Tony D'Amato
It's all about the inches
When it rains it pours
RUSSIA 🇷🇺 / РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGENT
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When it rains it pours
You know what this means right? 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...430e8c-58e2-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html
National Security
The NSA is ‘moving forward’ to install Michael Ellis, a former GOP operative, as its top lawyer, the agency said Sunday
The NSA said it will install former GOP political operative Michael Ellis as its general counsel, a day after the acting Pentagon chief ordered the NSA head to do so. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
By
Ellen Nakashima
Jan. 17, 2021 at 5:09 p.m. UTC
The National Security Agency is “moving forward” to install Michael Ellis, a former GOP political operative and White House official, as the agency’s top lawyer, the agency said Sunday.
The announcement came a day after Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller ordered the NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, to immediately place Ellis in position as the agency’s general counsel.
[Acting defense secretary orders NSA head to immediately install former GOP operative as agency’s top lawyer]
Ellis had been selected for the job in November by the Pentagon general counsel after a civil service competition. But Nakasone was not in favor of Ellis’ selection and sought to delay his installation, according to several people familiar with the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Though Nakasone is not the hiring authority — the decision is made by the Pentagon general counsel — by tradition the NSA director weighs in on the selection.
AD
“Mr. Ellis accepted his final job offer yesterday afternoon,” the NSA said in a statement Sunday. “NSA is moving forward with his employment.”
The Pentagon declined to comment.
Ellis was selected under pressure from the White House, people familiar with the matter said at the time. The move drew criticism from national security legal experts as an attempt to politicize a career position.
[White House official and former GOP political operative named as NSA general counsel]
It comes just a few days before President Trump leaves office, and complicates the Biden administration’s options for immediately replacing him, former officials said.
There have also been concerns about Ellis’s qualifications for the job, according to several people. One individual said that those issues included the possibility that he was picked over candidates who scored higher during the interview process.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...430e8c-58e2-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html
National Security
The NSA is ‘moving forward’ to install Michael Ellis, a former GOP operative, as its top lawyer, the agency said Sunday
The NSA said it will install former GOP political operative Michael Ellis as its general counsel, a day after the acting Pentagon chief ordered the NSA head to do so. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
By
Ellen Nakashima
Jan. 17, 2021 at 5:09 p.m. UTC
The National Security Agency is “moving forward” to install Michael Ellis, a former GOP political operative and White House official, as the agency’s top lawyer, the agency said Sunday.
The announcement came a day after Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller ordered the NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, to immediately place Ellis in position as the agency’s general counsel.
[Acting defense secretary orders NSA head to immediately install former GOP operative as agency’s top lawyer]
Ellis had been selected for the job in November by the Pentagon general counsel after a civil service competition. But Nakasone was not in favor of Ellis’ selection and sought to delay his installation, according to several people familiar with the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Though Nakasone is not the hiring authority — the decision is made by the Pentagon general counsel — by tradition the NSA director weighs in on the selection.
AD
“Mr. Ellis accepted his final job offer yesterday afternoon,” the NSA said in a statement Sunday. “NSA is moving forward with his employment.”
The Pentagon declined to comment.
Ellis was selected under pressure from the White House, people familiar with the matter said at the time. The move drew criticism from national security legal experts as an attempt to politicize a career position.
[White House official and former GOP political operative named as NSA general counsel]
It comes just a few days before President Trump leaves office, and complicates the Biden administration’s options for immediately replacing him, former officials said.
There have also been concerns about Ellis’s qualifications for the job, according to several people. One individual said that those issues included the possibility that he was picked over candidates who scored higher during the interview process.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
Yall thuoght this was over? 
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@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
David Smith9 Sep 2019
Donald Trump’s election win in 2016 was welcomed by Moscow. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
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
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed by KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into the 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.
“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”
Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.
Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”
Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”
“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
© 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)
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Barbarians at the (Pizza) Gate
Barbarians at the (Pizza) Gate
The kooky QAnon narrative of Donald Trump fighting a secret cabal of rich & famous pedophiles may have originated with...Donald Trump.
ON DECEMBER 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch burst into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in the tony D.C. neighborhood of Chevy Chase, armed with an assault rifle and a handgun. Patrons of the restaurant, many of them kids, fled, fearing for their lives—but Maddison Welch was not there to hurt children. He was there to save them.
Welch, the father of two small girls, had heard tell of a massive child sex trafficking ring involving the Clintons, whom he was convinced were terrible people. Maybe he watched a YouTube video posted by Alex Jones that November 4, in which the InfoWars provocateur said, “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her. Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
The hub of this heinous child sex ring, Welch read, probably on Reddit, was the basement of Comet Ping Pong. The pizzeria was frequented by the brother of Clinton crony John Podesta, and owned by the ex of the head of Media Matters—the same Media Matters head who had once paid his ex-lover almost $1 million in a fishy blackmail scheme. It was all incestuous and weird. Not only that, but when an influential rightwing provocateur, Jack Posobiec, had dined at the restaurant to scope it out, he’d been asked to leave (he’d been asked to leave because he was live-streaming a children’s birthday party going on in one of the back rooms, which the managers rightly found inappropriate, but whatever). Naturally, the police wouldn’t touch the case—the crooked Clintons had seen to that. So Welch, picking up where Posobiec left off, took it upon himself to conduct an investigation of his own.
As the patrons streamed out of the restaurant, Welch had a look around. He moved some furniture, hunting for secret entrances. He shot his way through a locked door, which he assumed was the entrance to the basement dungeon he expected to find, similar to what police discovered in the Cleveland home of kidnapper Ariel Castro. Instead he found a small room containing the computer server, which his bullet damaged. By the time the police arrived, Welch had concluded that not only was there no child sex ring operating in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, but Comet Ping Pong didn’t even have a basement. The whole thing was a bust. He’d been had.
His intelligence was bad, but his intentions were good. “I came to D.C. with the intent of helping people I believed were in dire need of assistance, and to bring an end to a corruption that I truly felt was harming innocent lives,” he wrote in a defense sentencing memo a few months later. “I felt very passionate about the possibility of human suffering, especially the suffering of a child, and was prompted to act without taking the time to consider the repercussions of my actions, or the possible harm that might come from them. I’m truly sorry….”
Maddison Welch was sentenced to four years in prison. He’s scheduled for release this summer.
“Pizzagate,” as this sad tale is colloquially known, was a prototype for the QAnon conspiracy theories that took hold later in Trump’s term of office. While it is easy to mock Maddison Welch for being so gullible, the reality is that the story he believed is not as fantastical as it first appears. Indeed, in the four years since Pizzagate, the narrative has gotten more, not less, believable.
The underlying conspiracy that lures well-intentioned people like Welch into the Q rabbit hole is that there exists a network of rich and powerful pedophiles engaged in the sex trafficking of children—and that network is so ruthless, its reach so absolute, that it can only be fought covertly. There is ample evidence to support this claim, at least on a surface level.
Jeffrey Epstein—arms dealer, spy, money launderer, kompromat creator—along with his partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, really did run a child sex trafficking operation, in which they sourced, groomed, and trained underage girls to provide sexual service to rich and powerful men, for purposes of acquiring kompromat. Among the men alleged to have been involved: Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria’s Secret and other “sexy” brands; criminal defense attorney to the stars Alan Dershowitz; Prince Andrew of Great Britain, aka “Randy Andy,” favorite son of Queen Elizabeth II and longtime friend of Ghislaine Maxwell; Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel; former president Bill Clinton, who famously lied under oath about hooking up with his intern, and who probably lied about his presence on Little St. James, Epstein’s sex island; the billionaire chairman of Hyatt Hotels, Thomas Pritzker; ex-president and serial rapist Donald John Trump; and an alarming number of billionaires, scientists, politicians, entertainers, and modeling industry bigwigs. Those are some powerful, powerful people. Epstein committed his crimes for decades, and appears to have been protected by the authorities. And his death while in federal custody—on the watch of Attorney General Bill Barr, whose father gave Epstein his first job at the Dalton School—will be conspiracy-theory fodder until the end of time.
In Washington, meanwhile, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, a Republican, is a “serial child molester,” in the words of the federal judge who sentenced him. His perverted predilections and history of pedophilia did not stop him from being second in line to the presidency for eight years. Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, was the assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State during a period when the team’s doctor was molesting the student athletes; according to witness testimony, Jordan was well aware of this and did nothing. The garrulous former governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards, once quipped, “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Given the ample rumors and off-the-record accusations, one does not have to have a conspiratorial mind to wonder if this maxim might apply to another Southern politician, whose sudden ardor for Trump is only surpassed by his thirst for dry martinis.
It is not just conspiracy theorists asking why this odious stuff went on as long as it did, why so many prominent people were involved, and why law enforcement turned a blind eye. In the case of Epstein, while we might guess at the source of his power and his funding, there is still not an adequate public explanation. So it is no great mystery why men like Maddison Welch, perhaps imagining their own daughters being trafficked by these monsters, take it upon themselves to, as the popular hashtag has it, #SaveTheChildren.
The stickiest conspiracy theories take hold because they are grounded in truth. In the Q narrative, the kernel of truth is the trafficking and rape of underage girls by rich and powerful men. As Epstein showed, that was not fiction. What has never made sense is the second part of the Q narrative: that Donald John Trump, of all people, was secretly working to expose and destroy the secret child sex ring. This is a man who has been credibly accused of four dozen sexual assaults or rapes. This is a man who bragged on tape about grabbing women by the you-know-what. This is a man who sent his own teenage daughter to a modeling agency run by a notorious abuser of underage women . This is a man who, when he discovered that his pal Jeffrey Epstein had a thing for very young women, was like, “Great, when can we party?” (Seriously: In 1992, he and Jeffrey went to a bash teeming with underage women, and they were the only men there). Thiswas the savior of the children? Donald Trump? Really? Where, I wondered, did Q come up with that big idea?
As it happens, the Trump-as-white-hat narrative may have originated with Donald Trump himself—with his fractious relationship with Epstein after the two had a falling out in 2004 over a piece of real estate in Palm Beach. As the indefatigable Craig Unger reports in the Vanity Fair excerpt of his new book, American Kompromat, Epstein asked Trump for advice on how to modify the property—and Trump, snake that he is, went behind his friend’s back and outbid him! It got worse, as Unger reports:
Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for a reported $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again.
From then on, whenever Epstein’s name was mentioned to Trump, the whole tenor of the conversation instantly changed. And that wasn’t the end of it. In 2005, the Palm Beach Police Department began investigating Epstein’s relationship to the young women around him. According to someone who knew him, Epstein believed Trump got the police to investigate him in retaliation for threatening to sue.
Basically, as Unger tells it, Trump fukked over Epstein, and when Epstein called him out for it, Trump narc’d him out to the police! While we can’t say for sure if this is the case, Epstein certainly believed it. If true, it means that, yes, serial rapist Donald Trump really was the prime mover in the downfall of Jeffrey Epstein—but for revenge, and not for the altruistic reasons Q would have us believe.
What’s that, you ask? How would Donald John Trump, a mere businessman, know how to covertly rat out his associate? As Lincoln’s Bible has been patiently explaining for some time, Trump, a top echelon Confidential Informant, had done likewise for decades, to criminals just as odious as Epstein.
The same information terrorists who radicalized Maddison Welch in 2016 radicalized many thousands of people four years later, as Pizzagate mutated into QAnon. Alex Jones was prominently involved in both ops, and he is hardly unique in that regard. The result? The besieging of the Capitol on January 6. It is telling how statements made by the indicted insurrectionists echo the letter Welch wrote at his sentencing. Here is what the attorney for the so-called “Q Shaman” told a local radio station: the Shaman “regrets very, very much having not just been duped by the president, but by being in a position where he allowed that duping to put him in a position to make decisions he should not have made.”
They thought they were fighting for a just cause! They thought they were there at the invitation of the president!
Winning the war against the information terrorists—the Steve Bannons and Rogers Stones and Alex Joneses and Jack Posobiacs and Mike Flynn père et fils—depends on Q adherents waking up and smelling the proverbial coffee. Here, alas, we are also fighting against human nature. No one wants to feel the humiliation that comes with being fooled by such an obvious scam; it is easier, psychologically, to double down.
But as Q prophets push back the date of the Second Trump Inaugural (now scheduled for March 4, as January 20 didn’t work out so hot), as duped besiegers come to grips with the criminal charges filed against them, as even the Proud Boys realize that Trump sold them a bill of goods, the story becomes less and less plausible. The narrator is unreliable.
When Maddison Welch went to Comet Ping Pong a month after the 2016 election, he was looking for captured children. He was also looking for the truth. He found the one, but not the other. Welch went about it the wrong way, obviously. But his impulse to actively get to the bottom of a Reddit rumor, rather than just share it on social media, was a good thing. Now he knows the truth, just as the Q Shaman knows, just as the Proud Boys know.
Churchill once quipped that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. That is even more true in the age of social media. But here’s the rub: the truth always prevails.
45https://twitter.com/john_sipher/status/1355199004523581443
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...b53b80-5029-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html
Piling up incriminating information about Trump’s Russian connections
A protester dons a mask depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin during a demonstration outside Donald Trump’s Washington hotel in October. In his book, Craig Unger makes a detailed case that Trump is a Kremlin asset. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)
By John Sipher
John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.
Jan. 29, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. UTC
One of the standard warnings attached to U.S. intelligence reports is that the source of a report intends “to influence as well as inform.” The caveat does not mean that the source’s reporting is wrong or should be discounted, but that the source also has an agenda. Craig Unger’s new book, “American Kompromat,” should be read with a similar understanding, for it opens with the presumption that former president Donald Trump is, as former CIA director Michael Hayden described him, “a clear and present danger.” Unger starts from the premise that Trump is a Kremlin asset and proceeds to advance the argument with great detail.
Unger is a veteran investigative journalist and writer, and “American Kompromat” is a follow-up to his 2018 book, “House of Trump, House of Putin,” in which he made the case for Russian collusion. “American Kompromat” can be read alongside others that examine Trump’s weak spot for Russia — including Greg Miller’s “The Apprentice,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s “Russian Roulette,” Luke Harding’s “Shadow State,” Tim Weiner’s “The Folly and the Glory,” and Seth Abramson’s “Proof of Collusion” — as well as books by insiders such as Peter Strzok, former FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; Josh Campbell, a former FBI special agent and special assistant to then-Director James Comey; and Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI.
(Dutton)
As the Trump administration came to a spectacular end, Unger must have felt the need to update his book continually. Day by day, Trump took actions that added to Unger’s thesis. In the closing weeks of his term, Trump sought to divert attention from a damaging Russian cyberhack, refused to concede Russian President Vladimir Putin’s poisoning of his leading political challenger and brazenly pardoned cronies who refused to testify in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. (Not to mention allegedly inciting the mob that violently overtook the Capitol.)
Unger outlines Trump’s decades-long relationships with Russian criminals and his willingness to abet the laundering of dirty money flowing from Moscow, and explains why Russian intelligence would find him an easy mark. The web of Trump’s damning connections and his actions as president suggest some sort of affinity for Putin.
According to Unger, there are indications that Trump was used as a conduit for Soviet covert messaging campaigns in the late 1980s. He made numerous visits to Russia where he was certainly watched, feted and cultivated. At the time, he publicly expressed thoughts that were far outside of mainstream Western opinion. For example, he complained that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was destroying the Soviet Union — suggesting perhaps relations with KGB elements that shared such a view. Unger cites former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, who served in Washington at the time, saying of Trump: “The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
By compiling decades of Trump’s seedy ties, disturbing and consistent patterns of behavior, and unexplained contacts with Russian officials and criminals, Unger makes a strong case that Trump is probably a compromised trusted contact of Kremlin interests.
That said, it is not an argument meant to stand up to the scrutiny of a criminal court (that would require evidence hidden in Russian intelligence files). Instead, it is a counterintelligence case, a circumstantial compilation of patterns, relationships and logical inferences. Even though counterintelligence probes often do not lead to arrests, the stakes of such investigations may be of far more serious consequence. We have learned over the past several years that many of the most important firewalls in our democracy are not necessarily written in the legal code. It may not be a crime for a presidential candidate to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power and lie about it, but it is potentially a far more serious challenge to our system.
In short, Unger alleges that Trump’s long-standing ties to Russian organized crime, his lifestyle and his business practices made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by the country that is unarguably the best in the world at those dark arts. His campaign team — with its own unusual shady ties to Russia — was willing to work with a hostile foreign power and eager to accept material stolen from Americans. None went to the authorities to report the illicit contacts, and many of them were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly, every single one of them lied and covered up their actions. Trump then attacked the very institutions that could hold him to account and sought to obstruct investigations, eventually pardoning anyone who could provide evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump’s most fervent supporters have been unable to provide an innocent explanation for why a domestic political campaign would need such deep engagement with a hostile foreign power.
Unger’s narrative of collusion relies on piling up any and all damning information he can muster. However, in some cases, the very volume of information undercuts the strength of his argument. Trump’s presidency was such a ruinous fiasco, it is tempting to keep adding inexplicable actions to the pile. However, the tangential material often confuses more than clarifies. Chapters on William Barr, the Catholic Opus Dei sect, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein are interesting but do little to illuminate Trump’s perfidy. For example, Unger ties Barr to FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, suggesting that Hanssen was promoted while Barr was the attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Anyone with experience in government would be hard-pressed to explain how a mid-level FBI promotion of someone not yet suspected of a crime would be of interest to the attorney general.
Further, Unger relies on relatively few sources, and none with direct access to Trump or present-day Russia. Shvets and Oleg Kalugin, his sources on Russian intelligence methodology, were celebrated KGB officers but left Russia in the late 1980s and have no direct knowledge of Trump’s contacts with Russian officials. They provide interesting context and color, but Unger would have benefited from a wider variety of sources.
Trump’s election exposed a previously undetected flaw in our system of protecting national security secrets. A duly elected president cannot be denied a security clearance, yet the Republican Party nominated a candidate whose greed, lack of morals and relationship with criminal elements should have disqualified him for the lowest-level clearance, much less the highest office in the land. What Unger’s books have shown us is that the evidence was there for anyone willing to look. “American Kompromat” uncovers no secrets, nor does it reveal much that is new, but it reminds us that there is still much left to learn. We know that Trump was compromised, but we’re not sure exactly how.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...b53b80-5029-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html
Piling up incriminating information about Trump’s Russian connections
A protester dons a mask depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin during a demonstration outside Donald Trump’s Washington hotel in October. In his book, Craig Unger makes a detailed case that Trump is a Kremlin asset. (Reuters/Carlos Barria)
By John Sipher
John Sipher worked for the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment.
Jan. 29, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. UTC
One of the standard warnings attached to U.S. intelligence reports is that the source of a report intends “to influence as well as inform.” The caveat does not mean that the source’s reporting is wrong or should be discounted, but that the source also has an agenda. Craig Unger’s new book, “American Kompromat,” should be read with a similar understanding, for it opens with the presumption that former president Donald Trump is, as former CIA director Michael Hayden described him, “a clear and present danger.” Unger starts from the premise that Trump is a Kremlin asset and proceeds to advance the argument with great detail.
Unger is a veteran investigative journalist and writer, and “American Kompromat” is a follow-up to his 2018 book, “House of Trump, House of Putin,” in which he made the case for Russian collusion. “American Kompromat” can be read alongside others that examine Trump’s weak spot for Russia — including Greg Miller’s “The Apprentice,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s “Russian Roulette,” Luke Harding’s “Shadow State,” Tim Weiner’s “The Folly and the Glory,” and Seth Abramson’s “Proof of Collusion” — as well as books by insiders such as Peter Strzok, former FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; Josh Campbell, a former FBI special agent and special assistant to then-Director James Comey; and Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI.
(Dutton)
As the Trump administration came to a spectacular end, Unger must have felt the need to update his book continually. Day by day, Trump took actions that added to Unger’s thesis. In the closing weeks of his term, Trump sought to divert attention from a damaging Russian cyberhack, refused to concede Russian President Vladimir Putin’s poisoning of his leading political challenger and brazenly pardoned cronies who refused to testify in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. (Not to mention allegedly inciting the mob that violently overtook the Capitol.)
Unger outlines Trump’s decades-long relationships with Russian criminals and his willingness to abet the laundering of dirty money flowing from Moscow, and explains why Russian intelligence would find him an easy mark. The web of Trump’s damning connections and his actions as president suggest some sort of affinity for Putin.
According to Unger, there are indications that Trump was used as a conduit for Soviet covert messaging campaigns in the late 1980s. He made numerous visits to Russia where he was certainly watched, feted and cultivated. At the time, he publicly expressed thoughts that were far outside of mainstream Western opinion. For example, he complained that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was destroying the Soviet Union — suggesting perhaps relations with KGB elements that shared such a view. Unger cites former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, who served in Washington at the time, saying of Trump: “The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
By compiling decades of Trump’s seedy ties, disturbing and consistent patterns of behavior, and unexplained contacts with Russian officials and criminals, Unger makes a strong case that Trump is probably a compromised trusted contact of Kremlin interests.
That said, it is not an argument meant to stand up to the scrutiny of a criminal court (that would require evidence hidden in Russian intelligence files). Instead, it is a counterintelligence case, a circumstantial compilation of patterns, relationships and logical inferences. Even though counterintelligence probes often do not lead to arrests, the stakes of such investigations may be of far more serious consequence. We have learned over the past several years that many of the most important firewalls in our democracy are not necessarily written in the legal code. It may not be a crime for a presidential candidate to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power and lie about it, but it is potentially a far more serious challenge to our system.
In short, Unger alleges that Trump’s long-standing ties to Russian organized crime, his lifestyle and his business practices made him uniquely vulnerable to blackmail and extortion by the country that is unarguably the best in the world at those dark arts. His campaign team — with its own unusual shady ties to Russia — was willing to work with a hostile foreign power and eager to accept material stolen from Americans. None went to the authorities to report the illicit contacts, and many of them were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly, every single one of them lied and covered up their actions. Trump then attacked the very institutions that could hold him to account and sought to obstruct investigations, eventually pardoning anyone who could provide evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump’s most fervent supporters have been unable to provide an innocent explanation for why a domestic political campaign would need such deep engagement with a hostile foreign power.
Unger’s narrative of collusion relies on piling up any and all damning information he can muster. However, in some cases, the very volume of information undercuts the strength of his argument. Trump’s presidency was such a ruinous fiasco, it is tempting to keep adding inexplicable actions to the pile. However, the tangential material often confuses more than clarifies. Chapters on William Barr, the Catholic Opus Dei sect, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein are interesting but do little to illuminate Trump’s perfidy. For example, Unger ties Barr to FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, suggesting that Hanssen was promoted while Barr was the attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Anyone with experience in government would be hard-pressed to explain how a mid-level FBI promotion of someone not yet suspected of a crime would be of interest to the attorney general.
Further, Unger relies on relatively few sources, and none with direct access to Trump or present-day Russia. Shvets and Oleg Kalugin, his sources on Russian intelligence methodology, were celebrated KGB officers but left Russia in the late 1980s and have no direct knowledge of Trump’s contacts with Russian officials. They provide interesting context and color, but Unger would have benefited from a wider variety of sources.
Trump’s election exposed a previously undetected flaw in our system of protecting national security secrets. A duly elected president cannot be denied a security clearance, yet the Republican Party nominated a candidate whose greed, lack of morals and relationship with criminal elements should have disqualified him for the lowest-level clearance, much less the highest office in the land. What Unger’s books have shown us is that the evidence was there for anyone willing to look. “American Kompromat” uncovers no secrets, nor does it reveal much that is new, but it reminds us that there is still much left to learn. We know that Trump was compromised, but we’re not sure exactly how.
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nytimes.com
Trump's Banker at Deutsche Bank Ousted Over Real Estate Deal
David Enrich
5-6 minutes
New regulatory records show the bank found that Rosemary Vrablic had engaged in undisclosed investment activity involving a client.
Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s longtime banker at Deutsche Bank was pushed out of her job in December following an internal investigation that concluded that she did business with a client without properly disclosing it, according to regulatory records that were made public on Wednesday.
Deutsche Bank’s review found that Rosemary Vrablic, a senior private banker and managing director in its wealth management business in New York, “engaged in undisclosed activities related to a real estate investment,” including buying a property “from a client-managed entity,” the bank said in records filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
The records said Ms. Vrablic, who left the bank in December, was “permitted to resign.”
Deutsche Bank’s internal review concerned a 2013 real estate transaction between Ms. Vrablic and a company, Bergel 715 Associates. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, held at least a small ownership stake in Bergel 715, according to a financial disclosure report he filed with the government last summer.
The bank’s investigation began last year after The New York Times reported that Ms. Vrablic and two of her colleagues had bought an apartment in a Park Avenue building for about $1.5 million.
At the time of the apartment purchase, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner had already borrowed nearly $200 million from Ms. Vrablic’s division at Deutsche Bank, and they would soon come back looking for hundreds of millions of dollars more.
It isn’t clear from the regulatory filing whether Deutsche Bank was concerned with Mr. Kushner’s connection to the transaction. The reference to “a client-managed entity” suggests that one of the managers of Bergel 715 Associates — in other words, not Mr. Kushner — was also a client of Ms. Vrablic’s.
Banks typically restrict their employees from doing side business with their clients because of the potential for it to create conflicts between the employees’ personal interests and those of the bank.
The records filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority also faulted Ms. Vrablic for “the formation of an unapproved outside entity to hold the investment.”
Ms. Vrablic’s partners on the 2013 transaction were Dominic Scalzi, a banker who reported to Ms. Vrablic, as well as Mr. Scalzi’s nephew, who at the time also worked at Deutsche Bank, according to public records. Mr. Scalzi resigned from Deutsche Bank along with Ms. Vrablic in December; his nephew had previously left.
In a separate regulatory filing, Deutsche Bank included an identical disclosure about the circumstances of Mr. Scalzi’s departure.
Ms. Vrablic’s lawyer declined to comment. Mr. Scalzi’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In the years before Mr. Trump ran for president, Ms. Vrablic was one of his most important financial partners.
At a time when he was largely frozen out of the mainstream banking system because of his history of defaults — including on a large loan from Deutsche Bank — Ms. Vrablic persuaded the bank’s executives to give Mr. Trump another chance. From 2012 through 2015, the bank lent him about $340 million for his Florida golf club, his Chicago skyscraper and his luxury hotel in Washington.
By the time Mr. Trump was sworn in as president, with Ms. Vrablic a V.I.P. guest at his inauguration, Deutsche Bank was by far his biggest creditor.
Mr. Trump owes about $330 million to Deutsche Bank, which is his largest lender. Those debts are scheduled to come due in 2023 and 2024. Mr. Trump has personally guaranteed those loans, which meant that if he were to default, the bank would have recourse to pursue his personal assets.
Deutsche Bank executives late last year concluded that they would not do business with Mr. Trump or his company in the future, a person familiar with the matter previously said.
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Trump's Banker at Deutsche Bank Ousted Over Real Estate Deal
David Enrich
5-6 minutes
New regulatory records show the bank found that Rosemary Vrablic had engaged in undisclosed investment activity involving a client.
Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s longtime banker at Deutsche Bank was pushed out of her job in December following an internal investigation that concluded that she did business with a client without properly disclosing it, according to regulatory records that were made public on Wednesday.
Deutsche Bank’s review found that Rosemary Vrablic, a senior private banker and managing director in its wealth management business in New York, “engaged in undisclosed activities related to a real estate investment,” including buying a property “from a client-managed entity,” the bank said in records filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
The records said Ms. Vrablic, who left the bank in December, was “permitted to resign.”
Deutsche Bank’s internal review concerned a 2013 real estate transaction between Ms. Vrablic and a company, Bergel 715 Associates. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, held at least a small ownership stake in Bergel 715, according to a financial disclosure report he filed with the government last summer.
The bank’s investigation began last year after The New York Times reported that Ms. Vrablic and two of her colleagues had bought an apartment in a Park Avenue building for about $1.5 million.
At the time of the apartment purchase, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner had already borrowed nearly $200 million from Ms. Vrablic’s division at Deutsche Bank, and they would soon come back looking for hundreds of millions of dollars more.
It isn’t clear from the regulatory filing whether Deutsche Bank was concerned with Mr. Kushner’s connection to the transaction. The reference to “a client-managed entity” suggests that one of the managers of Bergel 715 Associates — in other words, not Mr. Kushner — was also a client of Ms. Vrablic’s.
Banks typically restrict their employees from doing side business with their clients because of the potential for it to create conflicts between the employees’ personal interests and those of the bank.
The records filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority also faulted Ms. Vrablic for “the formation of an unapproved outside entity to hold the investment.”
Ms. Vrablic’s partners on the 2013 transaction were Dominic Scalzi, a banker who reported to Ms. Vrablic, as well as Mr. Scalzi’s nephew, who at the time also worked at Deutsche Bank, according to public records. Mr. Scalzi resigned from Deutsche Bank along with Ms. Vrablic in December; his nephew had previously left.
In a separate regulatory filing, Deutsche Bank included an identical disclosure about the circumstances of Mr. Scalzi’s departure.
Ms. Vrablic’s lawyer declined to comment. Mr. Scalzi’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In the years before Mr. Trump ran for president, Ms. Vrablic was one of his most important financial partners.
At a time when he was largely frozen out of the mainstream banking system because of his history of defaults — including on a large loan from Deutsche Bank — Ms. Vrablic persuaded the bank’s executives to give Mr. Trump another chance. From 2012 through 2015, the bank lent him about $340 million for his Florida golf club, his Chicago skyscraper and his luxury hotel in Washington.
By the time Mr. Trump was sworn in as president, with Ms. Vrablic a V.I.P. guest at his inauguration, Deutsche Bank was by far his biggest creditor.
Mr. Trump owes about $330 million to Deutsche Bank, which is his largest lender. Those debts are scheduled to come due in 2023 and 2024. Mr. Trump has personally guaranteed those loans, which meant that if he were to default, the bank would have recourse to pursue his personal assets.
Deutsche Bank executives late last year concluded that they would not do business with Mr. Trump or his company in the future, a person familiar with the matter previously said.
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The Durham Report nothing burger
