From Russia with Love: Trump Justice

[Kid Berwyn]

First off: Thank goodness for DU. Now for the business: The record clearly shows Trump's political support from FBI in New York City was no accident.

The Specter of 2016:

McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America

Timothy Snyder
January 26, 2023

SNIP...

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.

Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win. We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation. Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt. And again, the issue is not just the particular person. If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.

For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory. In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia. Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small. Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse. After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York. This was no secret at the time. One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift. And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying.

The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. When that failed, Russia had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence operations. (If you find that you do not remember the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it is very possibly because you were caught in the froth of Russian propaganda, spread through the internet, targeted to vulnerabilities.) The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and institutions. This is what I was working on in 2016, when a similar operation was clearly underway in the United States.

SOURCE:

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016

In addition to knowing who to bribe and program, the KGB is really good at the dividing and conquering side of their craft.

‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

by David Smith
The Guardian, January 29, 2021

EXCERPT...

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

CONTINUES...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book

Guess that all got lost with all that excellent January 6 insurrection coverage cough. Here's that interesting full-page ad Trump actually paid for just after his return from Moscow.



Details: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent-nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us

Gee, Corporate McPravda. Now TSF wants to throw NATO under the bus. Maybe that's why some people became suspicious when Trump FIRED entire FBI counterespionage team a few years back?

Here's context for America's AWOL Press and those who would be interested in how the FBI somehow missed investigating the story about Trump and Putin:

Trump’s Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime

Some of President Trump’s favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and the FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

NATASHA BERTRAND
The Atlantic, AUG 30, 2018

Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

snip...

Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect. Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone, complaining about his relationship with Steele and Ohr’s wife’s past work for Fusion GPS—the opposition-research firm that hired Steele in 2016 to research Trump’s Russia ties.

snip...

Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Incidentally, another Manafort associate, the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, admitted that he only managed to be in business because Mogilevich allowed him to be, according to a leaked 2008 State Department cable.) Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate. Nearly a decade later, Ohr and the FBI sought Deripaska’s help in taking down overseas criminal syndicates.

Snip...

The president has denied having any business ties to Russia, and his dream of building a Trump Tower Moscow never materialized. But his links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the former Soviet Union have been documented: Millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s developments and casinos throughout the 1990s, as the journalist Craig Unger has chronicled, as oligarchs looked for a place to hide their money in the West. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was once known as a hot spot for Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Russian Mafia, and quickly became the “favorite East Coast destination” of the top Russian mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov, according to the 2000 book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. It was also repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.

Continues...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/

So, as PRESIDENT Trump targeted the FBI Witch Hunters who were tracking Putin, the KGB/GRU/WTFICN, and his Mafiya.

Contrast with Biden Justice:

Joe Biden stands up to Putin, big time. Per PBS Frontline: Biden stood up to Putin as VP and shows President Biden standing up to Putin now.



The program, “Putin and the Presidents” is online and on-demand:

https://www.pbs.org/video/putin-and-the-presidents-gmztxm/

Poppy Bush claimed victory in the Cold War and recommended capitalism-freedom for all the Russias, Bill Clinton sounded the alarm about Putin the KGB trained feller, Smirko Bush talked a lot after looking into his soul and inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, Obama stood up against the little dictator with VP Biden doing a lot of the work, and Trump seemed to actively do Putin’s bidding.

But it was Biden who said to Putin’s face, after Putin reminded him of what George W Bush saw: “I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin replied, “Then we understand each other.”

[Kid Berwyn]

1. FBI counterintelligence head Charles McGonigal...Come on down!

Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?

The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.

Craig Unger
The New Republic, February 1, 2023

In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?

SNIP...

Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.

I’m well aware of the strict secrecy that accompanies ongoing investigations as a matter of procedure. But once the Mueller Report was finally released, it became crystal clear that Robert Mueller’s investigation dealt only with criminal matters, not counterintelligence. Trump had been thoroughly compromised by Russia and was a grave threat to national security. But the FBI wasn’t doing anything about it!

One reason for that may have been that on far too many occasions, FBI men in sensitive positions ended up on the take from the very people they were supposed to be investigating. And on January 23, a bomb dropped: We learned that the latest of these is Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York, who ended up working for billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a major target in the Trump Russia investigation. McGonigal was indicted in Manhattan on charges of money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions, and other counts relating to his alleged ties to Deripaska. He was also indicted in Washington, where he was accused of concealing $225,000 he allegedly received from a New Jersey man employed long ago by Albanian intelligence.

CONTINUES...

https://newrepublic.com/article/170328/charles-mcgonigal-throw-2016-election

[Emrys]

2. Many thanks for pulling all this together. n/t

[Kid Berwyn]

3. FBI agents undermined Russia investigation, downplayed Jan. 6, tried to block the Mar-a-Lago search

You are most welcome, Emrys! More from a good writer at KOS...

FBI agents undermined Russia investigation, downplayed Jan. 6, tried to block the Mar-a-Lago search

by Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff, March 1, 2023

There has always been an element within the FBI that has gone out of its way to protect Donald Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election, as The New York Times was devoting every single column of the front page to the “scandal” of Hillary Clinton’s email server, a story about Trump’s connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents was consigned to a brief account on an inside page, in part because FBI sources informed the NYT that there was nothing to the story. (Note that The New York Times was well aware that an investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia was underway, but chose not to run the story until well after the election.)

In January, Charles McGonigal, the former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, was charged with money laundering for a Russian oligarch. McGonigal worked directly with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also a major part of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, and the source of many of the lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine that Rudy Giuliani tried to push in the 2020 election cycle. (Lies that The New York Times published unchallenged.)

SNIP...

Previous to the July search, the DOJ was provided with new evidence—likely in the terms of testimony from someone who had worked with Trump at Mar-a-Lago—that Trump was knowingly holding classified documents at his Florida resort and was showing these documents to others. But when the department ordered a warranted search of the premises…

Two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

SNIP...

This was “one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president.” That included FBI agents working to “slow the probe” into Trump’s handling of classified documents,

Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June, after Trump’s legal team asserted a diligent search had been conducted and all classified records had been turned over, according to some people with knowledge of the discussions.

CONTINUES w/links to sources, details...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/1/2155645/-Opposition-to-Mar-a-Lago-search-confirms-the-FBI-is-badly-broken-and-Christopher-Wray-needs-to-go

[Hotler]

4. Thanks Kid. All links a must read. At least Timothy Snyder: The Specter of 2016

Holy Shit!

[Kid Berwyn]

5. TY! You're welcome, Hotler! Here's Dr. Snyder's Part II...

The Trauma of 2016 (spy scandal, part 2)

If we take the spy scandal seriously, we give ourselves a chance to heal

TIMOTHY SNYDER
FEB 2, 2023

EXCERPT...

Let us accept for the sake of argument that "disruption" was Russia's aim. That would just mean that Russians would want Trump in office, since no outcome would be more disruptive than that. Trump came, Trump disrupted, and Russian propagandists celebrated, most of all around during Trump's coup attempt. The distinction between "disruption" and "Trump victory" is not one that Russians would have made in 2016, nor for that matter one that Trump voters, or pretty much anyone else, would have made. It speaks to a very specific political sensibility to imagine that Trump was a figure of law and order. It does seem that some people in FBI New York thought just that. Of course, it would be a very bad thing if political preferences led FBI special agents to speak to the press in one way rather than another. In the context we are now in, however, this is among the most innocent of the possible explanations.

The "disruption" thesis was supported by no evidence (that I know of, or that was provided in the article), and made no sense in light of available evidence. Why then was it accepted by New York Times reporters, and made the centerpiece of an important article? I have an intuition. The idea that Russia did not back a side but just had a kind of distant interest in a balanced disruption might have appealed to a sensibility within the Times. There are two sides to every story, goes the received wisdom, and so we must shape stories so that they have two sides. If Russia backed Trump, that would be very inconvenient for the Times, because where then to seek the "other side" of the story? How welcome, then, to imagine that the Kremlin was not taking a side. It is almost as if someone understood how to manipulate the Times.

A final problem is precisely the bothsidesism that structures the entire article. Here is a sample: "The FBI's inquiry into Russia's possible role continues, as does the investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D. Wiener." This sentence, with its weird juxtaposition and overextended clauses, reads like a tweet from the NYTpitchbot on a good day. The reporters were unable just to write a story about Trump and Russia (or even negating Trump and Russia). They had to bring in an issue that had no bearing on the Trump-Russia question, just to serve the weird purpose of "balance."

This is a failure of journalism. If you have the story, write the story. It is not writing the story when you use the existence of another investigation to segue from Putin to Wiener. The English language bears such a sentence grammatically, if just barely, but that is no reason that it had to come into existence. The two scandals were of an entirely different structure and scale. One is still going on, and the other was dismissed after a few days. One was of world historical importance, and the other was piffle. The underlying problem is that the habit of juxtaposing one thing and another always serves a purpose that is not journalistic but political. They idea that one should generate "both sides" is an a priori view about politics, not a way of approaching reality. Its consequences are political, as they must be, and as they were in this case. By equating two things that were not at all equal, the Times made it more likely that Trump would win and that Clinton would lose a presidential election.

CONTINUES...

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-trauma-of-2016-spy-scandal-part

PS: Dr. Snyder really takes National News Media to task. As you know, that's why DU is so important, my Friend.

[Stuart G]

6. K and R... Terrible news for the FBI..... Thank You for Posting This Article....

This paragraph is horrific. ..................

In January, Charles McGonigal, the former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, was charged with money laundering for a Russian oligarch. McGonigal worked directly with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was also a major part of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016, and the source of many of the lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine that Rudy Giuliani tried to push in the 2020 election cycle. (Lies that The New York Times published unchallenged.)

Note the words: "Charles McGonigal, former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI," ...............................

Nothing worse than the above sentence........(as bad as it gets!!!!!)

[Kid Berwyn]

8. Terrifyingly Treasonous Times. But it gets worse.

After he's in office, pee-resident Trump fires just about everyone at DoJ having anything to do about Russia undermining the United States and its money.

Trump’s Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime

Some of President Trump’s favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and the FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

NATASHA BERTRAND
The Atlantic, AUG 30, 2018

Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

snip...

Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect. Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone, complaining about his relationship with Steele and Ohr’s wife’s past work for Fusion GPS—the opposition-research firm that hired Steele in 2016 to research Trump’s Russia ties.

snip...

Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Incidentally, another Manafort associate, the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, admitted that he only managed to be in business because Mogilevich allowed him to be, according to a leaked 2008 State Department cable.) Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate. Nearly a decade later, Ohr and the FBI sought Deripaska’s help in taking down overseas criminal syndicates.

Snip...

The president has denied having any business ties to Russia, and his dream of building a Trump Tower Moscow never materialized. But his links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the former Soviet Union have been documented: Millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s developments and casinos throughout the 1990s, as the journalist Craig Unger has chronicled, as oligarchs looked for a place to hide their money in the West. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was once known as a hot spot for Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Russian Mafia, and quickly became the “favorite East Coast destination” of the top Russian mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov, according to the 2000 book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. It was also repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.

Continues...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trumps-top-targets-in-the-russia-probe-are-experts-in-organized-crime/569056/

PS: You are most welcome, Stuart G! When the New York Times uh "misses" a story, like the FBI Russia Witch Hunters who were tracking Putin and his Mafiya getting canned, I thank goodness for Democratic Underground -- which is a lot.

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Trump Blasts Charles McGonigal After Arrest: 'Rot In Hell'

Frank Figliuzzi on his former co-worker...

“Fourth, as disturbing as the McGonigal indictments are, there is some solace in the fact that they don’t contain a charge of espionage. That means, as far as we know, McGonigal didn’t do what Robert Hanssen did: share classified national defense information with foreign powers. McGonigal held a much higher, and even more sensitive, position than Hanssen did. If McGonigal had sold secrets to adversaries, the damage could be almost insurmountable. If there’s anything to be thankful for here, it’s that maybe — just maybe — FBI New York’s top spy catcher had a line that even he would not cross.”

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/arrest-fbi-agent-linked-russian-oligarch-major-blow-rcna67060

Then, there’s the boss.

“He who excuses himself, accuses himself.” — Gabriel Meurier



Trump Blasts Charles McGonigal After Arrest: 'Rot In Hell'

BY EWAN PALMER
Newsweek, 1/24/23

Donald Trump reacted with glee after a former FBI official who was involved in the investigation into the alleged ties between the former president's 2016 campaign team and Russia was arrested.

Charles McGonigal, 54, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI's New York office, is accused of secretly working for a U.S.-sanctioned Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, as well as conspiring to commit money laundering.

Prosecutors said that McGonigal is alleged to have tried to help Deripaska get off the sanctions list after leaving the FBI in 2018. He is also alleged to have taken money off the Russian billionaire in 2019 in order to investigate a rival oligarch.

Snip…

In a post on Truth Social after the Department of Justice announced the charges, Trump said: "The FBI guy after me for the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, long before my Election as President, was just arrested for taking money from Russia, Russia, Russia. May he Rot In Hell!"

Continues…

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-charles-mcgonigal-russia-arrest-sanctions-1775988



PS: Oops! Sorry about the dupe above, Stuart G. Messed up, but not as bad as McGonigal.

[Hekate]

7. KnR

[Kid Berwyn]

9. In the Oval Office in the merry month of May 2017

Then Pee-resident Trump gestures to Russia's then-ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, as he speaks to still-Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. (Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images)

“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”

"I'm not under investigation," he added.



Sources:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5

Thanks, Hekate! The long game...

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. Let us not forget that Deripaska is MoscowMitch's buddy...

Moscow Mitch and his $200 Million Russian sugar daddy, Oleg Deripaska

[Kid Berwyn]

12. Mitch McConnell, the Gravedigger of American Democracy

“If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.“

Source:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/

——-=——-

Mitch McConnell’s Ties to Russian Oil Money

The Democratic Coalition

The Democratic Coalition’s ongoing investigation just uncovered the following evidence linking GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to Russian oil money, some of which we first revealed in February 2017.

McConnell recently voted to drop sanctions against Russian aluminum company RusAl which is still owned by one of Vladimir Putin’s sanctioned oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska. His action directly benefits one of the GOP leader’s major donors, whose fortune comes from Russian oil.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC run by Sen. McConnell’s former Chief of Staff, received a total of $3,500,000 ($2,500,000 in 2016 and $1,000,000 in 2017) via Access Industries and a subsidiary. Len Blavatnik is a Russian oligarch with US and UK citizenship who owns Access Industries and donated to Sen. McConnell’s 2016 Senate campaign vehicles.

Blavatnik’s Access Industries made many of its billions from Putin’s decisions about its Russian oil partnership. He is also a long-term business partner of Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska at RuSal, in which he is a major investor, as well as Viktor Vekselberg, who is entangled with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen through his U.S. family office Columbus Nova.
Last week, Sen. McConnell led 42 Republicans in voting against a resolution to maintain sanctions on Blavatnik’s business partner Deripaska.

Snip...

Blavatnik gave a total of $7.35 million to PACs working for high-ranking Republicans including organizations linked to both the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader during the 2015–16 federal campaign cycle. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is probing donor Blavatnik for his ties to Donald Trump and specifically a million dollar inaugural donation.

Source:

https://medium.com/@TheDemCoalition/mitch-mcconnells-ties-to-russian-oil-money-db56f16a4824

——-=——-

Traitors: GOP, the Guardians of Oligarchs and Putin

[republianmushroom]

13. Mustn't be political, now, correct.

36 months and counting

[Kid Berwyn]

14. Putin was busy laying the tracks way before then.

How the U.S. thinks Russians hacked the White House

Washington
CNN, April 8, 2015
—
Russian hackers behind the damaging cyber intrusion of the State Department in recent months used that perch to penetrate sensitive parts of the White House computer system, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.

While the White House has said the breach only affected an unclassified system, that description belies the seriousness of the intrusion. The hackers had access to sensitive information such as real-time non-public details of the president’s schedule. While such information is not classified, it is still highly sensitive and prized by foreign intelligence agencies, U.S. officials say.

The White House in October said it noticed suspicious activity in the unclassified network that serves the executive office of the president. The system has been shut down periodically to allow for security upgrades.

The FBI, Secret Service and U.S. intelligence agencies are all involved in investigating the breach, which they consider among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems. ​The intrusion was routed through computers around the world, as hackers often do to hide their tracks, but investigators found tell-tale codes and other markers that they believe point to hackers working for the Russian government.

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“In this case, as we made clear at the time, we took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” he said. “As has been our position, we are not going to comment on [this] article’s attribution to specific actors.”

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https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/07/politics/how-russians-hacked-the-wh/index.html

And then they hired McGonigal. Yes, republianmushroom, the CID action report must be a marvel to behold. Too bad no one in a position to raise hell seems to notice.

[PufPuf23]

15. Thank you for the compilation. Tells the story. kr

[Kid Berwyn]

16. The latest on McGonigal: unreported $250,000 payment from Albanian.

Former FBI counterintelligence chief sentenced to more prison time over undisclosed foreign cash

Josh Campbell and Kara Scannell, CNN
CNN, February 17, 2024

A former senior FBI counterintelligence official, previously sentenced to federal prison for his association with a Russian oligarch, has been ordered to serve additional time in a separate case involving the receipt of foreign cash, according to the US Justice Department.

Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the FBI who oversaw national security investigations at the bureau’s New York field office, was sentenced Friday “to 28 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release for his undisclosed receipt of $225,000 in cash from an individual with ties to the Albanian government while McGonigal was supervising counterintelligence investigations,” the DOJ said.

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The disgraced former high-ranking FBI official was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in January 2023. He pleaded guilty in August to one count of conspiracy to violate US sanctions and money laundering for working for Oleg Deripaska, a wealthy Russian with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and was sentenced to 50 months in prison.

In September, he pleaded guilty in a separate case in Washington, DC, to concealing hundreds of thousands of dollars he received from a former Albanian intelligence employee as well as foreign contacts he made with the individual.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-fbi-counterintelligence-chief-sentenced-020352439.html

PS: You are most welcome, PufPuf23! Wonder who else received unreported fortunes from Putin?