China Gave Trump an Ultimatum to Deal with N. Korea?

Posted on May 7, 2017May 7, 2017 by Denise Simon

BEIJING – China urged the United States to sack the head of the U.S. Pacific Command in return for exerting more pressure on North Korea amid concerns over its growing nuclear and missile threats, a source close to U.S.-China ties said Saturday.

The Chinese leadership headed by President Xi Jinping made the request, through its ambassador in the United States, to dismiss Adm. Harry Harris, known as a hard-liner on China, including with respect to the South China Sea issue, the source said.

Adm. Harry Harris, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, addresses the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney last December. | AFP-JIJI

China’s envoy to the United States, Cui Tiankai, conveyed the request to the U.S. side, to coincide with the first face-to-face, two-day meeting between President Donald Trump and Xi in Florida from April 6, but the Trump administration likely rejected it, the source said.

China is a longtime economic and diplomatic benefactor of North Korea.

As the head of Pacific Command, Harris, who was born in Japan and raised in the United States, plays a vital role in the security of the region.

He was responsible in ordering last month the dispatch of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier to waters near off the Korean Peninsula in a show of force amid signs the North was preparing to test-fire another ballistic missile or conduct a sixth nuclear test.

The Trump administration has called for exerting “maximum pressure” on North Korea to prod it to give up its nuclear and missile programs. The administration has said all options — including a military strikes — remain on the table.

Harris has pushed for the U.S. deployment of the advanced Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system to South Korea. China has opposed the deployment, saying it could undermine its security interests and the strategic balance of the region.

He has also called for continuing U.S. “freedom of navigation” operations in the contested South China Sea. Overlapping territorial claims, as well as land construction and militarization of outposts in disputed areas in the sea, remain a source of tension in the region.

According to the source, Cui also asked the Trump administration not to label China as a currency manipulator. As per the request, the United States did not label China as such, in light of Beijing’s role in helping Washington deal with the North Korean issue.

*** Related reading: 2013 Study Finds North Korea Has Indigenous Capabilities to Produce Nuclear Weapons

An example of the open-source evidence used for Kemp’s study: A 2011 image from a television broadcast in North Korea showing Kim-Jong Il inspecting a flow-forming machine located in an underground tunnel. This type of machine is able to produce centrifuge rotors for North Korea’s uranium-enrichment program.

***

Is the United States partners in the Asia Pacific region ready to deal with 5000 tunnels and an underground operation?

The entrance of an ‘intrusion tunnel’ under the DMZ between South and North Korea, Telegraph

North Korea’s Secret Strategy in a War with America: Go Underground

North Korea, one of the most secretive countries in the world, is no stranger to building underground military facilities. Whether a tunnel dug under the demilitarized zone designed to pass thousands of troops an hour, or bunkers to accommodate the regime’s leadership, North Korea has built extensive underground facilities designed to give it an edge in wartime.

One of the earliest examples of North Korean underground engineering was the discovery of several tunnels leading from North Korea under the demilitarized zone to South Korea. The first tunnel was located in 1974, extending one kilometer south of the DMZ. The tunnel was large enough to move up to two thousand troops per hour under the DMZ. A U.S. Navy officer and South Korean Marine corporal were killed by a booby trap while investigating the tunnel. Thanks to a tip from a North Korean defector, an even larger tunnel was discovered in 1978, a mile long and nearly seven feet wide.

Since then at least four tunnels have been discovered, with reinforced concrete slabs, electricity for lighting and fresh air generation, and narrow railway gauges to shuttle dirt and rock back to the tunnel entrance. Collectively, the four tunnels would have likely been able to move a brigade’s worth of troops an hour under South Korea’s defenses.

It’s difficult to determine how many tunnels exist. One report says that Kim Il-sung, the founder of the North Korean state and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, ordered each of the ten frontline combat divisions to dig two tunnels. If completed, that would theoretically mean another dozen or so tunnels remain undiscovered. A former South Korean general, Han Sung-chu, claims there are at least eighty-four tunnels—some reaching as far as downtown Seoul. The South Korean government does not believe Han’s numbers—nor the claimed ability to reach Seoul—are credible. A forty-mile tunnel would reportedly generate a seven-hundred-thousand-ton debris pile, which has not been picked up by satellite. Despite the warnings, the last major tunnel was discovered in 1990 and South Korea seems to believe that the tunneling danger has passed.

If it has passed, it may be because North Korea has decided to tunnel in different ways. The North Korean People’s Liberation Army Air Force is believed to have three different underground air bases at Wonsan, Jangjin and Onchun. The underground base at Wonsan reportedly includes a runway 5,900 feet long and ninety feet wide that passes through a mountain. According to a defector, during wartime NK PLAAF aircraft, including MiG-29 fighters and Su-25 Frogfoot ground-attack aircraft, would take off from conventional air bases but return to underground air bases. This is plausible, as one would expect North Korean air bases to be quickly destroyed during wartime.

Another underground development is a series of troop bunkers near the DMZ. A North Korean defector disclosed that, starting in 2004, North Korea began building bunkers capable of concealing between 1,500 and two thousand fully armed combat troops near the border. At least eight hundred bunkers were built, not including decoys, meant to conceal units such as light-infantry brigades and keep them rested until the start of an invasion.

Other underground facilities are believed to have been constructed to shelter the North’s leadership. According to a South Korean military journal, the United States believes there are between six thousand and eight thousand such shelters scattered across the country. This information was reportedly gathered from defectors in order to hunt down regime members in the event of war or government collapse.

North Korea is believed to have hundreds of artillery-concealing caves just north of the DMZ. Known as Hardened Artillery Sites, or HARTS, these are usually tunneled into the sides of mountains. An artillery piece, such as a 170-millimeter Koksan gun or 240-millimeter multiple-launch rocket system, can fire from the mouth of the cave and then withdraw into the safety of the mountain to reload. These sites are used to provide artillery support for an invasion of South Korea or direct fire against Seoul itself. As of 1986, and estimated two hundred to five hundred HARTS were thought to exist.

According to a report by the Nautilus Institute, North Korea is also thought to have “radar sites in elevator shafts that can be raised up like a submarine periscope; submarine and missile patrol boat bases in tunnels hewn in rock; tunnels a kilometer or more in length for storing vehicles and supplies, or to hide the population of a nearby city.”

How would the United States and South Korea deal with these underground facilities in wartime? First, it would have to locate the facilities. These facilities are hard to spot via satellite, and gleaning information from defectors is perhaps the best way to learn about them in peacetime. Once war commences, signal intelligence will pick up radio transmissions from previously unknown underground locations, enemy troops will from concealed positions or tunnel entrances, and artillery counter-battery radars will fix the positions of HARTS. It is likely that, despite advance preparations, many of these positions will be a surprise to Washington and Seoul.

Once located, there are three ways of dealing with the sites. The first and safest way to deal with them is to bomb them from above. This presents the least risk to allied forces, but it will also prove difficult to determine whether air or artillery strikes have had good effect. The use of bombs or artillery shells may cause cave-ins that prevent allied forces from entering an underground complex and exploiting any intelligence found inside.

Another option is to simply station troops outside tunnels and shoot anyone who ventures outside. While also a safer option, an underground complex will always have multiple exits—the tunnels Kim Il-sung ordered his divisions to dig were to each have four or five exit points. The most thorough way to deal with the tunnels would be to enter them. This would be by far the most effective way to deal with regime holdouts, but also the most dangerous.

Pyongyang’s eventual defeat in any wartime scenario is a given, but its underground headquarters, fortifications and troop depots have the potential to not only enhance the Korean People’s Army’s ability to mount a surprise attack, but also to prolong the war, confounding the high-tech armed forces of its adversaries. Such underground shelters, wherever they are, will likely be the site of the endgame phase of the war, as the regime is driven underground by rapidly advancing allied forces. Only then will we discover the true extent of North Korea’s extensive underground empire.

Obama WH Notes on Hillary’s Sever/Emails

Posted on May 5, 2017May 5, 2017 by Denise Simon

kennedy notes

DING DING DING and it seems there are still 2 missing boxes…

FNC: The Obama administration’s White House counsel was directly involved in deliberations over the release of Hillary Clinton emails as early as spring 2015, according to handwritten FBI agent notes released by the bureau late Friday.

The notes read: “Pat Kennedy (early May ’15) calls interagency MTG (meeting) re: scheduled release by JAN ’16, asking quick turnarounds – WH Counsel, CIA, etc…OSD, DNI, NSC and (redacted)”

The notes offer a raw account of the case from the perspective of FBI agents. Much of the content already had been documented in previously released FBI interview summaries, called 302s. The reference to “Counsel,” however, appears to be the earliest confirmation of White House involvement.

fbi notes

From the outset, the White House tried to put distance between itself and the former secretary of state’s personal email controversy. The records were also released to Judicial Watch which sued in federal court.

On March 7, 2015, then-President Barack Obama told CBS News that he learned about Clinton’s private server for government business from the media. “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” he said. But an email sent from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills later that day, and published by WikiLeaks, shows she told Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta otherwise: “We need to clean this up. He has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”

The newly released notes, from an interview with a State Department employee, also show how the department’s No. 3 at the time, Patrick Kennedy, tried to convince an FBI agent to change the classification of the Clinton emails, arguing they did not contain sensitive information. This was first reported by Fox News in September 2015, and later described in an FBI summary released last year as a “quid pro quo.”

At the time, Kennedy and the State Department denied the charge, which was credible.

The notes also cover how FBI agents were expecting 14 bankers boxes of Clinton emails from her lawyer’s firm Williams & Connolly, but only received 12, as Fox News reported in October. The two boxes have never been accounted for.

US Sanctions did not Stop Russian Election Hacking

Posted on May 5, 2017May 5, 2017 by Denise Simon

Image result for apt 28 russia The RegisterUK

Wired: Ten days after US intelligence agencies pinned the breach of the Democratic National Committee last October on the Russian government, Vice President Joe Biden promised government would “send a message” to the Kremlin. Two months later, the White House announced new sanctions against a handful of Russian officials and companies, and kicked 35 Russian diplomats out of the country. Six months later, it appears that the message has been thoroughly ignored.

The Russian hackers who gleefully spilled the emails of the DNC, Colin Powell, and the Clinton campaign remain as busy as ever, this time targeting the elections of France and Germany. And that failure to stop Russia’s online adventurism, cybersecurity analysts say, points to a rare sort of failure in digital diplomacy: Even after clearly identifying the hackers behind one the most brazen nation-state attacks against US targets in modern history, America still hasn’t figured out how to stop them.

Poking the Bear

In a recent report tracking the Kremlin-affiliated activity of the hacker group known as Pawn Storm, a.k.a. APT 28 or Fancy Bear, the security firm Trend Micro identified phishing sites that they say were used to target the political campaigns of left-leaning politicians Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in upcoming French and German elections. The analysts also found that the phishing domains had been registered in March and April of 2017, leaving no doubt the attacks started well after the US government’s attempt at deterrence last year.

“It seems like the opposite effect is happening. There’s definitely not even a slowing down” of the Pawn Storm attacks, says Trend Micro researcher Ed Cabrera. “It’s an emboldening.”

Speaking in a Senate hearing yesterday, FBI director James Comey had no illusions that the Obama administration’s response measures would keep Russian hackers away from future American elections, either. “I think one of the lessons that the Russians may have drawn from this is that this works,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I expect to see them to come back in 2018, and especially in 2020,” for the next US presidential election.

That failure to effectively deter Russia from its attempts at so-called “influence operations” of stealing and leaking documents doesn’t mean deterrence won’t work to stop state-sponsored hacking, says Peter Singer, a strategist at the New America Foundation. It means that the US just hasn’t gone far enough. “Never speak to me of cyber-deterrence if this is how we respond to the most important cyberattack so far in history,” Singer says. “We’ve put out the message not just to APT28 or Russia but any state or non-state attacker that this is going to be low cost, high gain.”

The Obama White House’s move to sanction Russian companies and hackers, eject diplomats and seize two Russian-owned compounds on US soil were “too little, too late,” Singer wrote in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee last month. That reaction, he pointed out, took more than six months to materialize, after even the private-sector cybersecurity community had come to the consensus that Russia was behind the attack. And even those sanctions didn’t cut deep enough for Russia’s highest-level leaders, Singer argues.

Pressure Points

Instead, Singer says, the US should have retaliated in a way that Putin would have felt personally: exposing his hidden personal wealth. “You have to go after the leverage points against the Russian oligarchy,” Singer says. He points to Putin’s fury at the Panama Papers leak from the tax haven law firm of Mossack Fonseca, which revealed portions of the Russian president’s secret wealth. “Reveal where things are hidden,” says Singer. “Make their lives more difficult.”

More broadly, Russian officials fear evidence of their corruption being exposed, says Jim Lewis, a cybersecurity and foreign policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That sort of counter-leak, he says, could be a significant card for the US to play. “We need to think if we want to be more aggressive in our responses,” says Lewis. “We need to think about how to make it more painful for them to continue to do this.”

Last December, in the wake of the sanctions, Lewis told WIRED he felt they were in fact strong enough to rile the Kremlin—he called them the “the biggest retaliatory move against Russian espionage since the Cold War.” However much they may have helped the US though, Lewis says, their deterrent effect doesn’t seem to have extended to US allies like France and Germany. Hence the Pawn Storm hackers’ targeting of the Macron campaign—a hacking attempt Macron’s staff has said failed—as well as German targets including a think tank associated with Germany president Angel Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party and the German parliament. The latter hack resulted in actual theft of documents that could still be leaked ahead of the country’s September election, in another Russian attempt to destabilize the European Union.

“The Russians appear to have interpreted the sanctions as only applying to actions against the US,” Lewis says. “On a collective level, we need to think about where NATO and the EU can take action.”

Lack of Action

Which raises the third problem with America’s digital diplomatic strategy: President Trump. The Trump administrations weak commitment to European allies, and his softening of Obama’s stance, can only have emboldened Russia further, rather than helping curtail their efforts. Trump has even continued to doubt publicly that the attacks on Democratic targets in the 2016 campaign originated in Russia in the first place, despite his own intelligence officials repeatedly pointing to the Kremlin’s involvement. More than three months after he momentarily conceded Russia’s involvement, Trump earlier this week again floated the unsubstantiated notion it “could’ve been China.”

That lack of commitment to even naming Russia—not to mention deterring its next attack—has left the US on its back foot, says Peter Singer. Even Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who criticized Obama’s sanctions for being too light or too late, Singer points out, are now fighting instead just to maintain sanctions against Russia rather than lift them. “The response to something being too little is to do more, not to do nothing,” says Singer. “And that’s what we’ve done since.”

All of which means the notion of deterring Russian attacks on elections or civil society is, for the moment, defunct. Expect the Kremlin’s habit of electoral-meddling will get worse before it gets better—until someone gives them a reason not to.

*** Image result for apt 28 russia FireEye

Meanwhile, Germany looks to take a more aggressive posture against Russian intrusion.

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency accused Russian rivals of gathering large amounts of political data in cyber attacks and said it was up to the Kremlin to decide whether it wanted to put it to use ahead of Germany’s September elections….

Hans-Georg Maassen, president of the BfV agency, said “large amounts of data” were seized during a May 2015 cyber attack on the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, which has previously been blamed on APT28, a Russian hacking group….

Germany’s top cyber official last week confirmed attacks on two foundations affiliated with Germany’s ruling coalition parties that were first identified by security firm Trend Micro.

“We recognize this as a campaign being directed from Russia. Our counterpart is trying to generate information that can be used for disinformation or for influencing operations,” he said. “Whether they do it or not is a political decision … that I assume will be made in the Kremlin.”

Maassen said it appeared that Moscow had acted in a similar manner in the United States, making a “political decision” to use information gathered through cyber attacks to try to influence the U.S. presidential election.

Berlin was studying what legal changes were needed to allow authorities to purge stolen data from third-party servers, and to potentially destroy servers used to carry out cyber attacks.

“We believe it is necessary that we are in a position to be able to wipe out these servers if the providers and the owners of the servers are not ready to ensure that they are not used to carry out attacks,” Maassen said….

He said intelligence agencies knew which servers were used by various hacker groups, including APT10, APT28 and APT29.

Less than 1% of Visa Overstays are Captured

Posted on May 5, 2017May 5, 2017 by Denise Simon

Note: Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson signed his name to a report dated January 2016 on the matter of ‘visa-overstays’. Nowhere in the report does it state all the systems and databases are not connected or using old technology and software. Click on the link above if you want to see the tables published by country. In the summary this paragraph was included:

Due to continuing departures by individuals in this population, by January 4, 2016, the number of Suspected In-Country Overstays for FY 2015 had dropped to 416,500, rendering the Suspected In-Country Overstay rate as 0.9 percent. In other words, as of January 4, 2016, DHS has been able to confirm the departures of more than 99 percent of nonimmigrant visitors scheduled to depart in FY 2015 via air and sea POEs, and that number continues to grow.

NBCBoston

Homeland Security can’t keep up with more than 1 million immigrants who have overstayed visas

Homeland Security has built up a backlog of more than 1.2 million illegal immigrants who it believes have overstayed visas but managed to arrest only about 3,400 of them, according to the most recent data, which works out to a rate of about 1 in every 350 lawbreakers.
That is far worse than the rate for those who crossed the border illegally, and it means criminals, people engaged in narcoterrorism and other national security risks are left to run free in the U.S., the Homeland Security inspector general said in a report Thursday.
Federal agents have trouble tracking down the criminals because the government still doesn’t monitor departures, meaning it can’t be certain whether those who came on tourist, business or student visas leave when they are supposed to.
Officers have to check as many as 27 in-house systems, in addition to state databases, to try to guess whether someone has left. Even then, they can make catastrophic mistakes when it wrongly appears that a visitor has left the country.

“Such false departure information resulted in [deportation] officers closing visa overstay investigations of dangerous individuals, such as suspected criminals, who were actually still in the United States and could pose a threat to national security,” the investigators said in the report. “For example, an ERO officer stated that a suspect under investigation was listed as having left the country, but had given his ticket to a family member and was still residing in the United States.”
Visa overstays, as they are called, have become an increasing focus of the immigration debate. As the flow of illegal border crossings declines, an increasing percentage of those in the country illegally are travelers who came on business, tourist or student visas but didn’t leave when their time was up.
Several of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were overstays.
Homeland Security has struggled to get a handle on the situation, or even to figure out how bad it is.
A report last year looking at just a portion of visas calculated that more than 500,000 visitors overstayed in 2015. The total backlog grew to more than 1.2 million, the inspector general said.
Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested only 3,402 potential overstays in 2015.

(Advance this video to the 18:40 minute mark and listen to the statistics on inbound travelers under the Visa Waiver Program) What could go wrong on this program?

In its official response, ICE said it is trying to do a better job of calculating the number of visa overstays.
President Trump has pushed the Homeland Security Department to finish the system that would track departures, and tests are being run at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.
The department also plans to release its next overstay report soon. That report will cover almost all visa categories, so the government will have a better sense for how bad the problem is.
But Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that until the government tracks all departures, it won’t know what’s going on.
“Visa security is a matter of national security, and it is imperative that we know who is coming to our country and when they leave so that we protect American citizens and our interests,” the Virginia Republican said.
Congress demanded a biometric entry-exit system more than 20 years ago, but administrations in both parties have failed to deliver, saying that airports aren’t configured to check departures and that the land ports of entry are an even bigger logistical hurdle.
Mr. Goodlatte said he expects Mr. Trump’s focus on immigration to finally push Homeland Security to finish the job.

Until then, officers will waste time on bogus leads, the inspector general’s report said. The data are so unreliable that officers and agents often end up finding an overstay still in the country who the systems said already had left, or spend time trying to track down someone who did leave the country or obtained legal status.
“An ICE officer estimated that he spent more than 50 hours on a single suspect, only to find the individual had applied for [an immigration] benefit and should not have been categorized as an overstay,” the audit said.

WTH Congressman Rohrabacher? Such a Wild Story

Posted on May 4, 2017May 4, 2017 by Denise Simon

It is a well known secret or rather fact that 90% of the Russians inside the United States are here on a Kremlin mission. Will we ever know all the names of the Russians that Obama expelled from the United States in December of 2016 as a response to the hacking and intrusion into our election architecture with bots and intelligence leaks? Not likely…but read on, this is almost like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

As for a video and background:

But how about this Congressman?

Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican representative from California, openly acknowledges such a meeting with Rinat Akhmetshin, an alleged Soviet spy in Berlin. The topic? A high-profile Russian money laundering case and related sanctions on Russia. A pretty good summary is here from Weiss.

Digging deeper

It all began before 2012, when Barack Obama signed the law titled the Magnitsky Act. Creepy things are included as the basis of this law which is noted on page 9 of the 15 page bill.

(7) Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky died on November 16,

2009, at the age of 37, in Matrosskaya Tishina Prison in

Moscow, Russia, and is survived by a mother, a wife, and

2 sons.

(8) On July 6, 2011, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev’s

Human Rights Council announced the results of its independent

investigation into the death of Sergei Magnitsky. The Human

Rights Council concluded that Sergei Magnitsky’s arrest and

detention was illegal; he was denied access to justice by the

courts and prosecutors of the Russian Federation; he was investigated

by the same law enforcement officers whom he had

accused of stealing Hermitage Fund companies and illegally

obtaining a fraudulent $230,000,000 tax refund; he was denied

necessary medical care in custody; he was beaten by 8 guards

with rubber batons on the last day of his life; and the ambulance

crew that was called to treat him as he was dying was deliberately

kept outside of his cell for one hour and 18 minutes

until he was dead. The report of the Human Rights Council

also states the officials falsified their accounts of what happened

to Sergei Magnitsky and, 18 months after his death, no officials

had been brought to trial for his false arrest or the crime

he uncovered. The impunity continued in April 2012, when

Russian authorities dropped criminal charges against Larisa

Litvinova, the head doctor at the prison where Magnitsky died.

(9) The systematic abuse of Sergei Magnitsky, including

his repressive arrest and torture in custody by officers of the

Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation that Mr.

Magnitsky had implicated in the embezzlement of funds from

the Russian Treasury and the misappropriation of 3 companies

from his client, Hermitage Capital Management, reflects how

deeply the protection of human rights is affected by corruption.

(10) The politically motivated nature of the persecution

of Mr. Magnitsky is demonstrated by—

(A) the denial by all state bodies of the Russian Federation

of any justice or legal remedies to Mr. Magnitsky

during the nearly 12 full months he was kept without

trial in detention; and

(B) the impunity since his death of state officials he

testified against for their involvement in corruption and

the carrying out of his repressive persecution.

*** It was in 2013, that a list of people were added to the Treasury sanction list.

BOGATIROV, Letscha (a.k.a. BOGATYREV, Lecha; a.k.a. BOGATYRYOV, Lecha); DOB 14 Mar 1975; POB Atschkoi, Chechen Republic, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

DROGANOV, Aleksey O.; DOB 11 Oct 1975; POB Lesnoi Settlement, Pushkin Area, Moscow Region, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

DUKUZOV, Kazbek; DOB 1974; POB Urus-Martan District, Chechen Republic, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

KARPOV, Pavel; DOB 27 Aug 1977; POB Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

KHIMINA, Yelena; DOB 11 Sep 1953; POB Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

KOMNOV, Dmitriy; DOB 17 May 1977; POB Kashira Region, Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

KRIVORUCHKO, Aleksey (a.k.a. KRIVORUCHKO, Alex; a.k.a. KRIVORUCHKO, Alexei); DOB 25 Aug 1977; POB Moscow Region, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

KUZNETSOV, Artem (a.k.a. KUZNETSOV, Artyom); DOB 28 Feb 1975; POB Baku, Azerbaijan (individual) [MAGNIT].

LOGUNOV, Oleg; DOB 04 Feb 1962; POB Irkutsk Region, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

PECHEGIN, Andrey I.; DOB 24 Sep 1965; POB Moscow Region, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

PODOPRIGOROV, Sergei G.; DOB 08 Jan 1974; POB Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

PROKOPENKO, Ivan Pavlovitch; DOB 28 Sep 1973; POB Vinnitsa, Ukraine (individual) [MAGNIT].

SILCHENKO, Oleg F.; DOB 25 Jun 1977; POB Samarkand, Uzbekistan (individual) [MAGNIT].

STASHINA, Yelena (a.k.a. STASHINA, Elena; a.k.a. STASHINA, Helen); DOB 05 Nov 1963; POB Tomsk, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

STEPANOVA, Olga G.; DOB 29 Jul 1962; POB Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

TOLCHINSKIY, Dmitri M. (a.k.a. TOLCHINSKY, Dmitry); DOB 11 May 1982; POB Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

UKHNALYOVA, Svetlana (a.k.a. UKHNALEV, Svetlana; a.k.a. UKHNALEVA, Svetlana V.); DOB 14 Mar 1973; POB Moscow, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

VINOGRADOVA, Natalya V.; DOB 16 Jun 1973; POB Michurinsk, Russia (individual) [MAGNIT].

*** What you ask?

Well, on May 3, 2017, FBI Director James Comey appeared before the Senate for the annual hearing. Senator Grassley made it a point to ask a few key questions regarding FARA and why FusionGPS was not listed or registered as required by law. Great question. It seems FusionGPS is a Russian front operation.

This operation also includes several other people that are Russian operatives that have been lobbying members of Congress to amend or repeal the Magnitsky Act. The letter for background is here demanding a full investigation and why. Senator Grassley is right to demand some answers as the matter includes dead bodies, embezzlement of more than $200 million and of course is part of a wide Russian intrusion and chaos campaign. The FBI cannot begin to come close to closing this case, it has years of history and is worldwide.

Remember that US Attorney Preet Bharara that Jeff Sessions fired? That was not a good idea, unless there was something else nefarious in history with people in the Trump orbit. No implication or inference here, however there is much more to the whole event.

Anyway…try this too.

A Russian lawyer who was a witness in a US federal court case connected to the largest money-laundering scheme in Russian history was hospitalized after plunging four stories on Tuesday in Moscow, a spokesman said.

Nikolai Gorokhov William Browder

There are conflicting reports about what happened to the lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov. His spokesman, William Browder — who was an alleged victim in the money-laundering scheme — says he was “thrown from the fourth floor of his apartment building.” Russian media, often controlled by the state, says he “fell while he and workers were trying to lift a Jacuzzi into his apartment.”

“His name is redacted in all the documents,” Browder told BuzzFeed News regarding court filings in the US Southern District. “The feds were very concerned for his safety. I can confirm his role.” The Department of Justice didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The case, USA v. Prevezon, is on the brink of going to trial in Manhattan — right in the middle of a massive shakeup of federal prosecutors by President Trump.

In court filings, the Department of Justice alleges that Prevezon, a Cyprus-based real estate company owned by a Russian national, purchased several New York City apartments with funds linked to a decade-old $230 million tax fraud case — the biggest in Russian history — perpetrated by gangsters and corrupt officials. In court filings, Prevezon says the DOJ has no hard evidence to back up its claims.

Last week, after plenty of drama, Trump fired Preet Bharara, the high-profile US attorney who was handling the case. Now prominent New York City defense attorney Marc Mukasey — the son of former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who at one point was defending Prevezon — is reportedly on the shortlist to replace Bharara.

Prevezon has filed a last-chance motion to get the case thrown out before trial — but if the judge rules against them, it’s scheduled to be presented to a New York City jury on May 15. It’s unclear when Trump — whose presidential campaign is facing close scrutiny for possible ties to Russia — will appoint Bharara’s successor.

Those involved in the case believe that it will stay on track, and experts agree that the case should proceed as scheduled, despite Bharara’s ousting.

“I don’t see the US government withdrawing from this case,” Will Pomeranz, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute and a leading expert on Russian commercial and constitutional law, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s unlikely that with a case on the eve of going to trial is one that they’re going to back away from. And if they did, it would obviously send a signal.”

Michael Mukasey is no longer involved in the Prevezon defense and did not respond to a request to comment for this article. Prevezon’s current firm, Quinn Emanuel, said that it could not comment on the record. The DOJ said that it could not comment because the case is ongoing.

So how did Russian gangsters allegedly steal nearly a quarter-billion in taxpayer dollars? According to the DOJ, they literally stole companies.

In 2007, investigators say, an organization of Russian mobsters, corrupt officials, and law enforcement orchestrated a raid on three companies held by the Hermitage Fund, which at one time was the largest Western investor in Russia. Cops associated with the would-be fraudsters stormed the offices of the companies and seized key assets. Then, they re-registered the companies, putting themselves in charge. After they took control, the thieves ginned up sham lawsuits that resulted in rulings against the companies totaling a massive $973 million. But the payoff came later, when these stolen companies filed for tax refunds to the tune of $230 million, which was immediately approved by tax officials in cahoots with the fraudsters.

Once he caught wind of what happened, the founder of Hermitage, William Browder — also the spokesman for the lawyer who was hospitalized Tuesday in Moscow — fought back by enlisting a group of accountants and lawyers to suss out who was behind the scheme. One attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, was particularly successful. By digging through bank records, Magnitsky was able to track the $230 million — which happened to be the exact amount that Hermitage paid in taxes in 2006 — to bank accounts opened with obscure banks controlled by Russian gangsters.

But when Magnitsky brought this to the attention of the Russian Interior Ministry in 2008, instead of going after the culprits, the government jailed Magnitsky. A year later, he died in prison at age 37.

Preet Bharara Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

The Russian authorities claimed Magnitsky died of heart failure and enacted a smear campaign against him, saying he and Browder had stolen the $230 million themselves. However, it was later revealed through investigative reports that Magnitsky had been denied medical care and likely tortured while in jail, which raised suspicion around his death.

The Magnitsky affair heightened tension between the Russian and United States governments. In 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which froze the assets of Russian human rights abusers and banned them from obtaining visas to enter the country. In 2013, the first 18 names were added to the list, including a number of people allegedly linked to the $230 million Hermitage tax heist. Vladimir Putin responded by banning 18 US citizens from entering Russia — including Bharara and a team of prosecutors who had put away a major Russian arms dealer.

“The reason that [the Prevezon case] is so important,” Browder told BuzzFeed News, “is this is the first major case going to trial involving money laundering from the crimes that led to the death of Sergei Magnitsky.”

In the years since Magnitsky’s death, Browder has led a crusade seeking justice for his former lawyer. And in 2013, he told BuzzFeed News, he walked a complaint into the Manhattan district attorney’s office, claiming that Hermitage’s investigators had linked funds from the $230 tax fraud to Prevezon and its real estate holdings in New York City. The Manhattan DA’s office turned the case over to Bharara, who announced in September 2013 that he was bringing a civil forfeiture claim to seize the assets of Prevezon, freezing $14 million of the company’s assets tied to the US bank accounts.

In court filings, Prevezon claims that the DOJ “tells two stories: one story about a $230 million Russian tax fraud, and another separate story about [Prevezon’s] legitimate real estate business,” but says that prosecutors “fail to connect the two.”

The company argues that Bharara’s former office has told “a graphic and disturbing story” about the tax fraud and Magnitsky’s death, but maintains that “[t]hose allegations are irrelevant to [Prevezon]” and “designed to inflame the reader [of the complaint] and to create prejudice against” the real estate company.

It is true that the DOJ makes no claim that the defendants from Prevezon were directly connected to the alleged theft of the $230 million. And in the end, if the US government is successful in its prosecution, a civil forfeiture ruling against the real estate company would only be the first small step in linking Russian individuals to laundered funds from the $230 million tax fraud in the court of law.

A number of other countries — including Britain, Switzerland, and Lithuania — will be watching the outcome of the case because they have opened criminal probes and frozen assets their investigators believe are tied to the $230 million heist. In total, to date, more than $40 million in assets tied to these cases has been frozen around the globe.

“It’s an example of the problem,” Pomeranz said, “but it’s just a small microcosm of the problem.”