Sanctions

see Bak for newer

EU?

TRUMP TOWER MTG?

bad code?

qz jul 2017

https://qz.com/1034589/exxonmobil-made-illegal-deals-with-russia-when-secretary-of-state-rex-tillerson-ran-the-company

when Rex Tillerson ran ExxonMobil, he made his name making deals in Russia, which in turn made Donald Trump’s decision to appoint him as secretary of State contentious. Skepticism about Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian state and its connections to the highest levels of the Trump administration dogged his confirmation hearings.

Now, it turns out at least some of those Russia deals made while he was CEO broke US law. The sanctions cops at the US Treasury Department have levied a fine of $2 million (pdf) on ExxonMobil for violating sanctions put in place to punish Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014.... That fine is, of course, a tiny drop in the ocean of Exxon’s petroleum profits of $7.8 billion last year. The violations hinge on some awkward timing. The US issued an executive order in March 2014, forbidding “the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services” from someone on the sanctions list.... bbb This was a no-no. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which enforces sanctions, called the deal an “egregious case” that showed “reckless disregard” for US sanctions.

bbb In a statement issued today, Exxon said the action is “fundamentally unfair,” and that it would file a legal challenge to overturn OFAC’s judgement.

Exxon said that the sanctions were aimed at Sechin’s personal wealth, not at Rosneft; it notes that a British oil company’s American CEO was allowed to attend board meetings with Sechin and that White House officials described the sanctions as an effort to target individuals, not companies. OFAC, on the other hand, said in its statement that it doesn’t recognize “an exception or carve-out for the professional conduct of designated or blocked persons,” and that the only thing that matters is the letter of the law.<...>OFAC also noted that “ExxonMobil’s senior-most executives knew of Sechin’s status as [a sanctioned individual] when they dealt in the blocked services of Sechin.” ExxonMobil’s senior-most executive at that time was Tillerson.

The next month, Tillerson was asked about sanctions by the Associated Press and said “there has been no impact on any of our business activities in Russia to this point, nor has there been any discernible impact on the relationship. The organizations continue to work business as usual.”

Rosneft was crucial to Exxon. In 2011, Exxon had begun working with the Russian firm in a $600 million deal to exploit Russian shale oil reserves. That represented an important gain in Exxon’s long-running battle to replenish its oil reserves, the key to the long-term survival of its business. The 2014 sanctions were a big obstacle to its success.

Three years later, during his confirmation hearing, Tillerson told senators that “to my knowledge, Exxon never directly lobbied against sanctions.” Politifact rated this statement “mostly false,” since Exxon had in fact paid a lobby group to lobby on the issue and Tillerson had spoken publicly of making Exxon’s opposition to sanctions known “at the highest levels.”

an 1 23

A retired chief Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) official who reportedly worked on the Trump-Russia probe was _{arrested and charged}_ in federal court for allegedly having close ties to a U.S. sanctioned Russian billionaire and stealing $225,000 in cash while investigating high-profile cases, The Washington Post reports.

Over the course of his 22 years as a top official at the agency, Charles McGonigal served in many roles including the chief of the FBI’s cybercrimes office in Washington, D.C., and chief of the FBI’s New York Counterintelligence office, in which _{he was responsible}_ for investigatingRussian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

McGonigal, Fox News reported, _{was one of the original}_ FBI officials to discover Trump advisor George Papadopoulos’ claim that “he knew Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton,” which led to the start of the Trump-Russia probe, known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and allegations of election interference. A source _{revealed to Fox News}_ that McGonigal “likely was briefed on Crossfire Hurricane at the time the investigation was launched.”

However, unbeknownst to McGonigal’s colleagues, in 2019 — one year post-retirement — the former top agent teamed up with former Soviet and Russian official-turned U.S. citizen, Sergey Shestakov, to work alongside Derispaska in an attempt to remove him from the U.S. sanctioned list.

As a result, according to Fox News, McGonigal, 54, and Shestakov, 69, have both been charged with “one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act ("IEEPA"); one count of violating the IEEPA; one count of conspiring to commit money laundering; and one count of money laundering,” with the possibility of a “maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.”

McGonigal’s money laundering charge _{is a result of his}_ “hiding payments totaling $225,000 that he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed decades ago by an Albanian intelligence agency,” according to The Post.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams _{confirmed in a statement}_ to Fox News that both McGonigal and Shestakov “previously worked with Deripaska to attempt to have his sanctions removed, and, as public servants, they should have known better.” Williams noted, “This Office will continue to prosecute those who violate U.S. sanctions enacted in response to Russian belligerence in Ukraine in order to line their own pockets.”

Speaking to the seriousness of sanctions, FBI Assistant Director in Charge Michael J. Driscoll said, "Aftersanctions are imposed, they must be enforced equally against all U.S. citizens in order to be successful." He continued, “There are no exceptions for anyone, including a former FBI official like Mr. McGonigal. Supporting a designated threat to the United States and our allies is a crime the FBI will continue to pursue aggressively."

McGonigal pleaded not guilty to the charges earlier this week through his attorney and former Department of Justice official, Seth DuCharme, who _{claims to have}_ “a lot of confidence” that his client will prevail. “As you all know, Charlie’s had a long distinguished career with the FBI. He served the United States for decades,” DuCharme noted. “This is obviously a distressing day for Mr. McGonigal and his family.”

The case may be distressing for McGonigal and his family, but it is also distressing for current agency officials.

"The FBI is committed to the enforcement of economic sanctions designed to protect the United States and our allies, especially against hostile activities of a foreign government and its actors," Driscoll said. "Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska perform global malign influence _{on behalf of the Kremlin}_ and are associated with acts of bribery, extortion, and violence."

Addressing McGonigal’s alleged disloyalty, Donald Alway, FBI assistant director at the Los Angeles field office, contended that “McGonigal is alleged to have committed the very violations he swore to investigate while he purported to lead a workforce of FBI employees who spend their careers protecting secrets and holding foreign adversaries accountable.”

But despite distress, FBI director Christopher A. Wray is confident that the agency upheld its responsibility with integrity. “The way we maintain the trust and confidence of the American people is through our work — showing, when all the facts come out, that we stuck to the process and we treated everyone equally, even when it is one of our own,” Wray said. “We hold ourselves to the highest standard, and our focus will remain on our mission and on doing the right thing, in the right way, every time.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/kremlin-propagandist-dwindling-human-resources/

begs for skilled workers

emptywl no lnx

SIDNEY POWELL IMPLICATES BARBARA LEDEEN IN HER EFFORT TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY

November 17, 2020/42 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election /by emptywheel

Yesterday, GA’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger used various means to push back on the Republicans who were trying to cheat to win. In addition to a genuinely useful thread from Erick Erickson debunking one after another conspiracy theory about GA’s vote, he gave an interview to the WaPo detailing how his Republican colleagues have been pressuring him.

He called Doug Collins (who, remember, campaigned with all the Trump felons) a liar.

The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s efforts in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”

Collins has questioned Raffensperger’s handling of the vote and accused him of capitulating to Democrats by not backing allegations of voter fraud more strongly.

[snip]

“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”

More alarmingly, Raffensperger described Lindsey Graham suggesting he should throw out entire counties of legally cast votes.

Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

As a number of people have pointed out, it’s a crime under GA law to solicit election fraud.

Meanwhile, Sidney Powell continues her effort to drum up support for undermining democracy. In a tweet this morning, she included Lindsey Graham staffer Barbara Ledeen among her co-conspirators.

In addition to working with Mike Flynn to try to reach out to hostile foreign governments in hopes they had hacked Hillary’s emails, Ledeen’s spouse, Michael, was the first person Flynn called when he was trying to figure out how to underminesanctions on Russia.

Ledeen is, in spite of those glaring conflicts, the key staffer behind Lindsey’s efforts to undermine the Russian investigation. That suggests she’s also a key staffer behind Lindsey’s decision to ignore how DOJ has altered documents in Bill Barr’s effort to undermine the prosecution of Powell’s staffer.

I honestly believe that Lindsey does all this because his mind has rotted and people like Ledeen have told him so many lies he believes it. But now he’s entering a potentially criminal racket.

Tags: Barbara Ledeen, Brad Raffensperger, Doug Collins, Lindsey Graham, Sidney Powell

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/rudy-giuliani-2649955361

salon

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on seven foreign members of Rudy Giuliani's inner circle who sought to interfere in the U.S. election and sway the results in Trump's favor.

The president has also reportedly dropped his reliance on Giuliani for his second impeachment trial, refusing to pay Giuliani for his unsuccessful post-election campaign to overturn November's results. Meanwhile, the New York State Bar Association has moved to disbar Giuliani this week. Needless to say, the week after he told thousands of Trump supporters to hold "trial by combat" before many of them violently stormed the U.S. Capitol with aims to halt the Constitutionally mandated certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for Rudy Giuliani. [twt doc]

the Treasury's targets include Russian-linked Ukrainians Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Andriy Telizhenko, Oleksandr Dubinsky, and –– most principally ––Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker sanctioned just last year, who played a key role in orchestrating the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory. It was with the help of these actors that Giuliani spearheaded a failed campaign to smear President-elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, with false claims of past corruption. Trump's call to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky –– in which the President pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden on his behalf –– would become the impetus for the President's own impeachment.

"Since at least 2019," said the Treasury in a statement on Wednesday, "Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a steadfast Trump loyalist, also attempted to add distance between his agency and Giuliani and his goons. "Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens are a threat to our democracy [...] The United States will continue to aggressively defend the integrity of our election systems and processes."

"Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in, though he has not accepted any responsibility in public or in private," CNN reported this week. "Giuliani is still expected to play a role in Trump's impeachment defense but has been left out of most conversations thus far."

The New York State Bar Association has also made moves to disavow Giuliani in light of last Wednesday's chaos. The Bar announced on Monday that it has launched an inquiry into Giuliani's role in Trump's months-long crusade to undermine the election. The group's bylaws make explicit reference to anyone "who advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any state, territory or possession thereof, or of any political subdivision therein, by force or other illegal means" and disowns anyone who has engaged in such activity.

The Association stated, "Mr. Giuliani's words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election's outcome to take matters into their own hands," adding, "Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power."

Giuliani, who called for "a trial by combat" in the rally leading up the riot on Capitol Hill, now faces the threat of permanent expulsion from the Bar, which would render him unlicensed to practice law in the state of New York. "We cannot stand idly by," said the Association, "and allow those intent on rending the fabric of our democracy to go unchecked."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

US, EU, Switzerland, and Ukraine sanctions: 2014-2017

After the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia in 2014, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on 12 September 2014, through the US Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) by adding Sberbank and other entities to the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN).^{[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]} This was done in concert with 31 July 2014 addition of Sberbank to the European Union sanctions list.^[29][30]

Sanctions consist of access restriction to the EU and US capital markets.^[31][32][33] After announcement of the sanctions, and by the end of July, Sberbank's market value had dropped the most market value among the world's major lenders plus investors moved $22 billion from Sberbank's market capitalization.^[34] Still, during the following year Sberbank's share price grew back 89%.^[35] Sberbank together with other Russian banks filed claims with the highest EU court to lift the punitive economic measures.^[36]

On 27 August 2014, Switzerland imposed sanctions on Sberbank and other Russian financial institutions.^[37]

On 22 December 2015, the United States imposed additional sanctions on Sberbank and its subsidiaries.^{[38][39][21][22][23][27]}

On 17 October 2016, Ukraine imposed sanctions against Sberbank Russia, Sberbank Leasing, and their payment systems Kolibri (Hummingbird), formerly Blitz (Ukrainian: «Колибри» стара назва – «Блиц»).^[40][41][42]

On 15 March 2017, the president of Ukraine imposed sanctions on Sberbank (and other Russian state-owned banks operating in Ukraine: VTB Bank, BM Bank, Prominvestbank, and VS Bank (Ukrainian: ВіЕс Банк)) as part of its continued sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and involvement in the War in Donbass.^[43][44][45]

2017 sale of VS Bank to Tihipko

In December 2017, due to sanctions, Sberbank sold its Ukrainian subsidiary, "VS Bank" (Ukrainian: ВіЕс Банк)^[43] to Ukrainian businessman Serhiy Tihipko.^[46]

see Magnitsky

this appears to be russia, but now expand eg iran

neo-neo-con vulcans economic war on ira, venez (used to be for nuke control eg north korea or human rights violations)

capt 619

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/

no lnx

random 220 what fresh hell

Relentless corruption and sheer madness are Donald Trump’s super powers

President Donald J. Trump delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020, in the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Joshua Holland / Raw Story February 16, 2020

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Seven days after he took office, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 which barred migrants from a handful of Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Hundreds of travelers were detained as they arrived here and tens of thousands of people had their visas suddenly revoked. For many Americans, it was clearly a bridge too far. Some had hoped that he would grow into the job, or that his bigoted campaign rhetoric would give way to a more responsible tone after he won, and the Muslim ban was evidence that those hopes had been misplaced as Trump moved to codify xenophobia.

With minimal organizing, thousands of people took to the nation’s airports to protest the policy.

Today, three years and three weeks later, Trump is crowing on Twitter about a New York Times story detailing how he’s basing his re-election campaign on his simmering resentments and paranoia. He is using customs and immigration enforcement to openly extort New York state into dropping investigations into his personal businesses. He’s brazenly retaliating against his own regime officials for testifying in his impeachment hearings. Meanwhile, his Attorney General, hand-picked after writing a brief arguing that it’s kosher for a president to exercise his or her powers toward corrupt purposes, is overruling career prosecutors to grant leniency to Trump’s henchmen when their crimes are unearthed. While federal investigators look at potential crimes committed by Trump’s personal attorney as he sought to fabricate a scandal about one of Trump’s Democratic foes, others within the agency are simultaneously colluding with that very attorney to advance that effort. Our nation’s top law enforcement agency has adopted a relentless focus on finding support for the president’s* unhinged conspiracy theories.

As Trump rants and raves, there are no crowds gathering spontaneously outside of US Attorney’s offices around the country to protest Bill Barr’s unprecedented corruption of the Department of Justice, . We may be outraged, but we seem to run out of gas. Trump’s behavior is so consistently venal and outrageous that we’ve become inured to it. Abuses of power that would be huge scandals under any other president of either party elicit ritualistic condemnations, but are ultimately just Trump being Trump.

Overwhelming our sense of decency with a constant stream of outrageous comportment is Trump’s super-power. It’s impossible to even keep up.

David Axelrod

@davidaxelrod

In this crazy world, almost nothing is said about the fact that @realDonaldTrump is rehiring his 29-yr-old former body man, forced from the WH earlier for failing a vet & with no personnel background, to direct hiring ACROSS THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!https://www.axios.com/johnny-mcentee-white-house-d1c29eee-8b0a-4c4d-8ba4-9355f3c27f4f.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top …

Johnny McEntee

Ex-Trump aide John McEntee to lead White House office of personnel - Axios

He's been hand selected by Trump, who sees him as the ultimately loyalist.

axios.com

9,798

4:49 AM - Feb 14, 2020

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*****

Speaking of the DOJ, an agency “anti-human trafficking grant program is facing internal complaints, after two nonprofits were denied funding in favor of two less established groups whose applications were not recommended by career DOJ officials.” According to Reuters, “the awarding of more than $1 million total to the two groups, Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina, has triggered a whistleblower complaint filed by the Justice Department’s employee union to the department’s Inspector General.”

*****

In related news, the FBI is revamping its efforts to curb homegrown terrorism after years of criticism that it downplayed or turned a blind eye to violent right-wing extremism. As part of those efforts, reports The Daily Beast, the FBI will now focus on “abortion violent extremism.” But they mean terrorists on “both sides” of the debate, despite the fact that the FBI could point “to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.”

*****

It’s hard to say whether these people are just trolling us at this point…

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.

The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov’s own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo’s aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.

Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.

*****

Probably not…

Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch.

Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to Deripaska, according to two Western officials with knowledge of the communication. Back in April 2018, the U.S. sanctioned the oligarch, who once lent millions of dollars to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the two men. Over the following months, Deripaska’s allies made a deal with Treasury to limit Deripaska’s control over the companies in exchange for sanctions relief…. In the year since then, it’s been all quiet on the Deripaska sanctions front.Until December, that is. What’s strange is that despite the signal, Treasury didn’t follow through and the sanctions—which would have targeted the unnamed people and entities because of their proximity to Deripaska—didn’t materialize. It’s been two months since the U.S. indicated that the new sanctions were about to come out, and there’s been no movement from Treasury on the oligarch. The two months of inaction has stirred suspicions of political interference in the sanctions process.

*****

Return on investment…

“Trump has proposed a 25 percent cut to the signature military fund designed to offset Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, according to the Defense Department’s budget documents unveiled Monday.”

Rep. Val Demings

@RepValDemings

Today Senate Republicans blocked THREE election security bills.

Two would require that illegal foreign election interference be reported to the authorities.

The other would make voting machines harder to hack.

All blocked.

52.5K

11:15 AM - Feb 11, 2020

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*****

We are fortunate that these malignant and corrupt ideologues aren’t more competent…

Caitlin McCoy

@CaitlinMcCoy_

The final rule that went to OMB last month is "...sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked 'text forthcoming.' The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain." YIKES.https://twitter.com/CoralMDavenport/status/1228065396554653696 …

Coral Davenport

@CoralMDavenport

The Trump administration has rolled back nearly 100 environmental rules. But Trump's attempt to take down his top regulatory target,the US's largest #climate change rule, are in meltdown. "They look like they’re headed to a legal train wreck."https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/climate/trump-fuel-economy-rollback.html …

2:29 PM - Feb 13, 2020

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*****

Type Investigations has an important story about how the Bureau of Land Management has, “over the past several years, ignored longstanding requirements that stem from the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act; approved mines and drilling without adequate review, turning the region into a ‘clearinghouse for federal permits’; and taken personnel off mining inspections in order to expedite development.”

*****

This will disappear down the memory hole in short order….

“A White House memo justifying the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January makes no mention of an imminent threat, which was President Trump’s rationale for the attack.

*****

Children aren’t born into this world harboring bigotry.

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

*****

Last week, we mentioned that a 65-degree temperature recorded at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula set a new record for the continent.

That record appears to have held up for four days. This week, “a weather research station on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula registered a temperature of 69.3 degrees (20.75 Celsius) on Feb. 9.”

*****

And we leave you this week with a couple of pieces of good news, via the courts…

Washington Monthly

@monthly

#BREAKING:The D.C. Circuit Court just shot down Trump’s Medicaid work requirement. Last week, @r_m_larochelle & @lsdeprez wrote about this move as part of the administration's war on the social safety net. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/07/donald-trumps-assault-on-the-social-safety-set/ …

Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s Assault on the Social Safety Net

It's a policy of death by a thousand cuts.

washingtonmonthly.com

9:11 AM - Feb 14, 2020

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Stephen Wolf

@PoliticsWolf

Whoa, this is a major win for Native American voting rights in North Dakota.The GOP passed a voter ID law that blatantly excluded most tribal-issued IDs, but the backlash against it helped activists raise money to provide free IDs in 2018 & Native turnout hit historic highs https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/1227989452838010880 …

Kira Lerner

@kira_lerner

New: The North Dakota secretary of state settled two lawsuits brought by Native American tribes over the state’s strict voter ID law. The state agreed to accept tribal IDs and allow people who don’t have a residential address to vote https://campaignlegal.org/press-releases/secretary-state-agrees-settle-voter-id-lawsuits-entering-consent-decree-north-dakota …

AN 1119

no lnx many

So is Tulsi Gabbard really a ‘Russian asset’? How would we know for sure?

Tulsi Gabbard/CreativeCommonsTulsi Gabbard/CreativeCommons

Written by Matthew Rozsa November 16, 2019

Is it valid to accuse Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii and a current presidential candidate, of being a “Russian asset”?

It’s a strange question, and one that normally wouldn’t need to be answered. Gabbard has never polled above the low single digits and has no realistic chance of being the 2020 Democratic nominee. Surrounded by controversy and facing a primary challenge from a more conventional Democrat, she has already announced she won’t run for re-election to Congress either.

But in recent weeks, Gabbard has been making news in peculiar ways. Although in most respects she is a left-wing Democrat, Gabbard has lately become something of an icon among Republicans and other conservative-leaning types. She has appeared on Fox News to criticize the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, has claimed that the Democratic presidential primaries are “rigged” and has been praised by far-right pundits, from online troll Mike Cernovich and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

At least some of that praise derived from Gabbard’s war of words with Hillary Clinton, who had seemingly accused Gabbard — an Iraq war veteran and an officer in the Army Reserve — of being a tool for Russian subversion. In this context, it’s important to look at what Clinton actually said during a podcast interview with David Plouffe, onetime campaign manager for Barack Obama:

They’re also going to do third party. I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.

Clinton’s PR team later clarified that word-salad, saying that she was not accusing the Russians of “grooming” Gabbard as a third-party candidate. Even so, Clinton still referred to Gabbard as “the favorite of the Russians” and appeared to describe her — depending on how you parse the sentence — as a “Russian asset.” Clinton has not retracted either of those claims, and Gabbard responded by labeling Clinton as “queen of the warmongers” and an “embodiment of corruption” and, later, demanding an apology. (Gabbard has also said several times she will not run as a third-party candidate.)

Donald Trump got into the fray by defending Gabbard and describing Clinton as “sick,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders — whom Gabbard supported against Clinton in the 2016 primaries — tweeted that “people can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset.” Several other current and former Democratic presidential candidates also defended Gabbard, including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who served with her in Congress.

This brings us back to the original question: What does it mean to accuse someone of being a “Russian asset” — and does that apply to Gabbard? I reached out first to Bill Browder, an American-born British businessman who spent many years in Russia and became a leading foe of Vladimir Putin. He later pushed Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, which allows the U.S. government to freeze assets and ban visas for human-rights violators around the world.

“All I have is an observation on a number of observable facts about Tulsi Gabbard in connection with Russia or Russian interests,” Browder said. “The first fact is that Tulsi Gabbard had hired a man named Chris Cooper from a firm called Potomac … to help her run interference on people who were doing negative reporting on her. Chris Cooper has an ugly history of having been involved in the anti-Magnitsky campaign,” including work in 2016 intended, Browder says, to discredit him personally along with the Magnitsky Act.

Adding that Gabbard was one of the few members of the House to vote against the Global Magnitsky Act in December 2016, Browder cited as his “next piece of circumstantial evidence” the fact that “Tulsi Gabbard is celebrated on Russian state television.” He also pointed to the “very unpleasant fact” that Gabbard “is a supporter of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator in Syria, and the person responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. And that is a position which is exactly consistent with the position of the Russian government.” (Gabbard has said she does not support the Assad regime, although she has met the Syrian president and has at times expressed skepticism about charges that Assad has used chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.)

Gabbard “may be entirely innocent” of any actual collaboration with Putin, Browder said, “but she may be an asset as far as the Russians are concerned because they may see her candidacy as an opportunity to further spread chaos in the U.S. political process.” He noted that Putin is likely “extremely happy” with the chaotic consequences of his meddling in the 2016 presidential election, noting that Trump’s ascent to power has earned Putin “some huge geopolitical wins,” such as Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

I also reached out to Michael McFaul, who was Obama’s ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is also despised by Putin, so much so that during the infamous Helsinki summit last year, Putin tried to persuade Trump to hand both Browder and McFaul over to him on charges that could generously be called dubious.

Like the seasoned diplomat he is, McFaul was far more cautious in the language he used about Gabbard. “I do not believe generally that somebody should be suspected of being an agent for a foreign country because of a foreign policy position that they have taken,” he said, adding he had not closely followed Gabbard’s positions and associations. “I think one needs to be very careful about insinuations of working for a foreign government. One should have some firm documentation before saying such matters.”

Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding this article. When an NBC reporter asked Gabbard last month about her alleged ties to Russia, she characterized the accusations as a “smear campaign.”

While Browder and McFaul seemed to take very different approaches to the Gabbard controversy, both made valid points. It’s generally not appropriate to make such a serious accusation based only on circumstantial evidence. If Hillary Clinton knows of any such evidence, she did not offer it.

Donald Trump, by contrast, was revealed by special counsel Robert Mueller to have actively sought the Russian government’s assistance during the 2016 election. There have been no investigations that have yielded any comparable evidence about Tulsi Gabbard.

Furthermore, it’s unwise and deeply un-American to suggest that people have been compromised by a foreign power simply because they hold controversial or unpopular views on foreign policy. Although the accusation of “McCarthyism” gets thrown around too freely, it is legitimate here. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s infamous witch hunts against alleged communists often targeted men and women who held unorthodox foreign-policy positions or who spoke out against the U.S. government’s Cold War policies.

It’s also fair to note that America has a mixed record on human rights, at best, and exposing such violations can sometimes be helpful to our global rivals. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaked information about U.S. human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, that was almost certainly welcomed by the Kremlin. There may be other reasons to suspect that Assange was in league with the Russian government, but releasing evidence of war crimes belongs to a totally different category.

All that said, there’s little doubt that Putin is trying to subvert the governments of other countries to create an “illiberal international.” We can be mindful of that without becoming paranoid. In a conversation I had with McFaul last January, he compared Putin to Vladimir Lenin, revolutionary founder of the Soviet Union.

“Lenin and his comrades created the Communist International,” he explained. “I do think Putin is leading something akin to an Illiberal International, not only in our country, but trying to find like-minded individuals, and movements and parties first and foremost, in Europe, in the United States, and he’s investing in those relationships.”

He added that Putin’s ultimate goal is “the end of the liberal international order. … The breakup of states as you have in the U.K., the breakup of alliances and NATO, the breakup of the European Union — those are all things that Putin thinks are in his national interest.”

Despite Republican claims to the contrary, it is clear that the Trump campaign was eager to work with the Russian government in 2016. Putin has meddled in other nations’ political processes in order to bring about results he sees as favorable to his interests. Just as there really were Communist agents in the West during the Cold War, there are politicians today who serve Putin’s interests in the post-Cold War world.

How do we identify those people and those forces without smearing innocent people simply because of the opinions they hold? If we don’t raise red flags where appropriate, we risk being played for suckers, as happened in the 2016 election. If we’re overzealous in exposing “Russian assets,” for example, purely by identifying people who hold unorthodox or unpopular positions, we risk creating a latter-day McCarthyism. That challenge will persist long after Tulsi Gabbard has faded from the public consciousness, and long after the political tribulations of this decade have entered the history books.

no lnx

DOWNED

Russian Official Linked to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Trump Tower Lawyer, Is Dead

Russia’s Deputy Attorney General Saak Karapetyan was exposed this year for running a foreign recruitment operation with Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Nico Hines

London Editor

Updated 03.20.19 4:04PM ET / Published 10.04.18 1:15PM ET

A Russian official accused of directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met senior Trump campaign officials in 2016, has plummeted to his death in a helicopter crash.

Russian Deputy Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was exposed in a Swiss court this year for a plot to enlist another nation’s law-enforcement official as a double-agent for the Kremlin.

Media reports in Russia say he died Wednesday night when his helicopter crashed into a forest during an unauthorized flight in the Kostroma region, northeast of Moscow.

Karapetyan, 58, was intimately familiar with some of the most notorious operations carried out under the orders of Vladimir Putin. He worked closely with Veselnitskaya as well as running some of Moscow’s most high-profile efforts to thwart international investigations into Russia’s alleged crimes.

It was Karapetyan who signed a letter from the Russian government refusing to help the U.S. in a civil case it was pursuing linked to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was trying to expose a $230 million fraud in Russia. Leaked emails have since shown that Veselnitskaya helped to draft the document sent with that letter.

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Karapetyan has been involved in efforts to foil international investigations for more than a decade. The Daily Beast reported that he was present for a meeting in Moscow where British detectives claim they were poisoned during efforts to track down the killers ofAlexander Litvinenko, who died after a dose of radioactive poison in London in 2006.

Despite claims that they were trying to help, the general prosecutor’s office did everything it could to block the Scotland Yard investigation.

Earlier this year, Karapetyan lashed out at Britain in the aftermath of the Novichok attack against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. He linked Skripal, Litvinenko, and Boris Berezovsky, a high-profile critic of Putin who died of suspected suicide in 2013.

“The British authorities have based the anti-Russian campaign surrounding the poisoning of former GRU officer Skripaland his daughter on a provocative scenario. A similar scenario was used in baseless allegations of Russia’s attempt on the life of Boris Berezovsky in London in summer 2003 and the circumstances surrounding the death of Alexander Litvinenko in the U.K. in November 2006,” Karapetyan said, according to Interfax.

On Wednesday night, the wreckage of a helicopter believed to have been carrying Karapetyan was found near the village of Vonyshevo. Video purported to be from the scene shows the chopper mangled and burnt out amid twisted tree trunks.

It is not known why experienced pilot Stanislav Mikhnov, 54, reportedly decided to take off after nightfall in adverse conditions without authorities’ approval. A third man, Arek Harutyunyan, was also killed, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

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Karapetyan’s links to Veselnitskaya emerged this year, when a case in Switzerland exposed the pair’s operation to recruit a high-level law-enforcement official who was supposed to be investigating the Swiss bank accounts of Russian oligarchs and mobsters.

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The top investigator was fired for “unauthorized clandestine behavior,” and allegations of bribery and breaching secrecy laws. The Swiss authorities discovered that the officer—who was identified only as Victor K.—had met Karapetyan in Geneva and Zurich. Before Christmas 2016, Karapetyan telephoned the official and invited him to Moscow, where he was put up in a luxury hotel and asked to attend a meeting with Veselnitskaya.

It is likely that the meeting with Veselnitskaya concerned the fallout from the death of Magnitsky, who had been working to expose a massive fraud that implicated the Kremlin when he was incarcerated, beaten, and left to die.

In the aftermath of his death, the lawyer’s client, Bill Browder, campaigned to enact a series of anti-corruption laws all over the world in his name. The U.S. Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012.

Veselnitskaya was one of the top advocates lobbying to overturn these global Magnitsky laws, which have reportedly absolutely infuriated Putin.

When she arranged to meet Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016, she was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton allegedly given to her by Karapetyan’s general prosecutor’s office, according to the emails of introduction, which have since been leaked. Once inside, we now know that she attempted to lobby the senior Trump officials on the Magnitsky case.

Karapetyan and Veselnitskaya also worked together on another job linked to Magnitsky. The U.S. authorities brought a civil case against a company called Prevezon for its alleged links to laundering proceeds of the fraud that Magnitsky uncovered.

In April, emails obtained by Dossier, an anti-Putin campaign set up by former oligarch MikhailKhodorkovsky, and published by The New York Times, showed that Veselnitskaya had helped to draft a document on behalf of the Russian government that explained why Moscow would not help with the fraud case against Prevezon.

Rather than engage with the allegations against Prevezon, much of the document was a personal attack on Browder. The cover letter that accompanied the document was signed by Karapetyan.

The refusal to help provide documents from inside Russia—orchestrated by Karapetyan and Veselnitskaya—likely contributed to the authorities’ ultimate decision to settle the case. Prevezon agreed to pay $5.9 million, but it did not admit any role in laundering the proceeds of the fraud.

Nico Hines

London Editor

@nicohines

nico.hines@thedailybeast.com

AN 819

no lnx

‘Economic terrorism’: Trump imposes total embargo against Venezuela after failed military coup

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 6, 2019

After the U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by force fizzled out, the Trump administration on Monday moved to further strangle the Latin American nation’s economy by imposing a full economic embargo.

President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Venezuela, according to the Washington Post, “blocks all property and assets of the government and its officials, and prohibits any transactions with them, including the Venezuelan Central Bank and the state oil company.”

“The action puts Venezuela on par with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria, the only other countries under a similar full embargo,” the Post reported.

Journalist and filmmaker Dan Cohen described the embargo as “economic terrorism”:

US ramps up economic terrorism campaign against Venezuela with total economic embargo and sanctions on any third party company who it does business with. https://t.co/3jRymjniCK

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) August 6, 2019

The Venezuelan economy has already been crippled by sweeping U.S. sanctions, which the Trump administration has expanded over the past several months in an attempt to overthrow Maduro and install opposition leader Juan Guaidó.

As Common Dreams reported in April, a study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that Trump’s sanctions against Venezuela killed more than 40,000 people between 2017 and 2018.

“The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports,” wrote CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot, a co-author of the study. “This is illegal under U.S. and international law, and treaties that the U.S. has signed. Congress should move to stop it.”

The Trump administration’s decision to impose a full embargo on Venezuela was viewed as yet another attempt to oust Maduro—an effort that could do severe harm to the civilian population.

“Trump’s action, the toughest yet against Maduro, not only bans U.S. companies from dealings with the Venezuela government but also appears to open the door to possible sanctions against foreign firms or individuals that assist it,” HuffPost reported.

Responding to recent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, journalist Ben Norton wrote, “The U.S. gov is telling the Venezuelan people that if they want to eat, they have to change their politics.”

The embargo comes as Trump national security adviser John Bolton is in Peru to deliver an address Tuesday to the so-called International Conference on Democracy in Venezuela.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a copy of Bolton’s prepared remarks, the national security adviser plans to claim that previous embargoes imposed by the U.S. were successful.

“It worked in Panama, it worked in Nicaragua once, and it will work there again, and it will work in Venezuela and Cuba!” Bolton will say, the Journal reported.

Though the Trump administration insisted the embargo will allow exceptions for humanitarian assistance such as food and medicine, experts said such exceptions will likely not have an effect in practice.

“The administration hasn’t been very good at dedicating financial lines that would allow the purchase of food and medicine in sanctioned countries,” sanctions expert Jeffrey Schott told the Journal. “In practice, we still block food and medicine because the parties in the targeted regime that want to import it can’t get financing.”

619 belated report of trump camp working on lifting (maybe in mueller rept?)

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/the-hybrid-war-against-iran/

no lnx

The hybrid war against Iran

written by Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute June 25, 2019

U.S. President Donald Trump sat in the White House and contemplated a war against Iran. His army had been sending surveillance aircraft along the Iranian coastline, teasing Iranian radar, which tracked these manned and unmanned planes as they skirted the 12 nautical mile limit of Iranian sovereignty. Last week, the United States had two planes alongside Iran’s coast—an unmanned Global Hawk drone and a manned P-8 spy plane.

Iranian air command radioed the U.S. forces to say that both the drone and the spy plane had come inside Iranian territory. The P-8 shifted course to leave Iranian airspace, while the Global Hawk continued. Iranian officials say that it was because the Global Hawk remained in Iranian airspace that it was shot down last Thursday morning at 4 a.m.

Trump and his team threatened to retaliate. They wanted to shoot at Iranian radar and anti-aircraft facilities. At the 11th hour, Trump said, he decided not to fire at Iranian targets. The Pentagon had warned him that this would threaten U.S. troops in the area. It was to protect these troops that Trump did not launch a strike.

Sanctions

Trump might not have sent in a suite of missiles to hit Iran last week, but the United States has—of course—already opened up a certain kind of war against Iran. A few days before the drone was shot down, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council—Ali Shamkhani—gave a talk in Ufa, Russia, on security matters. In his talk, Shamkhani said that the United States had squashed the sovereignty of a number of countries. The U.S. Treasury Department, he said, had become a kind of financial CentCom (Central Command). Shamkhani said that the policies pursued by the United States should be considered to be “economic terrorism.”

U.S. unilateral sanctions are at the heart of this “economic terrorism.” The United States is able to use sanctions as an effective instrument against other countries because it has such enormous power over the world financial and monetary system. The U.S. dollar is the main reserve currency and the main currency of international trade. Reliance upon the U.S. dollar and on U.S. financial systems means that most countries are unwilling to stand up against U.S. pressure.

Sanctions have meant that Iran—reliant upon the export of oil and natural gas—has seen its external revenues collapse. The domination by the United States over the world financial system—including the international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) has meant that Iran has not been able to raise credit on the international market. Difficulty in importing medicines and food has produced grave challenges for the Iranian people.

Hybrid War

Since the Western media continues to set the terms of international understanding, Washington’s interpretation of events around Iran predominates. Iran has never attacked the United States, but the U.S. has in fact intervened several times in Iran. In 1953, the U.S.—with the UK—overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq and over the course of the next two decades provided full support to the unpopular government of the shah of Iran. When the Gulf Arabs pushed Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, it was the U.S.—and Western Europe—that provided Iraq with arms and money for a bloody eight-year war. All of this context is lost to the Western media, which hyperventilate about fantasy stories such as Hezbollah in Venezuela or Iranian control over the Houthis. It is always Iran that is the aggressor, even when it has been Iran at the receiving end of U.S. aggression.

Iran is seen as the cause of the problem; the idea that Iran is a rogue or terrorist state is hard to shake off. This is part of the information war that Iran faces, unable—even with a sophisticated foreign minister (Javad Zarif)—to argue its case that it has not been belligerent, but it has been at the receiving end of threats and sanctions from Washington.

Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were killed. These scientists—Masoud Alimohammadi, Darioush Rezaeinejad, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and Majid Shahriari—were killed either by Israeli intelligence, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) or U.S. intelligence, or some combination of all of them. These scientists were killed inside Iran, in broad daylight. It sent a chill through the scientific community. A U.S. and Israeli created computer worm—Stuxnet—hit Iranian computer systems in 2010, creating damage to Iran’s computers that held part of its nuclear work. It was announced that more such attacks were possible. These took place before the nuclear deal was agreed upon in 2015. But the stench of such attacks remains.

Iran’s minister of information and communications technology—Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi—said that Iran has built a firewall that protects its facilities from any cyber-weapon thrown at it by the U.S. and Israel. This firewall is built by Iranian computer scientists.

It is this combination of attacks—the sanctions, the information war, the sabotage—that comprises the “hybrid war” against Iran (for more on the concept of “hybrid war,” see the dossier on Venezuela from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research). This hybrid war continues, with the threats of war as part of the arsenal wielded by Washington against Iran. Even Trump’s statement that he withdrew the order to bomb Iran just minutes before the attack began is part of this information war, this attempt to terrify Iranians into the belief that the U.S. is dangerous enough to drop bombs at any time. The hybrid war tightens the noose around Iran.

Group Against Sanctions

It is not easy to untangle the reliance of the world economy to the U.S. dollar and to U.S. financial systems. Even talk of multilateralism is premature. It is one thing to call for it and another to recognize that it will take at least a decade to create the institutions and instruments for multilateralism. Confidence in the Chinese yuan, for instance, will need to be built. So will confidence in alternative systems to transfer money and to reconcile trades. The European Union said openly that it wanted an alternative mechanism to pay Iran for oil, one that would not run through U.S. sanctions. But such an instrument could not be created. It will take time.

Meanwhile, on the political plane, about 25 countries have come together to create a platform against sanctions. These countries, says Iran’s senior parliamentarian Mohammad Ali Pourmokhtar, will stand together against the “inhumane” U.S. sanctions regime. It is not clear what this group will be able to do, but it is certainly the case that they will conduct a political campaign against the kind of harsh sanctions that are currently on Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.

It is significant that China and Russia will be involved with this club. In Tehran, Russia’s Ambassador Levan Dzhagaryan said that China, Iran and Russia will form a trilateral group to fight against the U.S. unilateral war on Iran.

The group of 25 will struggle against sanctions and the group of three will try to prevent a U.S. war—but whether they can prevail is a serious question. The United States—under Trump—is utterly unreliable, its military arsenal ready to be unleashed, its hybrid war already unfurled. These are dangerous times.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/heres-how-putin-suckered-trump-into-becoming-his-easily-manipulated-pawn/

Law enforcement officers and prosecutors have a saying, that when it comes to crime, there are no coincidences. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin taught us during the last presidential election that these days, there are no coincidences in politics either.

This article first appeared in Salon.]

When last we gathered to have a look back at how the 2016 election was stolen, we were discussing a day when that lesson was driven home with a vengeance. On March 6, 2014, when President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, he was doing what every president in the modern era had done before him. We express our condemnation of transgressions by foreign powers we disapprove of all the time. We sanctioned Iran for its nuclear program. We sanctioned Syria for its support of terrorism and human rights abuses. We have sanctions against North Korea for its nuclear and missile programs and against Venezuela for its anti-democratic and human rights violations.

What Obama did not know, and we did not know on March 6, 2014, was that he was setting the stage for how the presidential election of 2016 would not only be fought between two American political parties, but interfered with by a hostile foreign power, aided and abetted by then candidate Donald Trump.

What Trump did later on the same day Obama sanctioned Russia should have given us a hint of what was to come. He went to the CPAC convention, took the stage, and once again praised the autocratic leader of the nation that had pissed us off enough by its seizure of Crimea that we imposed sanctions on a passel of Russian oligarchs, Putin pals, and financial institutions and industries.

A month later, Trump was on Fox News telling viewers who only two years hence would become known as the “Trump Base” that he thought Putin was “very strong,” and that he “played Obama like a fiddle.”

A month after that, he was standing on a stage in Washington D.C. at the National Press Club telling the assembled pixel-wrought wretches that he had been in Moscow, where he “spoke indirectly and directly withPresident Putin who could not have been nicer. And we had a tremendous success.”

Three weeks later, on June 20, he gave an interview to the conservativeAmerican Spectatorand basically endorsed remarks Putin had made criticizing the idea that America was exceptional. “And I understand that,” Trump said. “You know, he [Putin] said, ‘Why are they exceptional? They have killings in the streets. Look at what’s going on in Chicago and different places. They have all of this turmoil, all of the things that are happening in there.’”

Almost exactly one month later, a Buk surface to air missile from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade was used by pro-Russia insurgents in eastern Ukraine to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing all 283 passengers and 15 members of the crew onboard. The Buk missile battery was hurriedly moved back across the Ukrainian border into Russia and hidden after the civilian airliner was shot down. The Russian government began a campaign of denial that its occupation of Ukrainian land and support of Ukrainian insurgents had anything to do with the shoot-down.

What the hell was Trump doing back in 2014, running around the country telling anyone who would listen what a fantastic leader Vladimir Putin was, how he was “strong,” while our own president was weak? Here was an autocratic leader of a hostile foreign nation that had just invaded another country, seized its territory, and supplied the weapon used to commit one of the largest civilian aircraft atrocities in history. And this guy was the national leader Trump looked up to?

WTF was going on with Trump and his love affair with Vladimir Putin?

Recent revelations that Trump was pursuing a deal to build a Trump Tower in the center of Moscow during the campaign of 2016 raised suspicions that Trump was flattering Putin to get the Russian leader to approve the deal. But I think it’s way, way deeper than that. I think Trump looked at Putin, and he said to himself, that’s the kind of leader I admire. He runs his country with a strong hand. He gets things done. Trump actually admired the guy. Putin ran Russia by fiat, and Obama was “weak” because he adhered to democratic rules and norms.

I don’t think Trump had to know much more about Putin than what he saw on cable news, but that was enough. He was a tough guy. He took a country that was, if not a real democracy, something close to it, and he transformed it into an autocracy. In 2014, when Putin saw Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych forced from power right next door by a popular uprising that was driven in part by social media, he decided the influence of the west was getting too close for comfort and moved to destabilize Ukraine with his invasion and seizure of Crimea.

When Obama cracked down with sanctions, Putin started making moves to infiltrate and destabilize the United States political system. He started up the Internet Research Agency and empaneled its “Translator Project” and sent at least two Russian agents into this country armed with dollars and technical expertise they would use toestablish propaganda outlets on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. He called in the top officials of his intelligence agency the GRU, and he said, you guys start looking around for some way to fuck things up over there in the United States for me, okay? We’re not going to take this sanctions shit lying down.

And Putin started looking around and asking himself, gee, who can I cozy up to over there who might be susceptible to lifting those goddamned sanctions?

See, “sanctions” aren’t just pieces of paper presidents of the United States sign to needle foreign leaders and try to bring them back in line. Sanctions are a powerful tool used to project power because of where they come from: the USA. You start telling officials of a foreign government like, say, Russia that they can’t travel to the United States, they can’t facilitate deals here on behalf of corporations from that country, and most importantly, they can’t move millions and billions they’ve skimmed off their economy through American financial institutions . . . well, that fucking hurts, and hurts badly.

You start telling foreign companies in Russia like the oil and gas giant PJSC Roseneft Oil Company that they can’t make deals with American companies like ExxonMobil Corporation to drill for difficult-to-get oil in the far reaches of the icy Russian north, and that fucking hurts.

And when you deny Russian state-owned banks and other financial institutions the ability to make big international deals that have to use the nexus of banking and investment headquartered in New York, that fucking hurts.

So the sanctions Obama imposed in March of 2014 weren’t some little pain in the ass for Putin. They were a major threat to his power.They cut deeply into the Russian economy. They caused financial pain to billionaire allies and business partners he needed to maintain his political power inside Russia. Putin’s sitting there in Moscow, and he’s looking at a nearby leader unnervingly similar to him, Yanukovych, another crook who’s running his government like a personal piggy bank, and he’s watching Yanukovych get thrown out, and he’s thinking, this could happen to me.

How to survive as an autocratic leader is in Putin’s blood. In 1989, he was a KGB agent serving in the city of Dresden in East Germany when almost overnight, the autocratic government of that Russian satellite nation fell. Putin stayed up all night burning KGB and Stasi secret records when the wall came down. He returned to Russia convinced, as he said later, that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest catastrophe of the [20th] century.” In short order, he began a campaign to rise to power in Russia and make certain the same fate would never befall him.

Trump probably didn’t know Putin’s history. He didn’t have to. All he had to do was watch Putin in action. When Putin wanted a political opponent prosecuted, it happened. When he wanted to shut down a pesky news outlet that was opposing him, it happened. When he wanted private media companies nationalized and made organs of the state, it happened. And when he wanted somebody dead, that happened, too.

That’s why Trump was running around during 2013, 2014, and 2015 singing Putin’s praises. He wanted to be just like him.

One year after Obama imposed sanctions on Russia, Trump descended the escalators in Trump Tower and announced he was running for president. And only a few weeks after that, Trump was in Las Vegas taking questions at something called “FreedomFest,” and a young woman stood up and asked him if he was elected president, would he continue the sanctions imposed by Obama on Russia.

“Putin has no respect for President Obama. Big problem. Big problem,” Trump said, waving his arms, making that now-familiar circle with his forefinger and thumb. “I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin, okay? And I mean where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”

The young woman was a Russian citizen by the name of Maria Butina. She is at this moment sitting in a Washington D.C. lock-up, occasionally venturing forth to visit with FBI agents and federal prosecutors as a cooperating witness for Robert Mueller in his investigation of the connections between Donald Trump, his campaign, and the Russian government. Maria Butina, at last report, was still drawing breaths of District of Columbia air.

Donald Trump, it appears, still has some things to learn from his BFF, Vladimir

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/heres-why-putin-wants-american-businessman-bill-browder-dead/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/how-mitch-mcconnells-weak-kneed-cowardice-makes-him-the-perfect-target-for-perfect-for-agents-of-power-and-influence/

...

The Chao Connection

Though third in this list because their influence is the least known and understood, the Chao family had by far the most significant effect on McConnell’s personal life and career. Thanks to second wife Elaine and her family, McConnell became a millionaire many times over and forged ties with contacts at the highest echelons of Chinese government and business.

Elaine Chao’s father is shipping magnate, James Chao.

The South China Morning Post takes up the story.

He ordered two ships to be built at the state-owned shipyard in Shanghai during Mr Jiang’s tenure as mayor. He started meeting Mr Jiang regularly, including three months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, when most other American businessmen were avoiding the leadership. Later Mr Chao’s business ties to Beijing would deepen as he started chartering his ships to mainland giants, such as Cosco and Sinotrans.

As McConnell’s acquaintance with Elaine Chao developed into a serious relationship, contributions began to pour into his campaign from the Chao family and their business associates. Their wedding ensured that the spigot was never turned off.

Ms Chao and Mr McConnell married in February 1993, and in December the pair met Mr Jiang in Beijing, joined by Ms Chao’s father. Mr McConnell was the second Republican Senator to meet Mr Jiang since Tiananmen, a move which helped him build ties with senior mainland envoys in the US.

Through the Chao family, McConnell cultivated friends in very high places — Mr Jiang is none other thanJiang Zemin, Secretary of the Communist Party from 1989 to 2002 and President of the People’s Republic of China from 1993 to 2003.

There’s little if any doubt that this prompted Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole to appoint McConnell as chair of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee for foreign operations and export financing in 1994. Certainly members of the US-China Business Council were impressed, and their corporate donations flowed freely into McConnell’s campaign coffers.

The change in his fortunes attracts the billionaire donors and McConnell is catapulted to rising star status.

In Shanghai on May 22, 2014, Chinese and Russian firms establish a number of partnerships. Among them are these two:

the Russian State Development Bank and the Export Import Bank of China sign an agreement on a $500 million credit line to finance projects in Russia

the Kremlin-controlled VTB Bank and the Bank of China ratify a partnership in investment banking, trade finance and capital markets transactions, and inter-bank lending.

The following year, theExport Import Bank of China (now partnered with the Russian State Development Bank) extends a $37.5 million loan to the Chao family shipping company, Foremost, to finance the construction of two bulk carriers being built by the state-owned China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC). Among those present for the signing of the deal are James Chao (Chairman of Foremost) with his daughters, Angela (Deputy Chairman) and Elaine.

Seven months later in May 2016,Elaine’s sister Angela Chao is elected to the Board of Directors at the Bank of China — now partnered with Russia’s VTB bankwhich has been operating under US_{ sanctions}_ since 2014.

So not only does McConnell have links to China via the Chao connection, both he and the Chao family interlink with the Russians.

Fast forward to 2018: McConnell retains his position as senate tyrant after the midterms; Elaine Chao is the Secretary of Transportation in Trump’s cabinet, and the Chao family maintains extensive contacts and business investments in China including a seat on the Board of the Bank of China which is partnered with the Russian VTB Bank that is part-owned by oligarch Oleg Deripaska who shares ownership in Rusal with Viktor Vekselberg whose business partner Len Blavatnik donated $3.5million to McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund.

...

But the big action on Capitol Hill is on the Democratic side. And they got off to quite a start yesterday when Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was called to the House up for both a classified briefing and a closed-door hearimg for the whole House to explain why in the world he decided to lift sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s aluminum company practically in the dead of night. (If you haven’t been keeping score, Deripaska is a former associate of Paul Manafort, who reportedly owed him a large sum of money.)

We don’t know what was said in the classified briefing, but the Democrats were hopping mad about the other one. Apparently Mnuchin was completely unresponsive, reading out a prepared comment and offering up nothing else. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “It’s stiff competition, mind you, but this was one of the worst briefings we’ve received from the Trump administration. The secretary barely testified.” Mnuchin had better get used to a lot more scrutiny.

flynn he was in a deal that req elimination of sanctions? trms?

===

mrs keene nra russian jet fuel deal 5 mil brls

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/8/17/17718780/rohingya-us-sanctions-myanmar-security-forces-ethnic-cleansing

https://www.alternet.org/daniel-gelbinovich-tried-get-us-shield-roman-abramovich

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Trump Campaign Aide Admits He Tried to Get Lobbyists to Protect a Top Russian Oligarch from U.S. Sanctions

Daniel Gelbinovich does not deny the allegations.

By Matthew Chapman / AlterNet August 15, 2018, 4:22 PM GMT

According to a bombshell report from The Daily Beast, a Trump campaign staffer by the name of Daniel Gelbinovich worked behind the scenes to help shield Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich from potential inclusion for Treasury Department sanctions.

The story has been corroborated by two D.C. lobbyists who chose to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the news. Even more incredibly, Gelbinovich himself does not deny it happened:

"I approached the lobbyists on behalf of a private equity firm that requested outreach for this type of work," he said in an email to The Daily Beast. "The firm claimed that this outreach was on behalf of the individual you mentioned. I do not have a direct connection to Mr. Abramovich myself."

Abramovich, an Israeli-Russian businessman and owner of the Chelsea Football Club, is estimated to be worth over $11 billion, and is a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He is not currently the subject of U.S. sanctions, although in January, his name was included on a "warning list" of individuals being considered by the Treasury Department for future punitive action.

Gelbinovich's efforts are yet another example of how Trump has surrounded himself with people working on behalf of Putin and his allies. And the news comes at the moment that Special Counsel Mueller's first trial against Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, another individual with deep and multifarious ties to Russia, is drawing to a close.

Matthew Chapman is a video game designer, science fiction author, and political reporter from Austin, TX

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-staffer-tried-to-recruit-lobbyists-for-russian-oligarch-roman-abramovich

no lnx many ref

Exclusive: Trump Staffer Says He Recruited Lobbyists for Russian Oligarch

Once he worked to get Donald Trump into the White House. Then he started doing favors on behalf of someone else—one of Russia’s richest men.

Betsy Woodruff

08.15.18 9:00 PM ET

In the time since the election, a little-known Trump campaign staffer named Daniel Gelbinovich reached out to a number of Washington lobbyists with an eyebrow-raising ask: to shield a Putin ally from U.S. sanctions.

Two lobbyists—speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter—told The Daily Beast that Gelbinovich approached them and told them he was trying to help Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch worth more than $11 billion, find a lobbyist to help keep him from being added to the Treasury Department’s sanctions list.

Gelbinovich confirmed this reporting.

“I approached the lobbyists on behalf of a private equity firm that requested outreach for this type of work,” he said in an email to The Daily Beast. “The firm claimed that this outreach was on behalf of the individual you mentioned. I do not have a direct connection to Mr. Abramovich myself.”

Gelbinovich’s claims to have worked on behalf of Abramovich, if true, are another piece of the web of connections between Trump World and powerful Russians. And that web is already thick: Besides President Trump’s much-vaunted personal friendliness with Russian President VladimirPutin himself, Trump and his allies have a long history of doing business with Russian power players. His daughter is longtime friends with Abramovich’s former partner; his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, invested in a shipping firm linked to Putin’s judo partner, who is under U.S. sanctions, according to The New York Times; and Trump himself teamed up with oligarch Aras Agalarov to put on the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.

“I approached the lobbyists on behalf of a private equity firm that requested outreach for this type of work. The firm claimed that this outreach was on behalf of the individual you mentioned. I do not have a direct connection to Mr. Abramovich myself.”

— Daniel Gelbinovich

The revelation of Gelbinovich’s claim to have worked on behalf of Abramovich also comes as a jury begins deliberations on the fate of another Trump campaign alum, Paul Manafort—who faces criminal charges related to his work for a Putin ally in Ukraine.

Evelyn Farkas, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, said the Gelbinovich effort highlights the growing consternation in Moscow about U.S. sanctions.

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“That just tells you how much nervousness there is in Russia about being put on the sanctions list,” said Farkas, who worked on Russia matters at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. “The thing is, if he’s put on the U.S. sanctions list, then he’s in effect—because we do everything still in close coordination with the EU—then he’ll be put on the EU sanctions list, which is the bigger impact on him because of the fact that he owns property in the U.K., which is still in the EU.”

Gelbinovich was a low-level staffer on the Trump campaign, according to campaign sources, frequently booking travel for senior staff. He was on the campaign in its very early days. A picture published by the Daily Mail on Aug. 27, 2015, shows him sitting alone at a long, bare table in Trump campaign headquarters, cradling a phone and flanked by “Trump Make America Great Again!” signs.

After the campaign, he did a stint at the lobbying firm Williams & Jensen, according to a public lobbying disclosure filing, working for Coca-Cola. Gelbinovich told The Daily Beast he is now self-employed and consulting, and that his work regarding Abramovich had nothing to do with Williams & Jensen.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian magnate who spent years in prison and is now a Kremlin critic, told Bloomberg that Abramovich is a close ally of Putin.

“There’s no oligarch among those still accepted in the West who’s closer and more trusted by Putin than Abramovich,” he said.

A May 2018 story in The Independent described Abramovich as “very close to the Kremlin” but “not quite in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.” And Luke Harding wrote in the Guardian that Abramovich was one of Putin’s early boosters, recommending that Boris Yeltsin bring him on.

In response to The Daily Beast’s queries, John Mann, a spokesperson for Abramovich, said the oligarch did not sign off on any outreach to D.C. lobbyists.

“We have instructed our attorneys to draft a cease-and-desist letter regarding the representations reportedly made by Mr. Gelbinovich, whom we had never heard of before today.”

— Spokesperson for Roman Abramovich

“At no time has Mr. Abramovich, or anyone authorized to act on his behalf, engaged any individual or company to lobby on his behalf in the United States,” he said in an email to The Daily Beast. “We have instructed our attorneys to draft a cease-and-desist letter regarding the representations reportedly made by Mr. Gelbinovich, whom we had never heard of before today.”

Gelbinovich, for his part, claimed that none of the lobbyists he contacted agreed to represent Abramovich.

But Gelbinovich is not the only Trump associate to claim an affiliation with the Russian oligarch. Ivanka Trumphas been friends with Dasha Zhukova, who has two children with Abramovich, for more than a decade, according to Bloomberg. Zhukova and Abramovich announced they would split in August 2017. The president’s daughter has posted multiple pictures with Zhukova on her Instagram. Bloomberg also noted that Jared Kushner and Abramovich have had several social encounters, which the president’s son-in-law revealed when applying for a security clearance.

Despite his powerful social circle, Abramovich has faced legal challenges this past year.The BBC reported in June that he withdrew his application for a visa to the U.K. after his investor visa expired in May. The BBC pointed to exacerbated diplomatic tensions between the U.K. and Russia over the chemical weapon attack on retired Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia as a possible explanation for Abramovich’s visa troubles. In the wake of his visa troubles, Abramovich took up Israeli citizenship, according to the Guardian.

Some of Putin’s oligarch allies have been iced out of the American financial system under the Trump administration as the Treasury Department has implemented sanctions retaliating against the Kremlin for meddling in the 2016 presidential election. In April of this year, Treasury announced a new round of sanctions targeting Russian entities and oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, the Putin ally who put millions into the pocket of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Pushing back against these sanctions has been a key focus of Russian foreign policy for years. When Kremlin-linked Russians met with Trump campaign bosses at Trump Tower in June 2016, participants claimed the group just discussed adoptions—likely Putin’s decision to bar Americans from adopting Russian children, a move retaliating against American sanctions.

And when alleged Russian operative Maria Butina questioned then-candidate Trump on July 22, 2015, she asked him about sanctions.

“I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we’ll get along with Putin,” Trump told her. “I would get along very nicely with Putin, I mean, where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well.”

The sanctions list hasn’t just survived the Trump administration; it’s grown. And it’s generated plenty of potential leads for Trump allies like Gelbinovich looking to cash in on their influence in Washington.

Betsy Woodruff

@woodruffbets

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.

dccc~ dana r

https://www.eenews.net/special_reports/campaign_2018/stories/1060082057

https://www.alternet.org/report-hans-kierstead-campaign-hacked

Cyberattack Successfully Targets a Democratic Opponent of 'Putin's Favorite Congressman': Report

Dr. Hans Kierstead, the third-place finisher in the primary for California's 48th Congressional District, was targeted by hackers.

By Matthew Chapman / AlterNet August 15, 2018, 1:58 PM GMT

A new report from Rolling Stone reveals that Dr. Hans Kierstead, a former candidate in the race for California's 48th Congressional District, was targeted repeatedly by cyberattacks — in a district that is home to the most infamously pro-Putin Congressman in America.

Currently, it is unknown who is behind the attacks. But FBI officials in California and Washington, D.C. are reportedly investigating, and according to Rolling Stone, the campaign is now going public about the incidents:

Kyle Quinn-Quesada, who was Keirstead’s campaign manager, tells Rolling Stone that the campaign is now going public about the attacks for the sake of voter awareness. “It is clear from speaking with campaign professionals around the country that the sustained attacks the Keirstead for Congress campaign faced were not unique but have become the new normal for political campaigns in 2018,” Quinn-Quesada says. He added that the Keirstead campaign did not believe the cyberattacks had an effect on the primary election results.

Kierstead, a stem-cell scientist who runs a biomedical research company, was a prominent candidate in California's "top two" primary earlier this year. He narrowly lost to Harley Rouda, a philanthropist and attorney, and subsequently endorsed him. Rouda will face off in the general election against 30-year GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

Rohrabacher, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, is famously friendly to Russia and to the interests of Vladimir Putin, and has been nicknamed "Putin's favorite congressman."He has pleaded for leniency for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has well-documented ties to Russia. He has even been accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Russia.

His Moscow sympathies are so great that even House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy once joked that Rohrabacher is one of only two people Putin pays, the other being Trump.

The American people deserve answers, now more than ever, about any threat to cybersecurity that impacts our elections.

https://www.alternet.org/meet-12-russians-us-government-indicted-last-week

...

12 Russian officials who were indicted by the Grand Jury of the District of Columbia. It is the fact that these people were indicted that prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to insist that American President Donald Trump turn over Americans like one of our former ambassadors, Michael McFaul, over to his government in order to be interrogated.

The key difference, of course, is that Putin is fabricating charges against McFaul and others like whistleblower Bill Browder, while the accusations against the 12 Russian officials are rooted in serious investigative work. Yet who are these dozen Russians that have been identified by Robert Mueller's investigation?

According to the indictment, the Russian officials singled out by the government were Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov and Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov. With the exception of Kovalev, the indictment describes all of these individuals as "GRU officers who knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the 'Conspirators'), to gain unauthorized access (to 'hack') into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election."

The indictment claims that these individuals hacked the email accounts of staffers and volunteers at Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign by at least March 2016, hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee by at least April 2016 and began releasing tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents by at least June 2016, continuing to do so through the month of the presidential election.

And who are they specifically?

According to the indictment, Netyksho is a Russian military officer whose unit (Unit 26165) "had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Antonov was assigned to that same unit and oversaw a department within it that was "dedicated to targeting military, political, governmental, and non-governmental organizations with spearphishing emails and other computer intrusion activity." Antonov is accused of having "supervised other co-conspirators who targeted the DCCC, DNC, and individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign." Badin held the title of "Assistant Head of Department" in that unit and supervised various attacks on the Democratic and Clinton-related targets chosen by the Russian government.

Then there is Yermakov, who the indictment claims was a master of aliases, using "various online personas" in order to engage in a number of hacking operations. These names included "Kate S. Milton," "James McMorgans" and "Karen W. Millen." Lukashev was a senior lieutenant in the Russian military and, like Yermakov, used a number of online pseudonyms, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." Lukashev "sent spearphishing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign." Morgachev, by contrast, was in charge of a department at the unit that developed and managed malware, including one hacking tool called "X-Agent," and is charged with supervising the agents who implanted the X-Agent malware on DCCC and DNC computers and then monitored it.

Kozachek is described in the indictment as a lieutenant captain who had been assigned to Morgachev's department within Unit 26165 and employed pseudonyms like "kazak" and "blablabla1234565" in order to do his job. He also "developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016." Yershov, meanwhile, is accused of having "assisted Kozachek and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use." Malyshev, on the other hand, was a second lieutenant whose work for Morgachev's department involved monitoring X-Agent malware that had been implanted on Democratic Party machines. He used pseudonyms like "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." Osadchuk is a Russian colonel and the commanding officer of Unit 74455, which "assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU." Meanwhile Potemkin was a Russian military officer assigned to Unit 74455 who supervised a department "responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by Potemkin's department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas." Throughout the document, considerable detail is given about how various email accounts owned by either the Clinton campaign or other Democratic Party bodies were deliberately targeted by individuals or groups of individuals on this list. It explains how they hacked into these accounts and what they ultimately gained from doing so. Kovalev specifically is accused, among other things, of hacking the website of a state board of elections and stealing information about roughly 500,000 voters "including names, addresses, partial social security numbers, dates of birth, and driver’s license numbers." He is also accused of hacking into the computers of a company that supplied voter registration verification software, targeting "state and county offices responsible for administering the 2016 US. elections" and visiting the websites of counties in states like Florida, Georgia and Iowa in order to find vulnerabilities.

It is worth reminding the reader, at this point, of what McFaul told Salon earlier in the week — namely, that Putin is trying to create a false equivalency between the crimes he ordered committed by Russian officials and the fabricated charges he has created against McFaul and Browder.

"But let's be clear: What Putin was doing was assigning moral equivalency to a legitimate indictment with lots of evidence against several Russian military intelligence officers for violating American sovereignty in 2016 during the presidential elections, with a completely fabricated, cockamamie story invented by Putin," McFaul told Salon. "To even, for a moment, give any kind of dignity to what President Putin proposed was not in America's national interest, from my point of view."

nbc no lnx

Former Diplomats: Trump Team Sought to Lift Sanctions on Russia

by Ken Dilanian / Jun.01.2017 / 8:22 PM ET

The Trump administration was gearing up to lift sanctions on Russia when the president took office, but career diplomats ginned up pressure in Congress to block the move, two senior former State Department officials told NBC News Thursday.

It's the latest evidence that President Trump moved to turn his favorable campaign rhetoric about Russia into concrete action when he took power.

Daniel Fried, who served as a senior diplomat until he retired in late February, said he became aware of the sanctions effort in the early weeks of Trump's presidency.

Trump sought lift of Russia sanctions: report

JUN.01.201713:17

Fried appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show Thursday, shortly after the story was first reported by Yahoo News.

He said State Department colleagues approached him, "concerned that the Trump administration, the incoming team was going to unilaterally rescind the sanctions on Russia, which had been placed there because of Russia's aggression on Ukraine. And it was further said by these people that there would be no action required from Russia."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News.

Fried declined to say who approached him, but "I found the story sufficiently credible, that I was concerned that there might actually be something done quickly."

So Fried and another former diplomat, Tom Malinowski, who was assistant secretary of state for human rights, began lobbying Congress to pass legislation codifying the sanctions, Malinowski told NBC News. A bill has been introduced in the Senate, but it has not passed.

Schwarzenegger calls Trump ‘a little wet noodle’ and ‘fanboy’ over Putin news conference

The Trump team backed off, Malinowski said he believes, because officials came to see that lifting the sanctions would look terrible in light of the drumbeat of revelations over potential Trump campaign coordination with the Russian election interference effort.

"It would be politically stinky," he said.

Malinowski said he is now concerned that even if the Trump administration doesn't lift sanctions on Russia, it will stop vigilantly enforcing them. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control, which polices sanctions, does not have a permanent chief, and the State Department does not have a permanent sanctions coordinator.

Report: From start, Trump pushed to lift Russia sanctions

JUN.01.201704:43

The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Trump administration is considering handing back to Russia two U.S. diplomatic compounds that the Obama administration seized as punishment for Russian election hacking.

Russia has not changed its behavior in any substantive way to merit that or other sanctions relief, Malinowski said.

"What was troubling about these stories is that suddenly I was hearing that we were preparing to rescind sanctions in exchange for, well, nothing," Fried said on MSNBC

1/18

https://themoscowproject.org/collusion/white-house-declines-impose-congressionally-mandated-sanctions-russia/

JANUARY 29, 2018

WHITE HOUSE DECLINES TO IMPOSE CONGRESSIONALLY-MANDATED SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA

The Trump Administration decides not to implement Congressionally-mandated sanctions that would have impacted the Russian defense and intelligence sectors. A State Department official later defends the decision, saying there is no current need to put the sanctions into place “because the legislation is, in fact, serving as a deterrent." Despite the Trump team’sefforts to lift US sanctions on Russia, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’scomment about the sanctions being “ripped up” once Trump took office, the House and Senatepassed a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill in July 2017. This bill imposed new sanctions on Russia, and restricted the White House’s ability to remove existing sanctions. Inretaliation, Putin ordered the U.S. to drastically cut its diplomatic staff in Moscow by 755 employees. Trumpsigned the new sanctions bill into law in August, but called the bill flawed andstated that it includes “unconstitutional provisions.” He alsothanked Putin for slashing U.S. diplomatic staff, saying that doing so would “save a lot of money.”

The U.S. government has historically used sanctions as a tactic against Russia; one notable example is the 2012 Magnitsky Act. Named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in jail afteruncovering a tax fraud scheme involving “a total of $230 million linked to the Kremlin and individuals close to the government.” Magnitsky was beaten, isolated, and denied access to lawyers and medical assistance. In response to this abuse, President Obamasigned the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned various Russian government officials and businessmen; the sanctions banned these individuals from entering the U.S. and froze any assets they had in U.S. banks. Russiaresponded by banning all U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Russian lobbyists have since lobbied heavily against the act; most significantly, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya has claimed that she attended the infamous June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower to discuss the Magnitsky Act and the Russian adoption ban. President Obama signed a second round ofsanctions in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. These sanctions further targeted individuals within Putin’s inner circle, including high-ranking officials in the Russian oil and finance sectors. In December 2016, in response to Russian interference in the U.S. election, President Obama “expelled 35 Russian diplomats and closed two Russian compounds” in the U.S.

In 2017, Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act(CAATSA), which targets people and entities linked to Russian military/intelligence agencies, the Russian oil and gas industries, and any entity linked to Russian cyberattacks. In what some have considered to be a response to Trump’s pro-Russian rhetoric, thebill also “established a review process that allows Congress to block any effort by Trump to ease or lift [the] sanctions.” Although Trump signed the bill into law, the deadline for implementing the sanctions passed on October 1, 2017, without anyguidance from the Trump administration on how to proceed with implementing the signed bill. After missing the first deadline, the State Departmentissued guidelines about which individuals and entities would ultimately be sanctioned on October 26, 2017.

The Trump administration’s eventual rollout of the sanctions again indicated their lack of interest in meaningfully implementing CAATSA. On January 29, the administration announced that it would not be instituting any new sanctions under the law, asserting—without evidence—that the mere passage of the bill had achieved the desired outcome. The next day, the Treasury Department released a list of oligarchs and Kremlin-linked figures intended to comply with CAATSA; however, subsequent reporting revealed that the lists were copied from a *Forbes* list of Russian billionaires and the Kremlin’s own website, respectively. When the administration finally announced new sanctions on March 15, 2018, the list of sanctioned individuals mainly comprised hackers already under indictment thanks to the Special Counsel investigation and oligarchs already under sanctions.

The administration did, however, respond to Russia’s suspected role in the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom in March 2018, expelling 60 Russian diplomats and closing the Russian consulate in Seattle.

However, Trump was reportedly furious that other individual countries expelled fewer diplomats than the United States, fueling a perception in the media that the US was taking the toughest stance on Russia.

On April 15, following a chemical weapons attack from Russia-supported President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Nikki Haley, the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations announced that the Trump administration would announce additional sanctions against Russia. However, Trump reportedly personally reversed Haley’s public position, having a senior State Department official call the Russian embassy to reassure them that Haley’s statements were incorrect.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-white-house-secret-efforts-lift-russia-sanctions-putin-619508

Trump’s administration moved quickly to try and lift economic sanctions on Russia and other punishments former President Barack Obama had put in place as soon as it took office in January, according to multiple sources who have spoken with Yahoo News.

“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” according to Dan Fried, who retired in February as Coordinator for Sanctions Policy at the State Department.

Fried told veteran investigative journalist Michael Isikoff, a former national investigative correspondent for NBC News and Newsweek alumnus, that in the early weeks of the administration he got several “panicky” calls from U.S. officials. They asked: “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”

The sanctions in question included those imposed by Obama for Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and others inflicted late last year to punish Moscow for its suspected efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. The plans Trump’s administration considered early on included returning diplomatic compounds seized from Russia in late 2016—recent reports say Trump is currently working to put this plan into action.

[Lifting the sanctions “would have been a win-win for Moscow,” according to Tom Malinowski who served as assistant secretary of state for democracy until inauguration day. Malinowski told Yahoo News that he heard the administration was working on a “grand bargain” with Russia.

In April, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said clearly that the U.S. would not lift sanctions on Russia until President Vladimir Putin hands Crimea back to Ukraine.]

...But Trump’s administration moved quickly to try and lift economic sanctions on Russia and other punishments former President Barack Obama had put in place as soon as it took office in January, according to multiple sources who have spoken with Yahoo News.

But Fried and Malinowski heard differently at the beginning of the administration. Both joined efforts to lobby Congress to bring in bipartisan legislation to prevent the rollback of sanctions.

At the beginning of this year senators Ben Cardin, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, moved to table legislation which would codify the sanctions and give Congress control of rescinding them.That bill stalled in early May after Republican Senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opposed it.

This week the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Banking Committee proposed their own bill to increase sanctions on Russia, hitting the country’s mining and railway industries.

In its early days, the Trump administration sought to strike a deal with Russia by seeking cooperation against the Islamic State militant group in Syria in return, two former officials said. This came in the form of a “tasking” order at the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs within the State Department. The order asked officials to draw up a list of options, including sanctions relief and the return of the seized diplomatic buildings in Maryland and New York.

*The Washington Post* reported on May 26 that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then chief foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, met with Russia’s ambassador to Washington during the presidency’s transition period. Kushner reportedly attempted to set up a communications back channel with Moscow from Russian diplomatic facilities. The plan was rejected, but picked up by American intelligence in communications between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and his superiors.

According to leaked intelligence reports, Flynn reportedly indicated to Kislyak during a phone call during the transition that Russia could expect a review of the sanctions under the Trump administration.

“We’ve been reviewing all the sanctions—and this is not exclusive to Russia,” a senior White House official told Yahoo News. “All the sanctions regimes have mechanisms built in to alleviate them.” they said, adding they hoped “the Russians would take advantage of that” by returning Crimea to Ukraine.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-allies-plan-lift-russian-sanctions-was-hatched-early-2016-campaign-report

new report from McClatchy reveals that a plan President Donald Trump's allies worked on that would have ceded Crimea to Russia and lifted key sanctions against the country was developed much earlier than has previously reported — in the beginning days of 2016.

This places the origination of the plan during the opening stage of Trump's run for the presidency, before he clinched the nomination and before there were any revelations about Russia's attempts to interfere in the election and support Trump's candidacy.

McClatchy notes that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the plan as part of his probe into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump associates. Though it's not clear there's a direct relationship with this plan, another incident during the 2016 election may be relevant: a mysterious change in the Republican National Committee's party platform to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine following the invasion of Russia.

McClatchy learned new details of the plan from Andrii Artemenko, a former Ukrainian politician. He says he worked on the plan with former GOP Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who has recently come under suspicion for his ties to both Trump and Russian business interests. Alexander Rovt, a prominent figure in New York real estate, was also reportedly involved.

This plan eventually ended up in the hands of Michael Cohen, Trump's fixer and former attorney. Trump's former business associate Felix Sater was also involved. Cohen has previously said that he gave the plan to Trump's ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, though he has changed his story on that front multiple times.

After the plan was first reported on in the *New York Times*, it appears to have fizzled out.

Artemenko says that, based on his interviews with Mueller, he believes Cohen is among the targets of the Russia investigation.

...

http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/cambridge-analytica

no linx twit

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: Russia may have accessed Facebook data of 87M Americans

by Leandra BernsteinWednesday, May 16th 2018

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, departs after meeting with House Judiciary Democrats, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WASHINGTON (Circa) — Amid reports the data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) is under investigation by the FBI and Department of Justice, a former research director turned whistleblower suggested thecompany engaged in voter suppression, "black ops" and coordinated its U.S. election operations with Russian government entities.

Much has been said about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' data for sophisticated political targeting operations. On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that massive dataset could have been "easily" shared with a Russian intelligence-linked company.

According to a Tuesday report by The New York Times, the FBI and Department of Justice appear to be in the "early stages" of an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Federal investigators are reportedly looking into the company's business practices and financial dealings.

Investigations of CA and its parent company, SCL, are currently underway in Britain, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya and India.

Christopher Wylie indirectly confirmed the investigation of his former employer, Cambridge Analytica. Asked by reporters if he was cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference, he replied, "I have been contacted by the FBI."

In his testimony, Wylie again confirmed cooperating with U.S. authorities, saying he had provided relevant documents and information. He added, "It should be made clear, I am not the target of these investigations."

Cambridge Analytica was asked to participate in the Wednesday hearing but after announcing bankruptcy and shutting its doors earlier this month declined the invitation.

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Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of Facebook's privacy scandal is closing. https://bit.ly/2w3WgXK

1:45 PM - May 2, 2018

HOW RUSSIA MAY HAVE ACCESSED THE DATA

In his testimony Wednesday, Wylie faced questions about Cambridge Analytica's numerous ties to Russian government entities, at one point suggesting the Facebook data of 87 million Americans may have been acquired by the Russians.

That massive data transfer may have been facilitated, knowingly or uknowingly by Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL. Nix's London-based company was known for providing "strategic communications" and had defense contracts, commercial engagements and political campaign operations around the globe.

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Senate panel agrees with US intel that Russia intervened in 2016 election to help Trump. https://bit.ly/2IoWTkc

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Wylie described a "high level of engagement" between CA's executive, Alexander Nix and Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company. Lukoil, which has known ties to Russian intelligence services, was sanctioned in 2017 in connection with the Russian annexation of Crimea.

According to Wylie's account, Nix was in "close contact" with Lukoil executives and in 2014 gave them a whitepaper written by Wylie outlining Cambridge Analytica's U.S. data mining and voter targeting project, which was reportedly of special interest.

Asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., if CA's dataset, with information on tens of millions of U.S. Facebook users was also shared with Lukoil, Wylie did not dismiss the possibility. He noted the information could have been "easily acquired" with or without CA's knowledge or consent.

"I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these datasets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that," Wylie said.

CBS News

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Feinstein: Do you think it's possible Facebook data harvested by Cambridge Analytica ended up in Russia?

Wylie: "I can't say definitively, one way or the other, if these data sets did end up in Russia but what I can say is that it would have been very easy to facilitate that."

7:49 AM - May 16, 2018

In their conversations with Nix, Lukoil executives were informed of "the scale of the data and the location of the data," Wylie said. "What was made known was that this data could have been easily acquired by something as simple as a keylogger on Dr. [Aleksandr] Kogan's computer when he was visiting Russia," he added.

Aleksandr Kogan was a researcher at Cambridge University and professor at Russia's St. Petersburg University and responsible for developing the Facebook quiz app that harvested thousands of datapoints from approximately 87 million unsuspecting Facebook users.

Around 2013, Kogan teamed up with Cambridge Analytica and gained access to the Facebook data. Facebook terminated its contract with Kogan in 2014 and in 2015 sent a letter requesting he delete the harvested data.

Facebook did not follow up and the user data, shared with Cambridge Analytica, was not deleted. Facebook officially suspended Cambridge Analytica's account in March 2018.

The Guardian

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Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election https://trib.al/uw0yqVr

5:48 AM - May 6, 2018

Cambridge Analytica kept Facebook data models through US election

Social network failed to make firm delete valuable models derived from data until campaign was over

theguardian.com

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WIKILEAKS AND 'BLACK OPS'

Among Wylie's other concerns about SCL and Cambridge Analytica's tactics included the firm's so-called "black-ops" capabilities, which he said involved hackers breaking into computers to obtain intelligence or compromising material to use against opposition candidates.

"Some of the targets of these intelligence operations are currently heads of state in various countries," Wylie asserted, saying his former employer hired former members of Russian and Israeli intelligence services for these "special IT services."

In addition,CA also recruited at least two individuals who were "closely associated" with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, according to Wylie.

DNC sues Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks over alleged 2016 election conspiracy. http://bit.ly/2JaN0CC

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These individuals were reportedly chosen because of their closeness to WikiLeaks, which was deemed a "hostile intelligence service," by former CIA director Mike Pompeo.

The company has been accused of using a playbook that resembles the WikiLeaks dumping of hacked emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, notably in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election. SCL and Cambridge Analytica denied allegations of hacking.

VOTER SUPPRESSION

Among the allegations Wylie made against his former employer is that it used social media data and complex algorithms to try to suppress the vote. The effort was reportedly done under the banner of "voter disengagement," and was cited by Wylie as one of the main reasons he left CA in July 2014.

At that time, Cambridge Analytica was a relatively new company. It was set up as a U.S. subsidiary of the London-based SCL.

In 2013, SCL's CEO, Alexander Nix, a British citizen, partnered with billionaire conservative donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer and then-Breitbart editor in chief Steve Bannon to set up Cambridge Analytica, or SCL USA. The firm worked on at least 44 congressional campaigns in 2014 and in 2016 managed the data and voter targeting services for President Donald Trump's campaign.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says Bannon wanted "weapons" to fight a "culture war" at the firm http://hill.cm/FRBTlQl

Wylie suggested this arrangement violated U.S. campaign laws and the U.K.-based parent company to handle "all" of CA's clients. The company reportedly received memos from lawyers warning against using foreign nationals in its U.S. political operations, but it "installed a non-American as its CEO [Nix] and embedded non-U.S. citizens in American campaigns," Wylie said.

Steve Bannon, who went on to serve as President Trump's chief strategist, was the company's vice president during Wylie's tenure and was reportedly very interested in how social media data could be used to identify, target and "exploit" certain subsets of the population, Wylie reported.

Much of Cambridge Analytica's political targeting was informed by the work of Stanford University behavioral researcher Michael Kosinski. Among other things, Kosinski found it was possible to accurately determine a person's sexual orientation, political party and race by analyzing 68 Facebook "likes." Deeper analysis of "likes" resulted in predictive powers that led some to conclude Facebook knows you better than your family.

CNN

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According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica's targeting operations were "designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases."

Before he left the company, there were "the beginnings of discussions" about how to use the profiling data for "voter disengagement," Wylie told lawmakers. This activity, he said, "was intended to focus on African-American voters."

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie tells Sen. @amyklobuchar that he left Cambridge Analytica in part because of the “beginnings of discussions about voter disengagement” with ads intended to suppress African American voters #tictocnews

Asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., if one of Bannon's goals was "to suppress voting or discourage certain individuals in the United States from voting," Wylie said that was his understanding.

Questioned further about whether "voter suppression" was "a service that U.S. clients could request in their contracts" with the company, Wylie referenced documents indicating clients had made that request.

There is room for doubt about the accuracy of Wylie's claims, according to testimony from Eitan Hersh, an expert in civic engagement and voter targeting at Tufts University.

"Persuasion is very, very hard," Hersh said, asserting CA's claims about its targeting accuracy seem "implausible."

"From everything I have seen publicly disclosed about Cambridge Analytica, I am skeptical of the idea that its strategies of voter persuasion were unusually effective or contributed meaningfully to the election outcome," he asserted.

It is not yet clear whether Wylie's allegations are being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice. The FBI is reportedly coordinating with British authorities in the U.K. investigation of Cambridge Analytica.

According to reports, Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation is looking at Cambridge Analytica's data practices, finances and other activities.

https://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-russia-sanctions-2464619894.html

Exxon Sues Feds Over $2 Million Fine

ExxonMobil filed suit against the federal government last week, claiming that a $2 million fine levied against the company by the Treasury Department is "unlawful" and "capricious."

The Treasury Department fined Exxon Thursday morning, alleging that the oil giant displayed "reckless disregard" of U.S.-Russian sanctions in its dealings with Russian company Rosneft in 2014 under CEO Rex Tillerson.

The Treasury Department's suit highlights particularly problematic deals with Rosneft in 2014, when Exxon was under now-Sec. of State Tillerson's guidance. The suit comes as the House prepares to pass new sanctions legislation targeting Russia, Iran and North Korea. The compromise bill gives energy companies some wiggle room to participate in energy projects with Russian stakeholders.

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