Corruption at the highest levels in Washington DC … why I’m NOT surprised … FBI and IC 🙂
○ American media are lapdogs of political elites | De Volkskrant – July 27, 2016 | [Dutch]
FBI Agents tried to flip Russian oligarch Deripaska to get to Trump | The New York Times |
In the estimation of American officials, Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, has faced credible accusations of extortion, bribery and even murder.
They also thought he might make a good source.
Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant.
More below the fold …
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men …
Two of the players in the effort were Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump, and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier of purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The systematic effort to win the cooperation of the oligarchs, which has not previously been revealed, does not appear to have scored any successes. And in Mr. Deripaska’s case, he told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Russian organized crime and Kremlin collusion in the campaign, a person familiar with the exchanges said.
The person added that Mr. Deripaska even notified the Kremlin about the American efforts to cultivate him.
…
The outreach to Mr. Deripaska, who is so close to the Russian president that he has been called “Putin’s oligarch,” was not as much of a long shot as it might have appeared. He had worked with the United States government in the past, including on a thwarted effort to rescue an F.B.I. agent [Robert A. Levinson] captured in Iran, on which he reportedly spent as much as $25 million of his own money.…
The timeline sketched out by Mr. Ohr shows contacts stretching back to when Mr. Ohr first met Mr. Steele in 2007. It also shows what officials said was the first date on which the two discussed cultivating Mr. Deripaska: a meeting in Washington on Nov. 21, 2014, roughly seven months before Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president.Mr. Steele served as an intermediary between the Americans and the Russian oligarchs they were seeking to cultivate. He had first met Mr. Ohr years earlier while still serving at MI6, Britain’s foreign spy agency, where he oversaw Russia operations.
…
Mr. Steele helped set up a meeting between the Russian and American officials during the 2015 trip. Mr. Ohr attended the meeting, during which the Americans pressed Mr. Deripaska on the connections between Russian organized crime and Mr. Putin’s government, as well as other issues, according to a person familiar with the events. The person said that Mr. Deripaska told the Americans that their theories were off base and did not reflect how things worked in Russia.Mr. Deripaska would not agree to a second meeting. But one took place the following year, in September 2016, when F.B.I. agents showed up unannounced at his door in New York.
…
Mr. Deripaska, though, told the F.B.I. agents that while he had no love for Mr. Manafort, with whom he was in a bitter business dispute, he found their theories about his role on the campaign “preposterous.” He also disputed that there were any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to the person familiar with the exchange.
Mueller may have a conflict — and it leads directly to Deripaska | The Hill – May 14, 2018 |
In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska [NYT] to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
…
Some aspects of Deripaska’s help were chronicled in a 2016 book by reporter Barry Meier, but sources provide extensive new information about his role.They said FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington. Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither involve nor harm his homeland.
“We knew he was paying for his team helping us, and that probably ran into the millions,” a U.S. official involved in the operation confirmed.
Before long, he [Levinson] was retained by the CIA to assist a new unit focusing on illicit international finance, a group that found his comprehensive reports educational and invaluable. By 2006, the Illicit Finance Group had been tasked to gather intel that could be used against the leaders of Iran, and when that responsibility was passed on to Levinson, he made the risky journey to meet an American-born terrorist, an assignment from which he never returned. [Source: The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran]
One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirmed.
Deripaska’s lawyer said the Russian ultimately spent $25 million assembling a private search and rescue team that worked with Iranian contacts under the FBI’s watchful eye. Photos and videos indicating Levinson was alive were uncovered.
Then in fall 2010, the operation secured an offer to free Levinson. The deal was scuttled, however, when the State Department become uncomfortable with Iran’s terms, according to Deripaska’s lawyer and the Levinson family.
FBI officials confirmed State hampered their efforts.
Chabad, Vekselberg, Putin and the Schneerson Library
[Update-1] Rusal Aluminum Merger [Deripaska] and Swiss Glencore
American/Israeli oligarch Marc Rich …
○ Business profile: Marc Rich, Glencore’s fugitive founder
in a merger with Russia’s Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg …
“Would [the U.S. government] have any concerns about CGI inviting Viktor Vekselberg, President of Renova Group, to attend CGI Annual Meeting in NYC in September?” Desai asks Clinton confidantes Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Michael Fuchs under the subject line “Russia/Viktor Vekselberg?”
[Source: National Review – 2012]○ DRC Mining Rights and Israel’s Billionaire
○ Marc Rich: controversial commodities trader and former fugitive dies | The Guardian – 2013 |
○ Laundering a Russian Oligarch through Israeli Citizenship
Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy | Politico – Dec. 2017 |
By May 2010, Brennan, then assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, confirmed in a speech that the administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a Washington conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, according to a Reuters report.
“There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing,” Brennan said. “And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.”
In practice, the administration’s willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to Project Cassandra members and others.
[Archive key words: Christopher Steele – Steele dossier]
○ British Intelligence Delivers Another ‘Dodgy Dossier’
○ Did MI6/CIA Collude with Chris Steele to Entrap Trump?
○ British Censor, Pablo Miller MI6 and Oui’s Diary
