Nike Called SDNY About Michael Avenatti

Posted on March 25, 2019March 25, 2019 by Denise Simon

And then for subsequent calls by Avenatti to Nike where yelling and more threats continued, the FBI was listening.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said Avenatti was arrested Monday in New York.

Flipboard: DEVELOPING: Sen. Grassley Refers Michael ...

Now will he be disbarred and will CNN be somewhat embarrassed for hiring CPL….Creey Porn Lawyer…

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Attorney Michael Avenatti, who represented adult film star Stormy Daniels in her legal battles against U.S. President Donald Trump, was arrested on Monday and charged with extorting more than $20 million from Nike, federal prosecutors said.

The U.S. Attorneys offices in New York and Los Angeles separately filed charges against Avenatti, with the California case accusing him of embezzling a client’s money to cover his own debts, as well as using phony tax returns to obtain millions of dollars in loans from a bank.

Avenatti threatened to expose allegations of misconduct from Nike employees unless the apparel company paid him and an unnamed co-conspirator $22.5 million to “buy Avenatti’s silence,” the New York complaint said.

He is also being investigated by the California State Bar Association in addition to the Senator Grassley referral to the DOJ.

According to the criminal complaint, Avenatti met in March 2019 with attorney for Nike and threatened to release damaging information about the company if Nike didn’t make millions in payment to himself and an unnamed co-conspirator. Avenatti also allegedly demanded that Nike pay $1.5 million to an individual he claimed to represent.

“I’ll go take $10 billion dollars off your client’s market cap…I’m not f***ing around,” Avenatti said, according to the complaint.

The criminal complaint is fascinating out of New York. Then there is the California criminal complaint noted below:

Avenatti Complaint by on Scribd

DIA: Ron Rockwell Hansen, Pleads Guilty

Posted on March 19, 2019March 19, 2019 by Denise Simon

We can’t know the extent of insider threats. The matter of China infecting our intelligence agencies and paying for spying continues.

Frankly, as compared to Jonathan Pollard, 180 months in prison for Hansen is hardly enough. Pollard was released after 30 years but remains on house detention. Pollard aided an steadfast ally, Israel….China is hardly a friendly country to the United States.

Man Who Tried To Spy For China To Face Charges In Utah | KUER 90.1

Anyway….

SALT LAKE CITY – A former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer, taken into federal custody by the FBI in June 2018 as he was preparing to board a flight to China, pleaded guilty Friday afternoon to attempting to communicate, deliver, or transmit information involving the national defense of the United States to the People’s Republic of China.

Ron Rockwell Hansen, 59, a resident of Syracuse, Utah, entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Court Judge Dee Benson in Salt Lake City. The plea agreement includes a stipulated sentence of 180 months, subject to the approval of the Court. Sentencing in the case is set for Sept. 24, 2019, at 2 p.m.

Hansen pleaded guilty to the lead count of a 15-count indictment returned in June 2018, charging him with attempt to gather or deliver defense information, acting as an agent of a foreign government, bulk cash smuggling, structuring monetary transactions, and smuggling goods from the United States. Federal prosecutors will ask the Court to dismiss the remaining counts of the indictment at sentencing, however, the plea agreement includes an agreement that relevant conduct can be considered by the Court in determining the reasonableness of the sentence.

Hansen retired from the U.S. Army as a Warrant Officer with a background in signals intelligence and human intelligence. He speaks fluent Mandarin-Chinese and Russian, according to court documents. Upon retiring from active duty, DIA hired Hansen as a civilian intelligence case officer in 2006. Hansen held a Top Secret clearance for many years, and signed several non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at DIA and as a government contractor.
As Hansen admitted in the plea agreement, in early 2014, agents of a Chinese intelligence service targeted him for recruitment, and he began meeting with them regularly in China. During these meetings, the agents described to Hansen the type of information that would interest Chinese intelligence. Hansen stipulated that during the course of his relationship with Chinese intelligence, he received thousands of dollars in compensation for information he provided them.

Between May 24, 2016, and June 2, 2018, Hansen admitted he solicited national security information from an intelligence case officer working for the DIA. Hansen admitted knowing that the Chinese intelligence services would find the information valuable, and he agreed to act as a conduit to sell that information to the Chinese. He advised the DIA case officer how to record and transmit classified information without detection, and how to hide and launder any funds received as payment for classified information. He admitted he now understands that the DIA case officer reported his conduct to the DIA and subsequently acted as a confidential human source for the FBI.

Hansen admitted meeting with the DIA case officer on June 2, 2018, and receiving individual documents containing national defense information that he had previously solicited. The documents he received were classified. The documents included national security information related to U.S. military readiness in a particular region — information closely held by the federal government. Hansen did not possess a security clearance nor did he possess a need to know the information contained in the materials.

As a part of his plea agreement, Hansen admitted he reviewed the documents, queried the case officer about their contents, and took written notes which contained information determined to be classified. He advised the DIA case officer that he would remember most of the details about the documents he received that day and would conceal notes about the material in the text of an electronic document he would prepare at the airport before leaving for China. He admitted he intended to provide the information he received to the agents of the Chinese Intelligence Service with whom he had been meeting. He also admitted knowing that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of a foreign nation.

Hansen was arrested June 2, 2018, on his way to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Seattle, Wash., to board a connecting flight to China.

As a part of the plea agreement, Hansen has agreed to forfeit property acquired from or traceable to his offense, including property used to facilitate the crime.

The case was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert A. Lund, Karin Fojtik, Mark K. Vincent and Alicia Cook of the District of Utah, and Trial Attorneys Patrick T. Murphy, Matthew J. McKenzie and Adam L. Small of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington assisted with this case.

The prosecution is the result of an investigation by special agents of the FBI, IRS-Criminal Investigation, U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Army Counterintelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Chinese Cheating for US Student Visas

Posted on March 12, 2019March 12, 2019 by Denise Simon

Sheesh, more cheating….and just think of the growing number of Democrats calling for the ICE agency to be abolished. Remember too that California had that whole birthing tourism scandal for foreign Chinese illegals.

5 arrested in scheme that hired people to take English proficiency exam on behalf of Chinese nationals seeking student visas

LOS ANGELES – Federal authorities this morning arrested five defendants linked to a scheme that helped Chinese nationals obtain student visas by hiring individuals who used fake Chinese passports to take an English proficiency test for the foreign students.

The arrests were made pursuant to a 26-count indictment returned on Friday by a federal grand jury. The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to use false passports, using false passports, and aggravated identity theft as part of the scheme to impersonate Chinese nationals who were required to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to obtain a student visa.

This case is being investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s Fraud Detection National Security Section. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the TOEFL exam, has provided assistance during the investigation.

“On top of allowing students to cheat their way into our top universities, schemes such as this exploit our nation’s legal immigration system and threaten our national security,” said Joseph Macias, Special Agent in Charge for HSI Los Angeles. “As this case shows, we will move aggressively to identify and prosecute those who engage in fraud and corrupt the immigration process for profit.”

The five defendants were taken into custody this morning without incident. They are:

Liu Cai, 23, of Woodland Hills, who allegedly facilitated the scheme, took at least five TOEFL exams himself and is residing in the United States on a student visa;

Quang Cao, 24, of San Francisco, who allegedly took at least four TOEFL exams with false identification, and who was arrested today in Stockton, California;

Elric Zhang, 24, of Los Angeles, who allegedly took at least five TOEFL exams as part of the scheme;

Mohan Zhang, 24, of Cerritos, who allegedly took at least two TOEFL exams under the names of foreign nationals; and

Samantha Wang, 24, of Corona, who allegedly took at least two TOEFL exams.

The four Southern California defendants are expected to be arraigned on the indictment this afternoon in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles. Cao is expected to make an initial appearance this afternoon in the Eastern District of California.

The sixth defendant in the case – Tuan Tran, 33, who allegedly took at least one TOEFL exam with a false identification document – is believed to be currently residing in Taiwan.

The United States requires foreign citizens who wish to enter the United States on a temporary basis to study at a college or university to first obtain an F-1 student visa. To obtain a student visa, foreign citizens must first apply to study at a school that has been authorized by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) to enroll foreign students. In the United States, many SEVP-certified schools require foreign citizens whose first language is not English to certify proficiency in English by achieving a particular score on the TOEFL.

When the foreign national goes to a TOEFL testing location, the test taker must present an original, non-expired, government-issued identification document recognized by their home country. According to the indictment, all six defendants used counterfeit People’s Republic of China passports to impersonate 19 different Chinese nationals at various TOEFL testing locations in and around Los Angeles.

The indictment further alleges that Cai paid for and registered 14 Chinese nationals for TOEFL exams over a one-year period in 2015 and 2016. Following the tests, Cai allegedly paid three co-defendants approximately $400 per test from his PayPal and Venmo accounts.

The conspiracy count in the indictment carries a statutory maximum penalty of five years in federal prison. The charge of using a false passport carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Aggravated identity theft carries a mandatory consecutive two-year sentence.

This matter is being prosecuted by Special Assistant United States Attorney Kyle J. Ryan of the General Crimes section.

FBI: Operation Varsity Blues, College and Elite Scandal

Posted on March 12, 2019March 12, 2019 by Denise Simon

We hate it when people cheat, but when the elite do it including lawyers, it is worse. It must be mentioned however, that in many cases the children/students did not know what their parents actually did.

Rick Singer, the founder of the consulting company that devised this scheme just plead guilty.

Image result for operation varsity blues

At least 50 well known people have been charged in several states and dealing with several universities. It is the largest college admissions scam EVER. Celebrities, coaches, lawyers and wealthy power-brokers have been now a variety of Federal charges including fraud, cheating and bribery.

This scheme goes back to at least 2011 and the money involved could be higher than $25 million. Operation Varsity Blues, as an FBI investigation began however in May of 2018 when FBI stumbled across a lead on a completely unrelated and separate investigation.

The criminal complaint is here.

Schools implicated in this operation include Georgetown University, Stanford, UCLA, University of San Diego, University of Southern California, Yale, Wake Forest and University of Texas.

Here’s the full list:

Gregory Abbott

Marcia Abbott

Gamal Abdelaziz

Diane Blake

Todd Blake

Jane Buckingham

Gordon Caplan

Michael Center

I-Hsin “Joey” Chen

Amy Colburn

Gregory Colburn

Igor Dvorskiy

Gordon Ernst

William Ferguson

Robert Flaxman

Martin Fox

Mossimo Giannulli

Donna Heinel

Elizabeth Henriquez

Manuel Henriquez

Douglas Hodge

Felicity Huffman

Agustin Huneeus, Jr.

Bruce Isackson

Davina Isackson

Michelle Janavs

Laura Janke

Ali Khosroshahin

Elisabeth Kimmel

Marjorie Klapper

Lori Loughlin

Toby MacFarlane

Steven Masera

William McGlashan

Rudolph Meredith

Marci Palatella

Mark Riddell

Jorge Salcedo

Mikaela Sanford

Peter Jan Sartorio

Stephen Semprevivo

David Sidoo

William Rick Singer

Devin Sloane

John Vandemoer

Jovan Vavic

Niki Williams

John Wilson

Homayoun Zadeh

Robert Zangrillo

The indictment is here.

The Creation of a Failed Venezuela due to Maduro

Posted on February 25, 2019February 25, 2019 by Denise Simon

Last year, Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal published a major warning about malaria in Venezuela. In spite of 3 million people fleeing their home country since 2014, the economic condition in Venezuela continues in a financial tail-spin. Treatment of malaria, measles and diphtheria as well as dengue and Zika are just not being treated. Further, the infant mortality rate is skyrocketing. The most recent population with malaria is estimated to be 411, 586.

Maduro has called on Russia, Cuba and Bolivia to help with military action, police action and even his personal security. Cuba denies there are forces in Venezuela. Hold on Cuba….

Informal information published by Foresightcuba, which is dedicated to presenting statistics about the island, counts Cuba’s military presence in Venezuela as follows: 4,500 Cuban infantrymen organized in 8 battalions of 500 troops, plus a battalion stationed in Fuerte Tiuna; 2 Brigade Generals (Herminio Hernández Rodríguez and Alejandro Ronda Marrero, one stationed in Fuerte Tiuna, another in Barquisimeto); 4 colonels (Rodrigo Hernández Maite, Rufino Zabaleta Corvino, Jaime Freitas Sambrano, and Simon Guillermo Senior); 8 lieutenant colonels; 6 frigate captains, and 25 junior officers.

This information details who they are with name and surname, their functions, where they are based, the weapons they use, and notes that they wear Venezuelan military insignia.

A long-standing situation

According to an article published in February 2010 by journalist Leandro Dario, international assistant editor of the newspaper Dario Perfi, by that time the then president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, had incorporated the Cuban military into the Armed Forces of the country with the aim of inserting the high command of Cuba into Venezuelan military forces, to ensure their control in the barracks and project socialism. More here.

This certainly now speaks to the humanitarian aid several countries are working to get to the desperate Venezuelan people that Maduro has cut off completely. Just two days ago:

Grave situation developing right now inside of #Colombia. @freddysuperlano a member of the National Assembly of #Venezuela was poisoned this morning at breakfast inside of Colombia & is in serious condition at the hospital. His assistant Carlos Salinas has died from poisoning.

#ATENCIÓN Ciudadanos intentan salvar parte de la ayuda humanitaria que fue incendiada por funcionarios de la PNB en el puente Santander, Ureña #23Feb pic.twitter.com/tIyJiaJ8Vb

— NTN24 Venezuela (@NTN24ve) February 23, 2019

Enter Senator Marco Rubio, he has been right on top of the conditions for many months sounding all the alarms as VP Mike Pence is presently in Columbia meeting with the interim Venezuelan President Guido and The Lima Group.

There are 5 naturalized American citizens still being jailed in Venezuela. And China deployed a tech envoy to Caracas to in many cases terminate the internet and other telecom services.

Meanwhile, here is more.

In part:

Due to Russia’s support for President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, the Kremlin has been given significant more control over Syria’s oil and gas industry. In 2017, Syria signed a deal giving Russia sole rights to its oil and gas production. In return for saving desperate regimes, Russia has gained significant control over global resource markets on top of its own large reserves.

But Assad has also given Russia a permanent air base and an expansion of Russian naval facilities in the country. The Kremlin is banking on mirroring such agreements in Venezuela. Joint Russian-Venezuelan naval exercises were held in 2008, while two nuclear-capable bombers flew to Venezuela’s La Orchila island in December 2018.

Though Venezuelan law prohibits permanent foreign military bases, Russia and Venezuela announced the creation of a ‘temporary’ long-term Russian airbase on La Orchila soon after the flight demonstration. Together with Venezuela’s Russian weapons imports, the two militaries will find it easier to coordinate Russian power projection in the Caribbean.

Expanding a military presence in Venezuela will bring up uncomfortable memories from the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 2017, Igor Sechin held talks with Cuban President Raul Castro and agreed to expand oil and gas ties. The potential for a Russian base in Venezuela came after steady integration through natural resource industries, a formula that Cuba appears intent on replicating.

Stakes have risen in Venezuela since Russia allegedly sent hundreds of personnel from its most notorious private military company, Wagner, in January. Deploying Wagner will allow Russia to mask its presence in Venezuela, similar to recent conflicts.

Many of Wagner’s personnel are ex-Russian soldiers. They have worked with rebel elements in Ukraine and been granted partial control of re-captured oil and gas fields in Syria. Wagner has also been deployed across Africa to safeguard regimes under scrutiny from the West and international institutions, as well as protect their lucrative mining operations.

Wagner represents a privatization of security backed by the power of the Russian military. Rosneft and Gazprom, Russia’s other resource crown jewels, operate their own security forces, and together could be the force that takes over from the Russian military in Syria and potentially in Venezuela.

Russia’s ability to safeguard desperate regimes has made other ‘rogue states’ increasingly look to Russia as a guarantor of their security. Keeping Maduro in power represents part of a wider policy of assisting other states hostile to wider US foreign policy.

The Kremlin often offers diplomatic support to North Korea and relieved most of its debt obligations to Russia in 2014. In the years that followed, Korean rocket tests increased dramatically, drawing the attention of the U.S. More recently, not only has Russia aided the Syrian government in the civil war, it has done so in tandem with Iranian forces after decades of Iranian military isolation.

Backed by the U.S., Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Gaido declared himself acting president on January 23, ushering in the latest escalation of Venezuela’s political crisis. He was soon recognized as interim president by the U.S., Canada, the EU, and most Latin American countries. China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and others continue to recognize Maduro, who still has the broad support of the Venezuelan military.

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on Maduro and individuals associated with him, as well as PVSDA, which is now stacked with Maduro allies. But the ability of Maduro and the Venezuelan economy to withstand the pressure suggests that, though the sanctions may damage his administration, they may not be enough to force him out.

Chavez fought to gain control over Venezuela’s oil supply and push out the U.S. and the West, only to have Maduro establish a new reliance on Russia. With the Kremlin’s help, his administration may survive, in return for Russian control over Venezuela’s oil industry and the establishment of a military footprint in the United States’ backyard. For the full summary, go here.