It is Bigger than Burisma and the Bidens, Trump Knows

Posted on November 14, 2019November 15, 2019 by Denise Simon

Speaker Pelosi held a press conference after the first day of the open impeachment inquiry hearing declaring that she is the smartest when it comes to intelligence and she will defend and protect the whistle-blower with all her might. HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff said at least twice that he does not know nor has he spoken to the whistle-blower. Sheesh really? REALLY?

Pelosi and Schiff are for sure covering for something much larger and it is in Ukraine and likely at least a few other countries. There was a historic theft from PrivatBank a few years ago that was in excess of $5 BILLION. Then Ukraine was forced to nationalize the bank until such time the monies were tracked, found or recovered, which still has not happened. The country was financially suffering and the reputation of corruption in Ukraine continued to fester.

Seems our own U.S. State Department was enlisted to step up operations in Ukraine using several government agencies and non-government agencies known as NGO’s.

The matter of the whistle-blower is but one piece of all things Ukraine even while 2 State Department officials, George Kent and William Taylor provide testimony in the first round of the public hearing. (BTW, Kent’s wife is of Crimean-Tatar ancestry) Kent and Taylor are in the thick of all things Ukraine and beyond even while responding in open testimony they were unaware of key political events stateside.

Our not so favorite nefarious operator George Soros is very much at the center of much of the chaos in Ukraine, the Hillary Clinton/John Kerry State Department and some of those NGO’s.

List below are some bullet items for reference. It is difficult to piece together the whole mess but the facts below may help the reader with the long game plot against President Trump because his handful of phone calls with Ukraine President Zelensky regarding investigations into corruption(s) has struck a nerve that the power-brokers in DC are driven to stop and protect.

To boost legitimacy of Ukraine and Burisma, the Obama administration partnered Burisma with USAID.
USAID was enlisted to prepare for a new generation of Ukrainian politicians.
From the U.S. Ukraine Business Council: Briefing by Vadym Pozharskyi, Advisor to the Board of Directors, Burisma Holdings Ukraine’s largest independent gas producer, 30% market share by gas output volume in 2015
Vadym Pozharskyi currently serves as an Advisor to the Board of Directors at the Burisma Holdings. He is also in charge of the Holding’s overseas expansion, GR & PR block. Prior to that, he worked for 4 years in the public sector, inter alia, on positions of the Head of the International Relations Department at the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine and the Deputy Head of the State Environmental Investment Agency of Ukraine.

During these engagements he extensively cooperated with international organizations, led the negotiations group to UNFCCC on the restoration of Ukraine’s status in Kyoto protocol. From 2010 until 2014, Mr. Pozharskyi was the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Focal point in Ukraine.

Burisma Holdings, www.BURISMA.com, since its launch in 2002, has rapidly become the largest gas producer in Ukraine. Burisma Holdings consists of 4 operating companies, engaged in exploration and production of hydrocarbons (dealing with hydrocarbon production). Burisma Holdings has expanded its operations beyond Ukraine and now operates in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and Kazakhstan.

Burisma Geothermal is a new branch of Burisma Holdings. It is a 100% owned subsidiary which specializes in geothermal energy development and electricity production from renewable and environmentally friendly energy sources in Europe. Burisma Holdings has purchased equipment and technologies from such USA companies as Halliburton and Caterpillar.
Several U.S. government agencies were tapped to provide financial assistance to Ukraine and President Trump is right to ask harder questions as there is no Inspector General assigned to Ukraine to track that spending for legitimacy. Remember the legacy of corruption in Ukraine and Trump has a duty to see if he can trust a brand new leader in Zelensky who was never a politician.

William B. Taylor is the executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Earlier, he was the special coordinator for Middle East Transitions in the U.S. State Department. He oversaw assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. Ambassador Taylor became chargé d’affaires ad interim for Ukraine in June 2019. In picking through some of the other names in the membership of The American Academy of Diplomacy (NGO) which includes Taylor, they are: Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Jon Huntsman Jr., John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, Strobe Talbott and Kent Volker.
Willam Taylor as part of the U.S. Institute of Peace, not only was USAID a deeper partner in Ukraine but Google is also. USAID was/is a sponsor of RADA. RADA and the USAID program that launched in November of 2013 collectively took to the streets in Ukraine for what is known as the Revolution of Dignity coordinating with Members of Parliament and civil society organizations and other international experts.
President Trump mentioned Crowdstrike in the phone call. Crowdstrike was hired by Perkins Coie to investigate the hacking of he DNC server. Perkins Coie was the law firm of record for the DNC and hired Fusion GPS. Trump has the notion that Crowdstrike also may have operated out of Ukraine that clues point to Crowdstrike was part of foreign interference into our 2016 elections. It should be noted that a independent group of journalists based in Britain are seeking a UK report of Russian/Ukraine interference their Britain’s election. As a matter of fact, Crowdstrike has an office in London.

With all this political power and international resumes, how was it that Russia was allowed to annex Crimea and invade Ukraine in the first place? Where was Taylor, Nuland, Kerry, Rice or Obama? Too busy with the Iran nuclear deal it seems. The United States needed Russia’s cooperation with the Iran JCPOA so Obama did not grant the request of Ukraine for military aide other than to ship MRE’s and blankets. Congress (read Democrats) never complained until President Trump was in a phone call and approved the eventual shipment of real military aide.

So, back to the beginning, where does this whistle-blower fit in? Seems he was/is the Ukraine expert assigned to VP Biden who was assigned by Obama to be the leader of the envoy for all things Ukraine. At least 6 emails obtained from a FOIA list the Ciaramella in the email chain. Others include Victoria Nuland, George Kent and Kathleen Kavalec. There are other names in the email discussion(s) dated June 2016.

This is a larger operation that has a genesis in Ukraine. There are known quantities of moving parts but it is clear that Pelosi, Schiff and perhaps many others at NGO’s, the State Department, the previous members of the Obama White House are in fact just a little nervous that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani are treading in waters made dark by operatives they are working to hide, defend and protect.

Project Nightingale, Shame on Govt and Google

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Denise Simon

Nobody was told or knew. WTH? Consent is not required. Yeesh

Google is NOT responding to media inquiries either.

Google is reportedly gathering health data on millions of ...

At least 150 Google employees are assigned to this secret program where they have full access. What about the Ascension employees? What about ethics and HIPAA laws? What about Nancy Pelosi and all those Democrats, only democrats that voted for Obamacare? Seems the very small mice type inside the HIPAA law does in fact allow portability of private health information without the patient’s knowledge or approval.

Everyone involved is preaching full legal compliance and this is all allegedly for AI, artificial intelligence operations. If you go asking questions, all this is housed in the Google cloud system.

By the way, Ascension is a Catholic chain of 2600 hospitals.

Google has partnered with one of the largest health care systems in the country to collect data on millions of American patients, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The venture, called Project Nightingale, allows Google to obtain access to personal health care data from Americans across 21 states through its partnership with Ascension, people familiar with the matter told the Journal, which also relied on internal documents for its report.

The data Google has access to includes lab results, doctor diagnoses, hospitalization records and health histories with names and date of births. Neither patients nor doctors were informed that Google was collecting the data, according to the Journal, and at least 150 Google employees have access to the information.Ascension, based in St. Louis, is the second-largest health care system in the country. Google started the project with Ascension last year with the goal of using the data to create new software based on artificial intelligence and machine learning for patients to make their own recommendations for their care.

The Hill has reached out to Google and Ascension for comment.

Big tech companies such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all made efforts to dig into the health care industry, but they haven’t reached a deal this extensive, according to the Journal.

Questions have been raised about whether Google’s actions broke federal law, but privacy experts say it doesn’t.

The experts reference the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 that says data can be shared with business partners without consent of the patient “only to help the covered entity carry out its health-care functions,” the Journal reported.

Trump’s Reelection Operation Targeted by Cyber Attacks

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Denise Simon

Hey Hillary it is not Russia, but they are out there for sure. This time most notable attributions are pointing to Iran.

When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the US military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?

“They’re under assault every hour of the day,” says James Lewis, vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Microsoft’s latest win over cloud rival Amazon for the ultra-lucrative military contact means that an intelligence-gathering apparatus among the most important in the world is based in the woods outside Seattle. These kinds of national security responsibilities once sat almost exclusively in Washington, DC. Now in this corner of Washington state, dozens of engineers and intelligence analysts are dedicated to watching and stopping the government-sponsored hackers proliferating around the world.

Members of the so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team are threat-focused: one group is responsible for Russian hackers code-named Strontium, another watches North Korean hackers code-named Zinc, and yet another tracks Iranian hackers code-named Holmium. MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed.

What are the superpowers of Microsoft?

“Microsoft sees stuff that just nobody else does,” says Williams, who founded the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. “We routinely find stuff, for instance, like flags for malicious IPs in Office 365 that Microsoft flags, but we don’t see it anywhere else for months.”

Connect the dots

Cyber threat intelligence is the discipline of tracking adversaries, following bread crumbs, and producing intelligence you can use to help your team and make the other side’s life harder. To achieve that, the five-year-old MSTIC team includes former spies and government intelligence operators whose experience at places like Fort Meade, home to the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, translates immediately to their roles at Microsoft.

MSTIC names dozens of threats, but the geopolitics are complicated: China and the United States, two of the most significant players in cyberspace and the two biggest economies on earth, are virtually never called out the way countries like Iran, Russia, and North Korea frequently are.

“Our team uses the data, connects the dots, tells the story, tracks the actor and their behaviors,” says Jeremy Dallman, a director of strategic programs and partnerships at MSTIC. “They’re hunting the actors—where they’re moving, what they’re planning next, who they are targeting—and getting ahead of that.”

Microsoft, like other tech giants including Google and Facebook, regularly notifies people targeted by government hackers, which gives the targets the chance to defend themselves. In the last year, MSTIC has notified around 10,000 Microsoft customers that they’re being targeted by government hackers.

New targets

Beginning in August, MSTIC spotted what’s known as a password spraying campaign. Hackers took around 2,700 educated guesses at passwords for accounts associated with an American presidential campaign, government officials, journalists, and high-profile Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised in this attack.

“Once we understand their infrastructure—we have an IP address we know is theirs that they use for malicious purposes—we can start looking at DNS records, domains created, platform traffic,” Dallman says. “When they turn around and start using that infrastructure in this kind of attack, we see it because we’re already tracking that as a known indicator of that actor’s behavior.”

After doing considerable reconnaissance work, Phosphorus tried to exploit the account recovery process by using targets’ real phone numbers. MSTIC has spotted Phosphorus and other government-sponsored hackers, including Russia’s Fancy Bear, repeatedly using that tactic to try to phish two-factor authentication codes for high-value targets.

What raised Microsoft’s alarm above normal on this occasion was that Phosphorus varied its standard operating procedure of going after NGOs and sanctions organizations. The cross-hairs shifted, the tactics changed, and the scope grew.

Microsoft’s sleuthing ultimately pointed the finger at Iranian hackers for targeting presidential campaigns including, Reuters reported, Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection operation.

One consequence of the 2016 US election is a rise in the sheer number of players fighting to hack political parties, campaigns, and think tanks, not to mention government itself. Election-related hacking has typically been the province of the “big four”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. But it’s spreading to other countries, although the Microsoft researchers declined to specify what they’ve seen.

“What is different is that you’re getting additional countries joining the fray that weren’t necessarily there before,” says Jason Norton, a principal project manager on MSTIC. “The big two [Russia and China]—now, we can say they’ve been historically going after this since well before the 2016 election. But now you’re getting to see additional countries do that—poking and prodding the soft underbelly in order to know the right pieces to have an influence or impact in the future.”

“The field is getting crowded,” Dallman agrees. “Actors are learning from each other. As they learn tactics from the more prominent names, they turn that around and use them.”

The upcoming election is different, too, in that no one is surprised to see this malicious activity. Leading into 2016, Russian cyber activity was greeted with a collective dumbfounded naïveté, contributing to paralysis and an unsure response. Not this time.

You saw them in 2016, you saw what they did in Germany, you saw them in the French elections—all following the same MO. The 2018 midterms, too—to a lesser degree, but we still saw some of the same MO, the same actors, the same timing, the same techniques. Now we know, going into 2020, that this is the MO we’re looking for. And now we’ve started to see other countries come out and start doing other tactics.”

In 2016, it was CrowdStrike that first investigated and pointed the finger at Russian activity aiming to interfere with the American election. The US law enforcement and intelligence community later confirmed the company’s findings and eventually, after Robert Mueller’s investigation, indicted Russian hackers and detailed Moscow’s campaign.

MIT Technology Review visited Microsoft, the full summary is here.

Erdogan of Turkey to Visit Trump White House

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Denise Simon

This visit is on and off and maybe on again. The meeting is scheduled the same day as the open impeachment inquiry hearings begin.

President Erdogan is angry with the United States due to Congress moving legislation to apply sanctions that would affect Turkey as a result of the invasion into Syria.

Turkey has been threatening Europe, especially Germany with more migrants and Chancellor Merkel capitulated. Erdogan is in fact deporting what he calls ISIS fighters to their home countries including the United States. Stating that Turkey is not a hotel, even if the home country has revoked citizenship, he is deporting them.

Now that Erdogan feels like he is in the driver’s seat, he has been also bombing Iraq as recently as last week.

On Tuesday morning Turkish air strikes targeted Kurdish forces on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq.

According to initial reports, the Turkish Air Force struck at bases used by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and its ally, the Yazidi Shingal Protection Units.

If Erdogan does meet President Trump it is going to be an interesting session. Trump is slated to confront Erdogan about buying the Russian air defense system and the recent three sanctions that Trump lifted could easily be applied again. Tensions are in fact high.

This is what happened the last time Erdogan was in Washington DC.
U.S. Secret Service agents were among those attacked during the May 16, 2017 protests. Two Diplomatic Security special agents, six U.S. Secret Service officers and one MPD officer sustained multiple injuries, with at least one taken to the hospital.

THAWING TIES: Erdogan to meet Trump | Local News for ...

Just last month, the House of Representatives passed a resolution 405-11 reaffirming the United States’ condemnation of “the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923.”

“Whereas Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide in 1944, and who was the earliest proponent of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, invoked the Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide in the 20th century,” the resolution states.

Turkey does not recognize the loss of 1.5 Armenians as genocide.

Meanwhile, a closer look at Turkey reveals the following:

In Germany, Turkey controls 900 mosques out of a total of 2,400. These Islamic centers not only serve members of the Turkish diaspora, but also stop them from assimilating into German society. Speaking with Turks in Germany, Erdogan urged them not to assimilate, and called the assimilation of migrants in Europe “a crime against humanity.”

Erdogan has also been expanding Turkey beyond its borders – starting with Cyprus, the Greek Islands, Suakin Island (Sudan) and Syria.

Mosques, migrants and the military are now Erdogan’s new weapons in his threats against the West.

Erdogan is the head of NATO’s second-largest army; he has spies throughout Europe through a network of mosques, associations and cultural centers; he has brought his country to the top of the world rankings for the number of imprisoned journalists and has shut the mouth of German comedians with the threat of legal action. By keeping migrants in Turkish refugee camps, he controls immigration to Europe.

The worse Erdogan behaves, the greater his weight in Europe. In a 2015 meeting, Erdogan reportedly was “openly mocking” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and other “senior European leaders”, as Juncker asked Erdogan to consider how he was treated “like a prince” at a Brussels summit.

Turkey’s 2018 military budget increased to $19 billion, 24% higher than 2017, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Erdogan has placed Turkey’s military — once a bastion of Turkish nationalism and secularism — under his political authority. While Europe is pacifist and refuses to invest in its own security or, like Germany, support NATO’s budget, Turkey is belligerent.

Ever since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) became Turkey’s dominant political force in 2002, for Erdogan, elevating the public role of Islam has been more than a slogan. At public gatherings, the Turkish president has made the “rabia“, a hand gesture of four fingers raised and the thumb hidden, to protest the overthrow of Egypt’s Islamist then President Mohamed Morsi by Egypt’s military. Erdogan evidently sees himself as a global Islamic leader with national elections to win. Through four million Turkish Muslims in Germany and vast communities in the Netherlands, France, Austria and beyond, Erdogan does indeed have enormous influence in Europe.

Erdogan has also been expanding Turkey beyond its borders – starting with Cyprus, the Greek Islands, Suakin Island (Sudan) and Syria. “We are a big family of 300 million people from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China”, Erdogan said in a recent speech from Moldova. The borders of Turkey, he stated in Izmir, span “from Vienna to the shores of the Adriatic Sea, from East Turkistan (China’s autonomous region of Xinjiang) to the Black Sea”. More here.

Iran’s Underground Enrichment Facility

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Denise Simon

Under the Iran deal, Iran agreed to redesign, convert and limit its nuclear facilities.

Particular focus was put on Iran’s uranium-enrichment capabilities, putting serious limitations on uranium-enrichment facilities in Iran – Natanz and Fordow. Among other resolutions, Iran also agreed to allow inspection of all its nuclear facilities and the IAEA inspectors will be able to request visits to military sites. However, it doesn’t guarantee them access to military sites.

Fordow is Iran’s second fuel enrichment facility, buried under a mountain in the Great Salt Desert near the holy city of Qom. Before the Iran deal, the bunker was filled with 2,710 centrifuges that could enrich uranium to weapons-grade materials.

Under the nuclear agreement, Iran agreed to stop any uranium enrichment and uranium enrichment R&D at Fordow and turn the plant into a nuclear physics and technology center that will produce radioisotopes for use in medicine, agriculture, industry and science.

Reported in part by Free Beacon:

U.S. State Department officials described Iran’s blocking of an international nuclear inspector from accessing key nuclear sites last week as an “outrageous and unwarranted act of intimidation” amid growing concerns Iran is hiding undeclared nuclear materials.

The administration suspects that Iran is trying to prevent international inspectors from confirming its work with prohibited nuclear materials.

“The United States is deeply concerned about the two issues the IAEA acting director general described in today’s special session of the IAEA Board of Directors,” the official said. “First, that the IAEA has detected evidence of potential undeclared nuclear material in Iran, and second, the detention of an IAEA inspector. Along with Iran’s expansion of proliferation-sensitive nuclear activity, this pattern of deception and intimidation is unacceptable. All nations should be concerned that Iran is not fully cooperating with the IAEA and should demand Iran immediately redress these serious problems.”

The diplomatic escalation comes as Iran breaches limits on the amount of enriched uranium it produces and the enrichment methods it uses. It escalated installations of advanced centrifuges in the past week and has vowed to continue doing so.

Nuclear experts told the Free Beacon that Iran’s behavior raises multiple questions and concerns about the nature of its ongoing work.

“Assuming the IAEA version of events is correct and she did not have explosive contamination on her person, then Iran may be testing what the reaction is to denying inspectors access to safeguarded sites,” David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Free Beacon.

“How long does it take for this episode to be reported to the board and media?” he asked. “Does the IAEA send a replacement quickly? How many countries and which ones believe the Iranian rationale? Is there outrage or are there divisions that delay a coordinated response?”

Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation analyst and research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described Iran’s actions as “highly provocative.”

It “gives the impression that Iran could be considering curtailing inspection authorities as a future step to draw down its JCPOA commitments,” Stricker said. “It’s a hostile sign for sure.”