RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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politico.com
Trump dossier author Steele gets 16-hour DOJ grilling
By NATASHA BERTRAND
5-6 minutes
During the 2016 election, Christopher Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to research President Donald Trump’s Russia ties. | Victoria Jones/AP Photo
Foreign Policy
The interview was contentious at first, according to two people familiar with the matter, but investigators ultimately found his testimony credible and even surprising.
Christopher Steele, the former British spy behind the infamous “dossier” on President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, was interviewed for 16 hours in June by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The interview is part of an ongoing investigation that the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has been conducting for the past year. Specifically, Horowitz has been examining the FBI’s efforts to surveil a one-time Trump campaign adviser based in part on information from Steele, an ex-British MI6 agent who had worked with the bureau as a confidential source since 2010.
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Horowitz’s team has been intensely focused on gauging Steele’s credibility as a source for the bureau. But Steele was initially reluctant to speak with the American investigators because of the potential impropriety of his involvement in an internal DOJ probe as a foreign national and retired British intelligence agent.
Steele’s allies have also repeatedly noted that the dossier was not the original basis for the FBI’s probe into Trump and Russia.
The extensive, two-day interview took place in London while Trump was in Britain for a state visit, the sources said, and delved into Steele’s extensive work on Russian interference efforts globally, his intelligence-collection methods and his findings about Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who the FBI ultimately surveilled. The FBI’s decision to seek a surveillance warrant against Page — a warrant they applied for and obtained after Page had already left the campaign — is the chief focus of the probe by Horowitz.
The interview was contentious at first, the sources added, but investigators ultimately found Steele’s testimony credible and even surprising. The takeaway has irked some U.S. officials interviewed as part of the probe — they argue that it shouldn’t have taken a foreign national to convince the inspector general that the FBI acted properly in 2016. Steele’s American lawyer was present for the conversation.
The interview was first reported by Reuters.
During the 2016 election, Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to research Trump’s Russia ties. His work was funded in part by a law firm that represented the Democratic National Committee.
Since then, Steele has become a villain to Trump allies who claim that anti-Trump DOJ officials conspired to undo the results of the 2016 election. Conservatives have also seized on Mueller’s conclusion that no criminal conspiracy existed between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin as evidence that Steele’s sensational dossier was a fraud.
But the extensive interview with Steele, and the investigators’ sense that he offered new and important information, may dampen expectations among the president’s allies who’ve claimed that Steele’s sensational dossier was used improperly by the bureau to “spy” on the campaign.
Page had been on the FBI’s radar since 2013, when he interacted with undercover Russian intelligence agents in New York City. A trip to Moscow in the summer of 2016 further aroused the bureau’s suspicions, according to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant the FBI got approved in October 2016, allowing the bureau to intercept his electronic communications.
Steele’s defenders have noted that the information he provided which made it into the FISA warrant application to monitor Page was not far off. According to Steele’s sources, Page met with high-level Russian officials while in Moscow in July 2016, including the CEO of Russia’s state-owned oil giant Rosneft.
Page denied the claim publicly until pressed under oath by lawmakers in 2017, when he acknowledged meeting “senior members of the presidential administration” during his trip, as well as the head of investor relations at Rosneft. Page had originally claimed only that he went to Moscow to give the commencement address at the New Economic School.
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nytimes.com
Michael Flynn Changes His Story, Putting Him on Collision Course With Judge
By Adam Goldman
7-8 minutes
Politics|Michael Flynn Changes His Story, Putting Him on Collision Course With Judge
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Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, will not deliver testimony he planned to give as part of a cooperation deal with the government.CreditCreditPatrick Semansky/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, backed off his planned testimony in a federal case against a former associate, according to court documents unsealed on Tuesday.
Mr. Flynn had previously admitted that he lied on foreign lobbying disclosure forms submitted to the Justice Department but now is blaming his former lawyers, accusing them of filing inaccurate forms without his knowledge. He did not dispute that the filing itself contained false information.
His latest gambit could provoke another dramatic and risky confrontation with the federal judge who delayed sentencing Mr. Flynn last year in a separate case so he could continue to cooperate with the government in the hopes of a lighter punishment. And it was the latest strange turn in a prosecution that should have run its course without much drama after Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to investigators and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigators.
Mr. Flynn’s lawyers might not care what the judge does if they believe President Trump will pardon his former national security adviser. Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Flynn is a good man who was treated poorly but has not said whether he will pardon him.
Mr. Flynn abruptly changed lawyers last month but has not said why. In the newly unsealed documents, his new lawyers seemed to take issue with his previous legal team, blaming them for the filing that helped land their client in legal trouble. Mr. Flynn’s changing story might have also prompted a change in representation because his previous lawyers had negotiated his plea deal with federal prosecutors.
As a result of Mr. Flynn’s unexpected disclosure, federal prosecutors say they will no longer ask him to testify in the trial of a former business partner, Bijan Kian, who is accused of violating foreign lobbying disclosure laws. Prosecutors played down Mr. Flynn’s testimony, saying it was not vital to the case. Other “evidence alone,” they wrote, “is ample to convict the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt.”
But Mr. Flynn’s testimony had been one of the reasons Judge Emmet G. Sullivan allowed Mr. Flynn to push back his sentencing, but his lawyers said he “cannot give that testimony because it is not true.”
Mr. Flynn’s new position surprised prosecutors who had long planned to use him as a key witness against Mr. Kian in his trial that was set to begin next week in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Mr. Kian was indicted last year along with another man, Ekim Alptekin, as part of a federal investigation into Turkey’s secret 2016 lobbying campaign to pressure the United States to expel a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Prosecutors accused the two men of seeking to conceal that Turkey was directing the work, and that high-level Turkish officials approved the budget for the project and were given regular updates by Mr. Alptekin about the campaign’s progress. Mr. Flynn’s firm — Flynn Intel Group — received a total of $530,000 for its work.
Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to F.B.I. agents about conversations with the Russian ambassador at the time about sanctions. Mr. Flynn also admitted to prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that he had repeatedly violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the law requiring firms to register their work on behalf of foreign clients. He acknowledged making “materially false statements and omissions” in those filings.
In the wake of Mr. Flynn’s reversal, federal prosecutors are now asserting that he is an unindicted co-conspirator rather than a cooperating witness and want to introduce his statements as evidence. Lawyers for Mr. Kian and Mr. Flynn both object vigorously to that move by prosecutors.
Lawyers for Mr. Flynn suggested that the government’s new position was possibly in “retaliation for Mr. Flynn’s truthful testimony the government does not like.” His lawyers also said that Mr. Flynn’s testimony would remain consistent with the facts of his plea deal and his statement of the offense. “When Mr. Flynn agreed in his ‘statement of offense’ in Judge Sullivan’s court that certain information in the FARA filing was false, he was doing so with some hindsight,” Mr. Flynn’s lawyers wrote.
Prosecutors, however, “do not necessarily agree with these characterizations,” they told defense lawyers.
That could be a sign that Mr. Flynn could find himself at odds again with Judge Sullivan, the federal judge in Washington presiding over his case related to lying to the F.B.I.
In a sentencing hearing late last year, Judge Sullivan upbraided Mr. Flynn for his conduct and raised concerns over suggestions by Mr. Flynn’s previous lawyers in presentencing memos that the F.B.I. agents who questioned him might have tricked him because they did not warn him that lying to investigators was a crime. Judge Sullivan gave Mr. Flynn a chance to withdraw from his plea but Mr. Flynn declined and once again told the judge he knew it was a crime to lie to the F.B.I. when agents questioned him in January 2017 at the White House.
Now Mr. Flynn’s cooperation with the government appears to have ended, leaving Judge Sullivan free to sentence him. If Judge Sullivan thinks Mr. Flynn is dodging responsibility, he could hand down a stiffer sentence. Mr. Flynn faces up to six months in prison.
Mr. Flynn’s lawyers also singled out David Laufman, the former counterintelligence chief at the Justice Department’s National Security Division. They said Mr. Laufman pressured Mr. Flynn’s previous lawyer into submitting the false paperwork. But Mr. Flynn’s new lawyers inaccurately described Mr. Laufman’s title at the time and insinuated inaccurately that he left the Justice Department under a cloud amid an internal investigation.
“The attorneys’ claims are nutty and utterly without merit,” Mr. Laufman said in an interview.
Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Flynn’s new lawyer Sidney Powell, who has repeatedly attacked the special counsel’s prosecutors in appearances on Fox News. She also sells T-shirts that depict caricatures of law enforcement officials who have been involved in the investigation — like Mr. Mueller and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey — above the hashtag #CreepsOnAMission.
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From 2003. Remember, GHISLANE MAXWELL is ROBERT MAXWELL'S DAUGHTER...GHISLANE IS A CO-PIMP OF SORTS WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN!
From 2003. Remember, GHISLANE MAXWELL is ROBERT MAXWELL'S DAUGHTER...GHISLANE IS A CO-PIMP OF SORTS WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN!
telegraph.co.uk
FO suspected Maxwell was a Russian agent, papers reveal
By Lydia Bell
2-3 minutes
British intelligence officers suspected that Robert Maxwell, the disgraced publisher, was a Soviet agent, according to Foreign Office papers which have just been released.
After the former Mirror newspapers chief and ex-Labour MP died at sea on November 5 1991, there was widespread speculation that he might have been a double or even a triple agent, but the FBI found nothing in a decade of monitoring him, despite his known links with MI6, the KGB and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
However, his file, titled "Captain Ian Maxwell", at the National Archives in Kew, London, has been found to contain reports submitted to the Information Research Department (IRD), a covert unit of the Foreign Office, describing him as "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia".
Correspondence between various members of the IRD reveal that the Czech-born Maxwell had been considered to be a suspicious figure directly after the Second World War, when Maxwell, then a lieutenant in the British Army, was working for the British Control Commission in Berlin - an allied administrative body.
Digby Ackland, of the IRD, wrote in a 1959 report that "Capt Maxwell's questionable activities have been brought to the notice of the Foreign Office on several occasions over the past 10 years".
Maxwell established Pergamon Press, which specialised in scientific books from Germany and Eastern bloc countries. Despite the Foreign Office suspicions, he became a Labour MP in 1964. He maintained links with Russian leaders until his death.
His son Kevin defended his father, who died leaving a £400 million hole in his publishing empire's pension fund. He claimed that the documents were merely evidence "of a long line of Foreign Office tripe".
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elpais.com
Spanish security company spied on Julian Assange’s meetings with lawyers
José María Irujo
7-8 minutes
Julian Assange was spied on 24 hours a day during the time that he spent at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he took refuge for seven years.
Documents, video and audio material that EL PAÍS has had access to show that a Spanish private defense and security firm named Undercover Global S. L., which was tasked with protecting the diplomatic building between 2012 and 2018, instructed its men to collect all possible information about the cyberactivist, particularly regarding his lawyers and collaborators.
Assange was so paranoid about being spied on that he conducted some of his meetings inside the ladies’ bathroom
Several video cameras, which were equipped with audio recording capability between December 2017 and March 2018, recorded dozens of meetings between the WikiLeaks founder and his attorneys and visitors. At these meetings, Assange’s legal defense strategy was discussed.
The recording equipment picked up on several secret plans drafted by Assange’s team to spirit him out of the embassy in disguise and take him to Russia or Cuba. The projects were never executed because the Australian-born activist refused, as he considered this solution “a defeat.”
UC Global’s feverish, obsessive vigilance of “the guest,” as he is described in the security firm’s notes, became more intense when Lenin Moreno became the new president of Ecuador in May 2017. It was Moreno who turned Assange over to British authorities. His predecessor, Rafael Correa, had granted him asylum and allowed him to stay at the embassy in London for seven years.
The security employees at the embassy had a daily job to do: to monitor Assange’s every move, record his conversations, and take note of his moods. The company’s drive to uncover their target’s most intimate secrets led the team to carry out a handwriting examination behind his back, which resulted in a six-page report. Company employees also took a feces sample from a baby’s diaper to check whether Assange and one of his most faithful collaborators were the child’s parents. This intelligence work had nothing to do with protection duties.
The security team for the Spanish company, which is based in Puerto Real (Cádiz), would write up a confidential report each day and send it to the company chief, David Morales, a former member of the military who trained with the special ops unit of the Marine Infantry, the marine corps of the Spanish Navy.
A handwriting test conducted by UC Global.S.L.
The degree of detail found in these reports illustrates how the company was bent on accumulating as much information as possible on a man who is indicted on 18 counts for leaking thousands of cables from the US State Department, as well as secret information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Great exaltation and nervousness by the guest after receiving news about the sentence commutation for [Chelsea] Manning [the soldier accused of passing secret documents to WikiLeaks],” reads the January 17, 2017 report. “Julian is providing a lot of information. The guest keeps writing in his agenda. You can feel the tension in the room. The guest hides his agenda with his hands at all times. Stella peeks out the door, thinking somebody could be listening in,” writes the security employee about the visit made by Walaman Adan Robert on January 12, 2017.
Another report dated January 21, 2017 says: “3.30pm-6.28pm. Pamela Anderson. They exchange information through notes. They take pictures inside the meeting room. The voice-distortion device is on at all times.”
On February 5 of that same year, the report says: “Approximately since 9pm, both the guest and Stella are moving things from the bedroom (clothes, mattress, suitcases, etc) to the entrance room. It is 11.35pm and they’re still at it.”
One of the visitors who elicited the biggest response from the Spanish security company was Andy Müller-Maguhn, a known German hacker. On one of his visits to Assange, security personnel photographed the inside of his travel bag and the numbers on his cellphones.
But if the security guards were obsessed with capturing every last detail about the “guest” staying at the “hotel,” the WikiLeaks founder was no less obsessed about avoiding being spied on. Every time he met with his lawyers and visitors, Assange would first turn on the aforementioned voice-distortion device, which was concealed inside a lamp. However, this did not prevent audio-recording equipment from capturing every conversation. Some videos show the cyberactivist writing with a folder covering the sheet of paper, to prevent any potential cameras from zooming in on his notes.
The security employees at the embassy had a daily job to do: to monitor Assange’s every move, record his conversations, and take note of his moods
Assange was so paranoid about being spied on that he conducted some of his meetings inside the ladies’ bathroom, which he considered a safe place. A report written by a security employee named José Antonio on January 15, 2017 says: “11.18am Aitor Martínez [Spanish lawyer] brings a briefcase, a telephone and a laptop; 11.20am guest, Stella and Aitor Martínez head for the ladies’ room, where they hold the meeting. 1pm: they exit the ladies’ room.” A few days earlier, on January 9, another employee reported on Assange’s meeting with his lawyers Melynda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, Aitor Martínez and Baltasar Garzón.
David Morales, the owner and director of UC Global S.L. declined to say whether his company spied on Assange. “All the information is confidential and it belongs to the government of Ecuador. We simply did a job. I cannot comment on anything that we did there, I can’t provide any details,” he said in a telephone conversation.
Asked directly whether they spied on Assange, the answer was: “We have our ethical and moral rules, and none of them were violated.”
The interest in monitoring Assange’s meetings with his lawyers did not end when the Lenín Moreno administration canceled the contract with UC Global and hired Ecuadorian company Promsecurity to take its place. Video cameras continued to record all meetings, and at least on one occasion, either embassy personnel or the new security team photographed a folder brought in by the lawyer Aitor Martínez during a meeting break.
These photographs, as well as dozens of video and audio recordings, were recently used in an extortion attempt against Assange by several individuals based in Alicante, Spain. The courts are investigating the case, and two of the alleged extortionists were arrested.
Meanwhile, the UK has approved a request for Assange’s extradition made by the US, where he faces 18 charges for leaking classified material.
English version by Susana Urra.
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