RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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spectator.us
Mar-a-Lago is the dream soft target for Chinese spies | Spectator USA
John R. Schindler
6-7 minutes
China Donald Trump World
Another espionage scandal hits Trump’s ‘southern White House’
Mar-a-Lago
Strange espionage events with a Chinese flavor are piling up at Mar-A-Lago, President Trump’s home-away-from-home. Awkward questions are now being raised about what’s really going on, including: are the White House’s real spy problems with Beijing rather than Moscow?
In Goldfinger, the British spy-turned-spy-novelist Ian Fleming gave the world the classic line, ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’ Veteran counterspies generally suspect enemy action well before the third incident, however, and President Trump’s odd Chinese espionage incidents are getting too numerous to ignore.
First, there was the case of Li ‘Cindy’ Yang, a naturalized US citizen born in China, who caused a media sensation last month when it was discovered that since late 2017 she had become a habitué at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort which serves as Trump’s ‘southern White House,’ where the president enjoys entertaining friends, donors, and hangers-on.
Yang was one such, and controversially she previously owned a Florida message parlor where Trump’s billionaire pal Robert Kraft was recently arrested for soliciting prostitution – a scandal which included hints of human trafficking. Furthermore, it turned out that Yang, a self-styled political consultant, had been pushing her access to the president in ads aimed at the Chinese community in Florida. Photos of her with the president and a wide array of Republican notables surfaced, raising questions about what Yang’s access to Trump and his retinue really is.
Making matters worse, it soon emerged that Yang has ties to known fronts for the Communist regime in Beijing. Specifically, she had a leadership role in Florida’s branch of the Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China, which advocates for the union of Taiwan with China on the latter’s terms. The CPPRC, which is known to Western counterintelligence agencies as a front for Beijing, is a subset of the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which reports to the party’s central committee. The UFWD exists to push the Beijing line on a wide array of issues, including to overseas Chinese communities. Its importance has risen in recent years, and in 2014 party boss Xi Jinping referred to the UFWD as the Chinese Communists’ ‘magic weapon.’
That was enough to raise serious counterintelligence concerns in Washington, and last month Congressional Democrats demanded an FBI investigation into the Yang affair, asking the Bureau to ‘conduct criminal and counterintelligence investigations into credible allegations of potential human trafficking, as well as unlawful foreign lobbying, campaign finance and other activities by Ms Yang.’
Things went from bad to worse this week with news that over the weekend, a Chinese woman attempted to infiltrate Mar-a-Lago for apparently nefarious purposes. Arrested while attempting to gain access to the ‘southern White House,’ Yujing Zhang was carrying four cellphones, one laptop, one external hard drive and a thumb drive, while that last item, according to the Secret Service, contained ‘malicious malware.’ So far, Zhang has been charged with entering restricted property and making false statements to a Federal officer.
Zhang initially told a Federal agent that she wished to enter Mar-a-Lago to use the swimming pool, but later changed her story, claiming she had come from Shanghai to discuss US-Chinese economic relations with a member of the Trump family. She also made mention of a non-existent United Nations event. Zhang, who was carrying two Chinese passports, had been enticed to the presidential resort by ads run in Chinese-language social media by – you guessed it! – Cindy Yang.
There were two Mar-a-Lago events on the books last weekend, both promoted online by Yang, one of which was advertised as hosted by Elizabeth Trump Grau, the president’s sister. What exactly Zhang was doing at Mar-a-Lago remains uncertain, but the Democrats’ wish has been granted, and there is a Federal counterintelligence investigation in progress regarding these strange Chinese events at the ‘southern White House,’ as the Miami Herald has revealed. This inquiry, led by the FBI, is looking into the Yang and Zhang cases, in an effort to determine how they are linked and, above all, whether these incidents are connected to the Chinese government. Who Zhang really is remains less than clear at this point.
Given known Beijing practices in espionage and political influence operations, which aggressively employ overseas Chinese in spying on the United States and many Western countries, the FBI has good reason to be suspicious about these cases. There’s a bevy of top-priority espionage targets at Mar-a-Lago, relating to the president and the communications he uses when he is in residence there. Beijing’s interest in such matters would be difficult to overstate. For spies, the ‘southern White House’ – with all the secrets of the real one but few of its defenses against espionage – represents a dream soft-target.
What’s going on down at Mar-a-Lago – including what, if anything, President Trump and his staff have connections to or knowledge of – is a question which needs an answer before there’s a third Chinese spy incident there, removing any doubt that this is enemy action, as Ian Fleming would say.
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Don't forget, Deripaska was linked to an effort to negotiate the release of a kidnapped FBI agent investigating Mogilevich connections in Iran...
Praise for the Mueller Report, From an Unlikely Source: Oleg Deripaska
Don't forget, Deripaska was linked to an effort to negotiate the release of a kidnapped FBI agent investigating Mogilevich connections in Iran...
Praise for the Mueller Report, From an Unlikely Source: Oleg Deripaska
nytimes.com
Praise for the Mueller Report, From an Unlikely Source: Oleg Deripaska
9-11 minutes
In a two-hour interview, the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska said that on the advice of his lawyers he did not cooperate with the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, saying, “Why should I?”CreditCreditEmile Ducke for The New York Times
MOSCOW — The email came out of the blue, from an aide to the mysterious Russian billionaire, Oleg V. Deripaska, who is said to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin and an on-again, off-again character in the two-year investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Would I be interested in interviewing Mr. Deripaska, the aide asked. It was a bit like being summoned to meet with Greta Garbo or J.D. Salinger.
Of course, I said, aware that Mr. Deripaska normally communicated, if at all, through the phalanx of lawyers and publicity agents he surrounded himself with. I wondered to myself why he had suddenly decided to speak out.
Soon enough, I found myself sitting alone in a hotel conference room, at a table bearing a gigantic fruit platter, unsure what to expect. This was, after all, a man who had emerged on top in Russia’s bloody aluminum wars in the 1990s, and was accused in United States Treasury Department documents of suspected ties to organized crime, money laundering and ordering a contract killing.
He is a man of about average stature, whose most striking feature is his large, round head. He was intense, and spoke in a robotic English, so as not to worry about mistranslations, he said.
It soon became clear that he saw the determination of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that the Trump administration had not colluded with Russia, at least according to a Justice Department summary of his findings, as an opening to rehabilitate his image in the West.
This despite the fact that Mr. Deripaska had refused to cooperate with the investigation, revealing for the first time that he had received written questions from the Mueller team but had declined to answer them.
“Do I feel like your president, that I am exonerated?” he said at one point. “I never felt guilty. It was annoying for me. There was this huge crush on my business, on my companies, when sanctions were put on the companies I founded.”
Like President Trump, Mr. Deripaska took a victory lap after the special counsel’s report into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
Over cups of special black tea from his home region, Krasnodar, he complained of the tendency of the American news media to rush to judgment and professed confidence in the United States justice system, which he said would ultimately prove his innocence of any wrongdoing.
A graduate of a prestigious physics faculty, Mr. Deripaska rose to wealth in the 1990s, strong arming his way to a virtual monopoly over the Russian aluminum industry. When it placed sanctions on him and his companies last year, the Treasury Department cited his links to the Russian government, saying he profits from the country’s “malign activity around the globe.”
Even while keeping a low profile, he pursued a costly lobbying and legal effort to assert his innocence. Initially, this revolved around sanctions on his businesses, and with the help of a global influence-buying operation he did persuade the Treasury Department to lift sanctions on his aluminum empire in January.
Mr. Deripaska now wants to escape the personal sanctions, which hinder his ability to do business in the United States. Last month, he filed a lawsuit seeking the removal of those sanctions, which he claims have cost him $7.5 billion.
The conclusion that members of the Trump campaign had not colluded with Russians, Mr. Deripaska said, suggested the tide was shifting in campaigns of innuendo and guilt through leaks to the news media. If so, he said, the American justice system might also eventually clear him of other accusations never proven in court, such as ordering a contract murder.
“I always believe in justice,” said Mr. Deripaska, whose lawyers have frequently fought to keep suits from being brought in American courts, saying they have no jurisdiction. “For us outside the United States, Mueller signals that the U.S. legal system is still alive, it still exists.”
Mr. Deripaska had faced scrutiny for financial entanglements with a former Trump campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, who in July 2016 reportedly asked an associate to offer Mr. Deripaska a private briefing on the presidential race, in hopes of settling a $26 million lawsuit stemming from a failed investment venture. The two had been business associates a decade ago. Mr. Deripaska had denied receiving the offer, but had not addressed these matters in detail while the investigation continued.
“There was a new reality in the U.S. In politics, in social life, you do not respect presumption of innocence,” he said, speaking of the sanctions imposed on him last year and leaks to the news media about the Russia investigation. “There is no due process. Without any court, the public can consider people guilty of something.”
Mr. Deripaska was an early focus of the F.B.I. investigation into Russian meddling. In September 2016, two months before the election, F.B.I. agents questioned him in an early morning visit to his New York residence.
He declined to elaborate on the specific, written questions the special counsel later sent to Moscow, but said they generally tracked news media reports about prosecutors’ suspicions. He did not answer on the advice of his lawyers, he said. Besides, he said, “Why should I?”
Once business associates, Paul J. Manafort and Mr. Deripaska had fallen out by the time Mr. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in 2016.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times
Mr. Manafort agreed to work for the Trump campaign for free, but did seek compensation elsewhere. In an email reported by The Washington Post, Mr. Manafort suggested to a former employee, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, that his dispute with the Russian tyc00n might be resolved by offering “private briefings” about the campaign. Mr. Manafort also transferred internal Trump campaign polling data to Mr. Kilimnik, who the special counsel said had ties to Russian intelligence.
These circumstances still have congressional investigators alarmed. “You might think it’s O.K. that the campaign chairman of a presidential campaign would offer information about that campaign to a Russian oligarch in exchange for money or debt forgiveness,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing last week. “I don’t.”
In the interview, Mr. Deripaska denied, as he had when The Washington Post first reported the offer of private briefings in 2017, ever having received from Mr. Manafort either an offer or any information about the campaign.
“For me, it’s just absurd,” he said. “I had no interest in the U.S. election. Why on earth, if I have no interest, would somebody offer private briefings to me?” He last met Mr. Manafort in 2011, he said.
“It’s not even sociable,” he said of the reported offer of briefings. “It looks like this: You haven’t seen this guy, you know you have this huge sum of a dispute, and then you are like, ‘Let’s go and drink a cup of coffee.’”
Mr. Deripaska said that he indeed suspended his multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Mr. Manafort, but not because Mr. Manafort had asked him to do so or because he had received anything from the campaign chairman in return.
“My lawyers felt that might put me at risk, which anyway happened later, when Manafort appeared in the campaign,” he said, referring to the eventual sanctions that came in 2018. “They didn’t want to bring more attention,” to the business dispute with a man who had become prominent in American politics, he said. He later refiled the lawsuit.
In fighting to lift the personal sanctions, Mr. Deripaska must overcome years-old accusations of ties to organized crime related to his path from the ashes of the former Soviet Union’s aluminum industry to a billionaire with global reach, and allegations he is a front for the Kremlin on foreign policy matters.
Mr. Deripaska called these accusations “balderdash” and his lawsuit challenged the sanction on constitutional grounds. He also denied he is close to Mr. Putin, insisting he only deals with the government on matters of business regulation.
The conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation, he said, gave him hope for success. “I reaffirm to myself that the U.S. systems, that U.S. institutions, still exist.”
Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting from Washington
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