went on to say that he dedicated much of his career in international politics to “helping democratic forces engage in competitive, non-violent election campaigns and helping improve governance in challenging parts of the world.”

“I am ashamed that failing to register (as a foreign agent) in these instances undermines much of my life’s work, and am committed to making amends for this transgression,” he wrote.

Kevin Miller can be contacted at 791-6312 or at:

kmiller@mainetoday.com

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/31/17805310/sam-patten-mueller-plea-manafort

Mueller investigation has resulted in yet another plea deal. Sam Patten, a Republican lobbyist, pleaded guilty Friday to violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in his unregistered work for a Ukrainian politician and a Ukrainian oligarch — and agreed to cooperate with the government.

Patten was charged by the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia. But Mueller’s team referred the investigation there and Patten’s plea agreement specifically says he must cooperate with the special counsel’s office. Andrew Weissmann, an attorney on Mueller’s team, attended Patten’s hearing Friday.

There are several similarities between Patten’s work and the unregistered Ukrainian lobbying allegations against Paul Manafort. Like Manafort, Patten worked for Ukraine’s pro-Russian political faction. Like Manafort, his payments went through offshore accounts in Cyprus.

Also like Manafort, Patten worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national who Mueller claims is tied to Russian intelligence services. (Mueller indicted Kilimnik alongside Manafort this year for attempted witness tampering, but he is overseas and has not been arrested.)

Weissmann, who attended the Patten hearing, is Mueller’s lead attorney handling the prosecution of Manafort. Manafort was convicted of eight counts of financial crimes in Virginia last week, but he is scheduled to face another trial on conspiracy, unregistered lobbying, and witness tampering charges in Washington, DC, next month.

What Sam Patten pleaded guilty to doing

According to the criminal information document filed by the DC US attorney’s office, Patten and Kilimnik (who is not named but referred to as “Foreigner A”) founded a lobbying and consulting company together. They did campaign work in Ukraine and lobbying work in the US, and were paid over $1 million between 2015 and 2017.

Specifically, the document claims that Patten contacted members of Congress and their staffers, State Department officials, and members of the press on behalf of his Ukrainian clients — all without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as required by law.

Patten also admits to helping his Ukrainian oligarch client get around the prohibition on foreign donations to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee.The oligarch sent $50,000 to Patten’s company, and then he gave that money to a US citizen, who bought the four tickets. The tickets were given to the oligarch, Kilimnik, another Ukrainian, and Patten himself.

Finally, Patten also admits to misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee and withholding documents from them during testimony this January.

Who is Sam Patten?

Patten worked for George W. Bush’s State Department, and according to his website, he’s done work in Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Iraq, and Russia. He also worked as the Eurasian program director at Freedom House, a group that promotes democracy and human rights, between 2009 and 2011.

Patten’s ties to Kilimnik were known publicly and described in profiles by the Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay and the Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand earlier this year. Indeed, Patten even publicly defended Kilimnik in the press when he came under Mueller’s scrutiny this year.

Intriguingly, Patten is also tied to the controversial political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Patten told the Daily Beast earlier this year that he worked with the company in its 2014 US elections work and on “several overseas campaigns.”

Cambridge later did work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and came under investigative scrutiny for, among other things, its use of Facebook data. Mueller’s team reportedly looked into Cambridge Analytica in their Russia probe, but has not charged any matter related to the firm.

This is the third known referral by Robert Mueller to other Justice Department offices — but now, Patten is cooperating with Mueller

Either because of lack of resources or a desire to avoid expanding his probe too much beyond the central players in the Russia investigation, Mueller is now known to have referred several potentially criminal matters he has discovered to other offices in the Justice Department to investigate.

The special counsel reportedly referred another inquiry of prominent Washington figures’ Ukrainian lobbying to the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), this one concerningTony Podesta, Vin Weber, and Greg Craig. (This trio worked with Manafort and his associate Rick Gates on some of their Ukraine projects.)

Mueller also referred the investigation of Michael Cohen for tax and campaign finance violations to SDNY (though he appears to have continued investigating Cohen on matters related to Russia). Cohen pleaded guilty on eight counts in the SDNY case last week.

The charge here — not registering as a foreign agent under FARA — is believed to be widespread in Washington, but it is rarely prosecuted. Mueller’s probe, however, seems to have turned up a plethora of evidence of such violations, even for figures he hasn’t closely focused on.

The Patten investigation is the third known probe Mueller has referred. Yet this does not seem to have been a complete handoff, since his plea agreement specifically mentions he must cooperate with the special counsel’s office. So Patten has become Mueller’s newest cooperator.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/mueller-subpoenas-director-of-controversial-data-firm-cambridge-analytica-in-russia-probe/

Brittany Kaiser, a director of data company Cambridge Analytica, has been subpoenaed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, the Guardian reports.

A spokesman for Kaiser confirmed she is fully cooperating with Mueller, according to the Guardian, and that she is working with separate “US congressional and legal investigations into the company’s activities.”

Kaiser is the second person from Cambridge Analytica who has been subpoenaed by Mueller. As the Guardian notes:

“In August, Sam Patten, a US political consultant who had worked for Cambridge Analytica on campaigns in the US and abroad,struck a plea deal with Mueller after admitting he had failed to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.”

Patten worked with Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who Mueller on Friday recommended spend up to 24 years in prison for “serious, longstanding, and bold” financial crimes,” and with Russian oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik, a subject of Mueller’s probe.

“Kaiser, however, is the first person connected directly to both the Brexit and Trump campaigns known to have been questioned by Mueller,” the Guardian reports.

...

---

wayback

Wayback Machine

Patten headed the International Republican Institute (IRI)’s Moscow office from 2001-2004, and provided technical assistance to a range of political parties and non-governmental organizations. In particular, he worked closely with the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, whose center-right party, the Union of Right Forces, pushed for free market and democratic reforms. Sam traveled extensively throughout Russia’s 11 time zones, building relationships and a nuanced understanding of Russia’s character. From 2009-11, Sam served as Eurasian program director at Freedom House, an advocacy group, where he continued to focus on Russian affairs, as well as those in the broader region.

http://officeofsampatten.com/experience/uk/

Office of Sam Patten

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Sam worked with one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies to introduce new technologies and methodologies to U.S. campaigns during the 2014 congressional cycle. This beta run of a cutting-edge electoral approach included taking micro-targeting to the next level. Currently this approach is being adopted by at least one major U.S. presidential candidate.

SAM@OFFICEOFSAMPATTEN.COM

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===

VATD

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-secretive-trump-lobby-wants-profit-breakup-iraq

Ex-Bush administration officials with pro-Trump leanings have forged a secret alliance with a former private Iraqi Pentagon contractor who is a member of one of Iraq’s wealthiest dynasties. Their mission is to promote the breakup of Iraq as the only viable way to defeat the Islamic State. They have achieved partial success: on Monday, the Trump administration announced a seismic shift in U.S. policy toward the possibility of Iraq’s dissolution.

Yet this network has been intimately connected to Cambridge Analytica (the technology firm that ran Trump’s election campaign), entities that have sponsored ISIS and other Islamist militants, as well as to ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers — who might benefit from the breakup of the country. If you want an inside glimpse into how Deep State 2.0 under Trump is working, this is it. It’s all about networks of influence, vested interests and manipulation of public opinion, in the U.S. and Iraq, in particular. But it’s also about oil and raw materials, and how in some ways, sectarian tensions represent only the surface of deeper drivers of conflict.

By perusing documents, speaking to sources and digging into obscure public records, Insurge Intelligence was able to follow a thread that has so far only been guessed at: what is driving the Trump administration’s thinking on Iraq, a country the U.S. invaded and occupied in 2003, and where it still fights an endless "war on terror"?

A window into the answer comes from a little-known U.S.-Iraqi network, operating through the front of a supposedly patriotic American campaign group. The network was active through the latter half of 2016, coinciding with the final stages of presidential campaigning, and focused on opposing President Obama’s Iraq policy.

The locus of the activity is an organization called the Committee to Destroy ISIS, set up in July 2016 by Sam Patten. Patten served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior State Department advisor from 2008 to 2009, and previously was Bush’s presidential campaign coordinator in 2000. He is executive director of the Committee, which describes itself as a group of Americans and Iraqis campaigning for the western Sunni region of Iraq to achieve independence from the central government in Baghdad.

In October 2016, Patten’s Committee to Destroy ISIS provided financial support to the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington DC think-tank with direct ties to the Trump transition team, to produce a report which calls for the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines.

The curious implications of the connection between Patten and the Hudson Institute report were first highlighted in October 2016 by Ali Hadi al-Musawi for 1001IraqiThoughts. The report, "West Iraq: The Search for Leaders and Leverage," describes itself as a "feasibility study" of western Iraq becoming an independent or autonomous Sunni statelet. The proposal would end up giving neighboring Saudi Arabia significant influence on the envisioned statelet.

The idea of breaking up Iraq is not new. It was, according to high-level sources in Jordan, actively discussed by Bush administration officials based on a vague plan brokered by Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a year before the 2003 invasion. Officials talked about engineering the sectarian partition of Iraq into three autonomous cantons for Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’as. This could make it easier for the U.S. to control the country and access the oil-rich regions.

The plan never left the drawing board, but the strategic thinking behind it lingered and continued to surface in neoconservative planning for the future of the Middle East. This thinking seeped across party political lines and reared its head repeatedly among Democrats. In 2006, Joe Biden, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, advocated splitting Iraq into three along sectarian divisions. Since then, pundits and policymakers have circulated the idea. But the U.S. government never formally adopted it as even a potential scenario , until now.

The lead author of the Hudson Institute report is Michael Pregent, with research assistance provided by Kevin Truitte. Pregent is a former intelligence adviser to General David Petraeus who served in Iraq and heads up a separate campaign group known as Veterans Against The Deal (VATD), set up to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran brokered by the Obama administration.

VATD launched in late 2015 with a million-dollar ad campaign against the Iran deal, claiming it would give Iran billions of dollars to fund terrorism in the Middle East. But the group did not disclose its donors.

To be sure, Iran has played an increasingly abysmal role in escalating atrocities in Iraq and Syria, fueling anti-Sunni sectarianism and, in turn, emboldening anti-Shi’a extremists. Yet conversely, Michael Pregent and his backers appear to have a curious blindspot on the role of Turkey and the Gulf kingdoms in supporting extremists linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Koch-Bush-Trump nexus

At its launch, VATD’s board members included Pete Hegseth, CEO of another pro-Republican campaign group, Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth’s group was financed almost entirely by the Koch brothers’ $400 million political donor network.

A year later, Hegseth met with Donald Trump as a potential candidate for the post of Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He didn’t get the job. But Michael Flynn, Trump’s one-time National Security Advisor (before his untimely resignation in February) was also previously an advisor to VATD.

VATD’s PR campaign was run by a Washington DC PR firm, Javelin DC, founded by Matt Latimer, President George W. Bush’s deputy director of speechwriting and chief speechwriter to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Javelin’s co-founding partner is Keith Urbahn, who served as Rumsfeld’s chief of staff.

VATD executive director Michael Pregent is also closely connected to the Center for Security Policy, a Washington DC think-tank founded and run by former Reagan defense official Frank Gaffney.Pregent frequently appeared as a guest on Gaffney’s CSP ‘Secure Freedom’ radio podcast from 2015 to 2016.

Gaffney — a staunch advocate of the Obama Muslim birther conspiracy theory — was asked by Trump to help him select his national security team, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The Trump team denied that Gaffney formally advised the transition, but did not confirm or deny whether he had met with Trump.

Pregent declined to comment when asked whether he agreed with Gaffney’s bizarre conspiracy theories.

Cambridge Analytica

In their Hudson Institute report, Pregent and his co-author Truitte “acknowledge support from the Committee to Destroy ISIS, which helped defray expenses incurred during the preparation of this study.”

One of Donald Trump’s senior foreign policy advisors at the time of publication was George Papadopoulos, a former research associate at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015. During his Hudson Institute tenure, Papadopoulos worked under Richard Weitz, director of the think-tank’s Center for Political-Military Analysis.

Sam Patten, whose Committee to Destroy ISIS funded the Hudson Institute feasibility study for the breakup of Iraq, has his own ties to the Trump administration.

Patten’s biography on the website of his lobbying firm, Office of Sam Patten LLC, describes him as having worked with “one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies to introduce new technologies and methodologies to US campaigns during the 2014 congressional cycle. This beta run of a cutting-edge electoral approach included taking micro-targeting to the next level. Currently this approach is being adopted by at least one major US presidential candidate.”

It’s now well-known that the London-based technology firm engaged in presidential campaigning in this way was Cambridge Analytica. The company, which has become notorious for its role in supporting Trump’s presidential campaign, previously supported the campaigns of Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

A spokesperson for the firm told me that Patten had indeed worked for Cambridge Analytica at the Oregon office of its parent company, SCL Group. Patten had got involved early when the firm was actively fine-tuning its methodologies in 2014 before the presidential campaign.

Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is on the board of Cambridge Analytica, which is now actively using its close ties to Trump’s inner circle to pitch for new government contracts.

Michael Flynn — who advised Michael Pregent’s VATD — also served as an advisor to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, to help expand its contracting work. Under Trump, the firm has just finalized a contract with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on a new counter-extremism program.

Among the firm’s main financiers is billionaire Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s chief political donors, and previously a key funder for Bannon’s Breitbart News, among other projects.

In 2014, Bannon was the Mercer family’s political advisor, and played a key role in rolling out Cambridge Analytica for the US Republican election scene — precisely when Patten worked there.

In July 2016, the month Patten launched the Committee to Destroy ISIS, Patten was interviewed by Steve Bannon on Breitbart News’ radio show to discuss the Committee’s vision for a partitioned Iraq. Breitbart also published an op-ed by Patten putting forward the same views.

Asked about his relationship with Steve Bannon, and whether he believed the Trump administration might end up taking on the Committee’s proposals for a breakup of Iraq, Patten said: “One outcome of the US election is the likely change in approach to foreign policy. The new administration includes voices that oppose making America’s regional policy a hostage to a single Gulf nation’s ambition, and has been actively calling for new ideas.”

Patten also heaped praise on the White House chief strategist: “We met Mr. Bannon last summer and he struck us a thoughtful person, an avid student of history and an original thinker. We hope that new thinking may challenge the cynical, status quo of recent years….”

I asked the U.S. State Department whether it supported the Committee’s position, or still stood by the traditional U.S. position of previous administrations supporting a unified Iraq. A spokesperson sent me an excerpt from Monday’s press briefing, in which an official confirmed that the Trump administration was moving to accommodate the possibility of a divided Iraq: “With respect to the unity of Iraq, you’re right, that is something we make a point of saying. But ultimately, these are all internal political discussions that Iraq needs to have with all ethnic groups resident in the country.”

This is the first time that the State Department has officially declared the U.S. government’s willingness to contemplate the prospect of an Iraq breakup of some kind. The reality on the ground is that the process is already underway, but the Trump administration’s position is a major step toward formalizing it.

But former Bush PR guru Sam Pattenis not just connected to the Trump administration. He simultaneously works with certain Sunni factions in Iraq — some of whom were suspected by U.S. intelligence of having ties to the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Flirting with insurgents

In 2014, as Iraqi writer Ali Hadi al-Musawi reported, Patten separately registered as a foreign agent on behalf of the Sunni-led Al Arabiya bloc, an Iraqi political coalition formed by then-deputy prime minister of Iraq, Saleh al-Mutlaq. Under Saddam, al-Mutlaq was a member of the Ba’ath Party until the late 1970s when he was expelled for insisting that five Shi’ite men should receive a fair trial.

Since then, however, al-Mutlaq unofficially maintained contacts with the Ba’ath Party on many levels, according to Jordanian writer Mohammed Hussainy. Disclosure filings confirm that during this time, Patten was paid from al-Mutlaq’s Jordanian office in Amman.

According to the Daily Beast, “some in U.S. intelligence have suspected him [al-Mutlaq] of having ties to Sunni insurgents over the years.”

In January 2007, U.S. forces were reportedly fired on from al-Mutlaq’s office in Baghdad, during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda safehouse. “One of the buildings from which Coalition Forces received heavy enemy fire, including grenade launches, was later identified as belonging to Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq,” said a US statement. Al-Mutlaq denied the incident.

On April 17, 2007, al-Mutlaq called for Iraq’s insurgent groups to unite against the U.S. during an interview with Reuters from Amman. He said that insurgents must agree on a future vision of Iraq if the U.S. military did not abruptly pull out of the country.

His rapport with the wider Sunni population is questionable, though. A declassified December 2007 intelligence assessment by the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee described al-Mutlaq as commanding “little support from the Sunni street.”

But the key point is that Sam Patten didn’t seem particularly concerned by the fact that the U.S. administration he once served suspected al-Mutlaq of siding with the insurgency.

Lobbying for the dynasty

Patten’s loyalties are further revealed from documents he filed in accordance with lobbying regulations.

Congressional filings for the Committee to Destroy ISIS reveal that Patten’s Iraqi benefactors go far beyond al-Mutlaq and the al-Arabiya Coalition, to one of Iraq’s most powerful and wealthiest Sunni clans.The dynasty once maintained friendly relations with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, but went on to forge close relations with the U.S. military occupation run by the Bush administration.

The first filing, filed and signed by Patten in August 2016, reveals that the Committee is majority-owned by a foreign entity listed in the disclosure form as “Rhodes Precast Concrete Ltd.” The documents show that Patten is essentially acting as a lobbyist for this “foreign entity.”

===

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/the-astonishing-tale-of-the-man-mueller-calls-person-a/562217/

...When Kostya struggled to make sense of some American political terminology, the operative Philip Griffin, who hired him, would josh him about his martial past. “If I had you translate ‘There are seven tanks and three infantry with heavy mortar hiding on a bridge,’ you could translate that lickety-split, I bet.” According to Griffin, Kilimnik would wink and say, “Oh yeah, I could translate that real fast.”

If you weren’t close with Kostya, if you didn’t go out drinking with him, you might not have paid all that much attention to his presence in the office. But in the right setting, he could be loquacious, fun even. He played along with jokes about his stature. Office mates not only referred to him as “Carry On”—a reference to how he could be stowed on a flight—but they tested the proposition, successfully stuffing him into a plastic tote bag. This gag was played with his apparent consent, although it’s not hard to see how the joke could have stoked simmering resentment.

Kostya’s mind moved quickly. He absorbed information voraciously and took pleasure in relaying it. One former American official who got to know him years after he started at the IRI told me, “He knows all the gossip.” But, he warned, “you get all the stories and don’t know if it’s true.”

This hunger for information bred distrust with his colleagues, especially the native-born Russians in the office. They relayed their concerns about his reliability to Judy Van Rest, who oversaw the IRI’s operations in the region back at headquarters, in Washington, D.C. His colleagues whispered about his limited capacity for confidentiality, complaints that were vague and hardly noteworthy, given the choking atmosphere of distrust in Moscow in those years. Meanwhile, Kostya’s value to the organization grew. The Americans in the office needed him to get phone numbers, to set up meetings, to translate. Kostya, who was competent and seemingly well-connected, displayed unimpeachable acumen in these tasks. IRI officials in Washington relied on him so much that they named him the acting director of the Moscow office.

The nature of Kilimnik’s job meant that he accompanied American operatives on sensitive meetings with political dissidents, especially as Vladimir Putin presided over Russia’s authoritarian turn. When the office finally got a permanent chief,Sam Patten, he worried that dissidents wouldn’t speak openly in Kostya’s presence. Patten advised an American colleague to disinvite Kostya from an important meeting with Boris Nemtsov,the Kremlin insider turned critic. Instead of passively accepting his colleague’s judgment, Kilimnik pitched an uncharacteristic fit, insisting that he tag along. (Patten declined to comment for this story.)

These suspicions were vague, yet they lingered. In the spring of 2005, Kilimnik received a call from Stephen Nix, a high-ranking IRI official in Washington. According to one of his colleagues, Nix had received hard evidence that Kilimnik was working for the political consultant Paul Manafort. Nix summarily fired Kilimnik for moonlighting with an operation that had a reputation of working on behalf of less-than-democratic clients. (“He was asked to leave because he violated IRI’s ethics codes,” a spokesperson for the organization told me.)

Later that month, IRI received a devastating blow.Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB—the Russian security service—denounced the organization in a speech to the Duma. The speech came during years of protests, when flickering prodemocracy movements threatened to crash the post-Soviet order. Patrushev portrayed these movements as having been launched by meddlers from the IRI, which he accused of formulating even grander plans for fomenting the “continuation of velvet revolutions in the post-Soviet territory.” In other words, he referenced information gleaned from a retreat the IRI had held the previous month in Bratislava, the Slovakian capital. Kostya had been one of two non-Americans to attend the meeting.

Russia | IRI - International Republican Institute

https://www.iri.org/country/russia

IRI and NDI Presidents in The Washington Post: Russian Meddling is Nothing Like ... IRI Expert to Senate Subcommittee: Russia is Undermining European ...

Missing: s ‎| ‎Must include: ‎s

International Republican Institute

https://www.iri.org/

IRI Eurasia Director in Atlantic Council Blog: Why John McCain Scared Putin ... an on-the-ground look by reading Democracy Speaks, a blog written by IRI staff.

Missing: s ‎moscow

Who We Are · ‎What We Do · ‎Where We Work · ‎News & Resource Center

International Republican Institute - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Republican_Institute

The International Republican Institute (IRI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to ... Ronald Reagan's 1982 speech before the British Parliament in Westminster in which he proposed a broad objective of helping countries build ...

President**‎: ‎Daniel Twining

Headquarters‎: ‎Washington, DC, United States

Budget‎: ‎$78m (2008)

Revenue (2015)‎: ‎$55,568,065

Russia — Office of Sam Patten

officeofsampatten.com/experience/russia/

Patten headed the International Republican Institute (IRI)'s Moscow office from 2001-2004, and provided technical assistance to a range of political parties and ...

Russia's nefarious meddling is nothing like democracy assistance ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../b8942f20-3ce2-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.ht...

Apr 10, 2018 - Daniel Twining is president of the International Republican Institute. ... that Moscow'scampaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.- ... the International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI) and ...

U.S.-funded democracy NGO pulls out of Russia – Foreign Policy

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/12/u-s-funded-democracy-ngo-pulls-out-of-russia/

Dec 12, 2012 - A pro-democracy group funded by U.S. taxpayers, the International Republican Institute (IRI), ... the tens of thousands to demonstrate against Vladimir Putin's rule. ... Some local staff were laid off and a few remain in Moscow.

Russia Bars McCain's Democracy Group as Security Threat - Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/.../russia-bars-mccain-s-democracy-group-as-national-sec...

Aug 18, 2016 - International Republican Institute declared 'undesirable' ... The IRI, whose stated goal is “advancing democracy worldwide,” ... The MacArthur Foundation, a Chicago-based non-profit organization, closed its Moscow office in ...

Konstantin Kilimnik: Manafort Aide Is Mueller's 'Person A' - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/the-astonishing.../562217/

Jun 6, 2018 - When Konstantin Kilimnik first entered the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute (IRI), in 1995, he looked like a bleary-eyed ...

Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik used International Republican ...

https://www.dailykos.com/.../-Paul-Manafort-and-Konstantin-Kilimnik-used-Internatio...

Jul 3, 2018 - ... working secretly through the International Republican Institute (IRI). ... theInternational Republican Institute and became head of its Moscow ...

===

no lnx

CBS/AP September 1, 2018, 2:25 PM

Washington, D.C., lobbyist pleads guilty to failing to file as foreign agent

WASHINGTON — W. Samuel Patten, an associate of a key figure in the investigation into former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, has pleaded guilty to one count of failing to register as a foreign agent.

Patten was a business associate of Konstantin Kilimnik, a man U.S. authorities said has ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik worked closely with Manafort, who was found guilty this month of eight financial counts. Kilimnik also is a co-defendant in a pending case against Manafort in Washington that accuses them both of witness tampering.

Court documents don't refer to Kilimnik by name, but said Patten worked with a Russian national on lobbying and political consulting services. Patten's company was involved in lobbying work in the United States and Ukraine, prosecutors said, adding that he failed to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department as required by law.

Prosecutors said Patten formed a company with the Russian national and it received $1,000,000 for its work advising Ukraine's Opposition Bloc party, including a prominent Ukraine oligarch. Prosecutors said this violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Paul Manafort Associate Sam Patten Charged For Failure To Register As A Foreign Agent In Mueller Russia Probe

The case was brought by the U.S. attorney's office in Washington and the Department of Justice's National Security Division, and not by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team has been investigating potential coordination between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

Even though the case was not brought by Mueller, President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, called it an "irrelevant indictment" from the special counsel's team.

"I think Mueller has turned into the private prosecutor," Giuliani said about Patten's guilty plea. "I mean, what does this have to do with President Trump.? Not a single thing. Has nothing to do with collusion. Some guy that donated to the inauguration."

Manafort's name was not mentioned once during Friday's hearing. Attorney Andrew Weissmann for the special counsel's office and FBI agent Omer Meisel were present in court. They have lead roles in Manafort's trial in Washington.

Patten told Judge Amy Berman Jackson that he suffers from mental illness and is under the care of a psychiatrist and is taking medication. Jackson asked whether he is suffering from depression and anxiety, and he quickly responded, "Correct, your honor." She ordered him to continue seeing his psychiatrist and to avoid alcohol.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/404530-manafort-associate-charged-with-illegal-lobbying-report

Sam Patten, a former associate of Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to illegally acting as a foreign agent and is now cooperating with the government.

Patten was charged with failing to register as a foreign agent in the United States.

The charges are related to Patten’s work lobbying on behalf of a political party in Ukraine, known as the Opposition Bloc, according to the criminal information document federal prosecutors filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday.

The criminal information filing typically comes before a subject pleads guilty, according to Bloomberg, who first reported on the charges.

Patten is accused of knowingly and willfully acting as an agent for a Ukrainian political party and its members without registering with the attorney general, a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The government alleges he worked with a Russian national, known only in court documents as Foreigner A, on lobbying and political consulting services, and helped Foreigner A and a prominent Ukraine oligarch set up meetings with members of Congress, specificallysenators on the Foreign Relations Committee andrepresentatives on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, as well as officials in the State Department and members of the media.

Patten is scheduled to enter a plea at an arraignment hearing Friday morning before federal District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in D.C.

The news comes as Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, readies for a second federal trial in D.C. stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Manafort, who was convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud earlier this month, faces charges including conspiracy to launder money and failing to register as a foreign agent.

Patten is a Washington-based political operative who reportedly once worked for Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign during the 2016 race and that was embroiled in a scandal earlier this year when it was revealed it had obtained data on millions of Facebook users without their consent.

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Opposition Bloc (Ukrainian: Опозиційний блок) is a Ukrainian political party that was founded in 2014 as six parties that did not endorse Euromaidan merged.^[7][5] In the 2014 election, it won 29 seats predominantly in the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Luhansk and Kharkiv oblasts.^[8]

American lobbyist Paul Manafort acted as political consultant for the party.^[9]

In Ukraine the party is perceived as the successor of the disbanded Party of Regions.^[10]

History

Party "Leading force"

The party was registered at the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice on 23 April 2010 as "Leading force" (Ukrainian: Ведуча сила).^[11] The party was the led by Anatoly Kornienko.^[11]

The party did not participate in the 2012 parliamentary elections.^[12]

2014 parliamentary elections and since

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%B7%D1%83%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8_%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%96%D0%B2_%D0%B4%D0%BE_%D0%92%D0%A0_%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%97%D0%BD%D0%B8_2014_%28%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%96%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D1%96%D1%8F_%D0%9E%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%96%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA%29.png)

Opposition Bloc support (% of the votes cast) in different regions of Ukraine (in the 2014 election).

Opposition Bloc support (% of the votes cast) by district

In September 2014 American lobbyist Paul Manafort was hired as an advisor to (former Manafort client) Viktor Yanukovych’s former head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Serhiy Lyovochkin.^[9] Manafort was tasked with rebranding Party of Regions.^[9] Instead, he argued to help stabilize Ukraine, Manafort advised to create a new political party called Opposition Bloc.^[9] According to Ukrainian political analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky “He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a symbol of being opposed".^[9]

It was planned that the biggest party in the previous 2012 parliamentary elections, Party of Regions, would be part of the Opposition Bloc in the 2014 parliamentary elections.^[13] This alliance was to be led by Serhiy Tihipko.^[13] But he refused to do so because in his opinion in this alliance there were "people tainted by corruption and to put it mildly, unpatriotic".^[13] Tihipko then became leader of (the revived) Strong Ukraine.^[13]

On 14 September 2014, the Party of Regions choose not to participate in the elections; it deemed the election lacking legitimacy because the residents of the Donbasscould not vote in the election.^[13][14] Also on 14 September 2014, a forum took place in Kiev with the banner "Peace. Stability. Revival", at the end of which Party of Development of Ukraine, Center All-Ukrainian Union, Ukraine – Forward!, Labour Ukraine, New Politic and "State neutrality" decided to take part in the 2014 parliamentary elections as Opposition Bloc.^[5] Many individual members of Party of Regions ended up as candidates of Opposition Bloc.^[7][13] Among them Yuriy Boyko, who headed the party's election list.^[7][13] Other main figures on this election list are Natalia Korolevska, Mykhailo Dobkin and Vadim Rabinovich.^[7][13] In September 2014 Boyko argued that Opposition Bloc does not represent parties, but consisted only of individual politicians.^[7] Boyko, Dobkin and Rabinovich all took part in the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election.^[13] In which they scored 0.19%, 3.03% and 2.25%.^[15] Korolevska and Boyko were both ministers in the second Azarov Government.^[16] Serhiy Lyovochkin was also a candidate of the party.^[17][18] Five members of Party of Regions were in the top 10 of the Opposition Bloc’s electoral list.^[5]

The party won 29 seats; including the winning of 2 constituency seats.^[8] It won 2 constituency seats but for the nationwide party lists of the election (53.2% of the seats was elected by a nationwide party lists and 46.8% in 198 constituencies^[19][20][21]) the party gained most votes in all 14 constituencies in Kharkiv Oblast, all 6 constituencies^[22] in Luhansk Oblast (were voting was possible^[22]), 8 out of 9 in Zaporizhia Oblast (Petro Poroshenko Bloc winning the remaining constituency), in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast 10 out of 17 constituencies (Petro Poroshenko Bloc winning the remaining constituency), in Donetsk Oblast (were voting was possible^[22]) 6 out of 11 constituencies (Petro Poroshenko Bloc winning the remaining 5 constituencies).^[23] In Odessa Oblast 27 October preliminary result indicated that Petro Poroshenko Bloc had won 7 constituencies with the remaining 4 constituencies won by Opposition Bloc.^[23] In Mykolaiv Oblast Petro Poroshenko Bloc seemed to be the clear winner with winning 5 constituencies while the remaining constituency won by Opposition Bloc.^[23]

On 27 November 2014 an Opposition Bloc parliamentary faction of 40 people was formed (at the opening session of the new parliament).^[24]

The party was one of the winners of the 2015 Ukrainian local elections.^[25] It gained most (of all) votes South and East Ukraine (except of Kharkiv Oblast).^[26][27]

In May 2016 Rabinovich left the party and its parliamentary faction after a request from his party Center All-Ukrainian Union.^[28]

Ideology and stances

According to Tadeusz Olszański (pl), of the Centre for Eastern Studies, the party's 2014 election programme was socially liberal and pro-Russophone.^[1] The party's platform envisages protecting the status of Russian as a regional language.^[5]

The party wants "maximum decentralization" for Ukraine.^[5]

The party wants a non-aligned status for Ukraine and wants to prevent it from becoming a NATO member.^[5]

In the War in Donbass the party advocated to end the conflict by peaceful means and by negotiating with Russia.^[1][5] The party rejects the March 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia and wants "peace in united Ukraine within the borders of 1991".^[5]

patten, sam c anal

Sam Patten

What Sam Patten pleaded guilty to doing

Who is Sam Patten?

This is the third known referral by Robert Mueller to other Justice Department offices — but now, Patten is cooperating with Mueller

Contents

History

Party "Leading force"

2014 parliamentary elections and since

Ideology and stances