Operation Disarray – FBI

Posted on April 3, 2018April 3, 2018 by Denise Simon

The opioid crisis kills 155 people in the United States each day. In 2016, there were 64,000 drug overdoses and related deaths to fentanyl and fentanyl analogs.

President Trump has authorized a very aggressive program to stop this catastrophe.

A nationwide law enforcement action aimed at shining a light on those who use the dark web to buy and sell illegal opiates has resulted in hundreds of interactions and arrests of individuals who may have considered their seemingly anonymous online transactions beyond the reach of authorities.

The FBI-led enforcement action last week, named Operation Disarray, is part of a recently launched Department of Justice initiative to disrupt the sale of opioids online and was the first operation of its kind to occur simultaneously in all 50 states.

“The point of Operation Disarray,” said Special Agent Chris Brest, who helped organize the effort from FBI Headquarters, “is to put drug traffickers on notice: Law enforcement is watching when people buy and sell drugs online. For those who think the Darknet provides anonymity,” he explained, “you are mistaken.”

Darknet marketplaces resemble legitimate e-commerce sites, complete with shopping carts, thousands of products, sales promotions, and customer reviews. But the Darknet sites’ drop-down menus direct customers to cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and other illegal drugs.

The marketplaces are accessed through a type of software that claims to make the buyer and seller anonymous. Drug users anywhere in the world can sit in front of a computer screen and, with a click of the mouse, buy narcotics without having to risk a face-to-face interaction. “Drug trafficking is changing,” Brest said. “The environment is moving from real-world to the virtual realm, and it’s on the rise.”

Such unfettered access to illegal drugs, said Special Agent Eric Yingling, who specializes in Darknet investigations from the FBI’s Pittsburgh Division, “can accelerate someone’s addiction because the drugs are so easy to obtain. It also facilitates a low barrier of entry to becoming a trafficker,” he explained. “We see a number of individuals go from consuming to becoming distributors because they’ve become comfortable using the marketplaces. Anyone who owns a computer could potentially be involved in this type of activity.”

But there are risks with the Darknet, Yingling pointed out. Buyers might get more than they bargained for. Opiates laced with fentanyl, for example, have resulted in deadly overdoses throughout the country. And there is the very real risk of arrest and prosecution because specially trained investigators can use a variety of techniques to infiltrate the marketplaces.

Operation Disarray was designed, in part, to highlight those risks for buyers and sellers. Hundreds of FBI agents and federal partners—including personnel from the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Postal Inspection Service—conducted searches, made arrests, and carried out “knock and talks” with more than 160 individuals known to have bought or sold drugs through the marketplaces. Leads from the investigation identified 19 overdose deaths of persons of interest.

“We wanted to get the word out about the potential dangers of the drugs people are purchasing,” Yingling said, “and to remind them that law enforcement is very cognizant of this activity.”

“Education of what these drugs can do is one of the first steps to curbing the opioid epidemic,” Brest said. “People may be under the assumption that they won’t be the one that gets addicted, or that these drugs can’t ruin your life.”

Law enforcement personnel participating in Operation Disarray handed out brochures that included information on medical steps to take in the event of an overdose and where individuals or family members can get help for issues related to drug addiction.

In January 2018, the Department of Justice announced the Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement (J-CODE) team, an FBI-led initiative that brings together a variety of federal agencies to disrupt illicit opioid sales online.

As part of the effort, the FBI is training hundreds of agents, as well as local and state law enforcement partners, about the increasing use of Darknet marketplaces to facilitate the sale of opiates.

“The FBI has made the J-CODE a priority, and we are bringing together significant resources to strategically attack this crime problem.” Brest said. Operation Disarray was the first major J-CODE action, and, he continued, “we will consider the operation a success if our actions prevented one more person from overdosing on illegal narcotics.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions Announces Results of J-CODE’s First Law Enforcement Operation Targeting Opioid Trafficking on the Darknet

U.S. Caps Money at 25% of UN Peacekeeping

Posted on March 29, 2018March 29, 2018 by Denise Simon

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For the most part, peacekeepers do not achieve the standards of their home country for military or humanitarian positions, so they are dispatched to the United Nations.

Conflicts where peacekeepers are deployed are also near countries at the top of the list.

The UN’s peacekeepers currently have operations in Western Sahara, Central African Rebpublic, Mali, Haiti, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon, Abyei, South Sudan, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Liberia and India and Pakistan.

China’s peacekeepers will form part of the “Peacekeeping Capability Readiness System”, a rapid-deployment standby force.

Its move to become one of the largest forces in the UN’s peacekeepers indicates its growing presence on the world stage, while also saying that China is a responsible power.

The UN’s current peacekeeping budget stands at £5.25bn, and its force has been implemented in 69 missions over the past 68 years. Click here to see the personnel donations from listed countries.

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US: Won’t pay over 25 percent of UN peacekeeping anymore

UNITED NATIONS — The United States will no longer shoulder more than a quarter of the multibillion-dollar costs of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations, Washington’s envoy said Wednesday.

“Peacekeeping is a shared responsibility,” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said at a Security Council debate on peacekeeping reform. “All of us have a role to play, and all of us must step up.”

The U.S. is the biggest contributor to the U.N.’s 15 peacekeeping missions worldwide. Washington is paying about 28.5 percent of this year’s $7.3 billion peacekeeping budget, though Haley said U.S. law is supposed to cap the contribution at 25 percent.

The second-biggest contributor, China, pays a bit over 10 percent.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has complained before that the budget and Washington’s share are too high and pressed to cut this year’s budget. It is $570 million below last year’s, a smaller decrease than the U.S. wanted.

“We’re only getting started,” Haley said when the cut was approved in June. It followed a $400 million trim the prior year, before Trump’s administration.

Haley said Wednesday that the U.S. will work to make sure cuts in its portion are done “in a fair and sensible manner that protects U.N. peacekeeping.”

The General Assembly sets the budget and respective contributions by vote. Spokesmen for Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declined to comment on Haley’s remarks, noting that the 193 U.N. member states will decide the budget.

Drawing over 105,000 troops, police and other personnel from countries around the world, the peacekeeping missions operate in places from Haiti to parts of India and Pakistan. Most are in African countries. The biggest is in Congo, where the Security Council agreed just Tuesday to keep the 16,000-troop force in place for another year.

Some missions have been credited with helping to protect civilians and restore stability, but others have been criticized for corruption and ineffectiveness.

In Mali, where 13,000 peacekeepers have been deployed since 2013, residents in a northern region still “don’t feel safe and secure,” Malian women’s rights activist Fatimata Toure told the Security Council on Wednesday. She said violence remains pervasive in her section of a country that plunged into turmoil after a March 2012 coup created a security vacuum.

“We have still not felt (the peacekeeping mission) deliver on its protection-of-civilians mandate,” though it has helped in some other ways, Toure said. “We feel, as civilians, that we’ve been abandoned, left to our fate.”

Peacekeeping also has been clouded by allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation. An Associated Press investigative series last year uncovered roughly 2,000 claims of such conduct by peacekeepers and other U.N. personnel around the world during a 12-year period.

Maintaining peace has become increasingly deadly work. Some 59 peacekeepers were killed through “malicious acts” last year, compared to 34 in 2016, Guterres said Wednesday. A U.N. report in January blamed many of the deaths on inaction in the field and “a deficit of leadership” from the world body’s headquarters to remote locations.

Guterres said Wednesday that the U.N. is improving peacekeepers’ training, has appointed a victims’ rights advocate for victims of sexual abuse and is reviewing all peacekeeping operations.

Still, he said, more needs to be done to strengthen peacekeeping forces and ensure they are deployed in tandem with political efforts, not instead of them. They also shouldn’t be overloaded with unrealistic expectations, he said.

“Lives and credibility are being lost,” he said. “A peacekeeping operation is not an army or a counterterrorist force or a humanitarian agency.”

Representatives from many countries also stressed a need for more focused, better prepared peacekeeping missions and more robust political peace processes.

The U.N., its member states and countries that host peacekeeping missions all “need to shoulder our responsibilities,” said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose country arranged the debate as this month’s Security Council president.

ICE Arrests 271 in Florida, Puerto Rico, VI from 36 Countries

Posted on March 28, 2018March 28, 2018 by Denise Simon

ICE arrests 271 across the state of Florida, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands

MIAMI – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers arrested 271 aliens as part of an enforcement action targeting immigration violators and those who pose a threat to public safety. The enforcement action ran March 18 through 22. ERO officers made the arrests across the state of Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Of those arrested by ICE during the enforcement action, 99 had criminal records that included felony convictions for serious or violent offenses, such as 1^st degree murder, attempted murder, vehicular manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, attempted robbery, battery, burglary, child neglect, cruelty toward a child, domestic violence, drugs charges such as possession and trafficking, weapons offenses, abuse of the elderly. Additional convictions included driving under the influence, fraud, harboring aliens, illegal entry and re-entry to the United States, resisting an officer, traffic offenses, trespassing and workman’s compensation fraud. As part of the action, ERO officers apprehended 49 ICE fugitives and 39 individuals who were previously removed from the U.S., as well as two known gang members and one individual with an Interpol Red Notice.

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“ICE continues our commitment to making our communities safer by removing threats to our public safety,” said Marc J. Moore, field office director for the ERO Miami Field Office, which oversees all of Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. “Communities across Florida and Puerto Rico are safer today because of the hard work of the men and women of ERO.

During the operation, ERO was supported by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal and local law enforcement agencies, including the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service.

Arrests took place in 23 Florida counties, including 76 in Miami Dade, 65 in Broward, 27 in Duval, 17 in Palm Beach, 14 in Hillsborough, 10 in Orange, seven in Seminole, five in Manatee, five in Lee, four in Pinellas, four in Brevard, three in Polk, three in Indian River, two in Volusia, two in Bay, two in Martin, one in Escambia, one in Gadsden, one in Lake, one in Osceola, one in Sarasota, one in St. Lucie, one in Suwannee, 11 in Puerto Rico, and seven in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Arrest examples include:

On March 19, ERO officers arrested a Cuban citizen in Miami Dade. In 2014, the subject was convicted of attempted murder. The subject is currently pending a removal hearing by an immigration judge.

On March 20, ERO officers arrested a Mexican citizen in Pompano Beach. The subject was previously convicted of child exploitation charges in 2013. The subject is currently pending removal.

March 20, ERO officers from the Tampa office arrested a Haitian national and Bloods gang member in New York. He has multiple criminal convictions, including: burglary, patronized prostitution, possession of marijuana, meth and cocaine, criminal possession of a weapon, and rape in the first degree. He was designated as a registered sex offender for life and served five years in prison for rape.

Those arrested represented 36 countries throughout the world, including: Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Anguilla, Bahamas, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Chile, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Jamaica, Kuwait, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and United Kingdom.

Arrested individuals who have outstanding orders of deportation, or who returned to the United States illegally after being deported, are subject to immediate removal from the country. The remaining individuals are in ICE custody awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge, or pending travel arrangements for removal.

All the targeted individuals in this operation were amenable to arrest and removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

ICE deportation officers carry out targeted enforcement operations daily nationwide as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to protect the nation, uphold public safety, and protect the integrity of our immigration laws and border controls. These operations involve existing and established Fugitive Operations Teams.

During the targeted enforcement operations, ICE officers frequently encounter other aliens illegally present in the United States. They are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and, when appropriate, they are arrested by ICE officers.

2 Russians May not Survive Poison, but What about Lesin’s Murder?

Posted on March 28, 2018March 28, 2018 by Denise Simon

As of the time this article is published, the Kremlin is turning the blame of the attempted assassination in Britain on the Brits themselves. There is overwhelming evidence that the poisoning was in fact done at the hands of thugs at the behest of Moscow.

Russia has denied any involvement in the attack and has said it suspects the British secret services of using the Novichok nerve agent, which was developed by the Soviet military, to frame Russia and stoke anti-Russian hysteria.

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“We believe the Skripals first came into contact with the nerve agent from their front door,” said Dean Haydon, Britain’s’ senior national coordinator for counter terrorism policing. More here from Reuters.

Noisy Room has an excellent summary on Skripal and his daughter, that sadly are not expected to survive the assassination attempt by novichok. In part:

Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, are still hospitalized and are in critical condition in Britain after being exposed to the Russian nerve agent called novichok. Authorities now believe it was applied to their front door and that is how they came into contact with it. This is a military grade nerve agent that has no cure.

Skripal’s niece, Viktoria Skripal, told the BBC that the two have about a one percent chance of surviving. If they do, they will be crippled physically and mentally for the rest of their lives. The effects are debilitating and the pain continues to grow. It is prolonged torture until the victim succumbs and dies. She said the prognosis “really isn’t good.” The attack took place on March 4th in Salisbury. “Out of 99 percent, I have maybe 1 percent hope,” she said. “Whatever [nerve agent] was used, it has given them a very small chance of survival. But they’re going to be invalids for the rest of their lives.” More here.

*** But the United States is not without a successful assassination that happened in Washington DC, that seems to continue to be a major coverup. Further, the Obama administration did nothing to Moscow regarding the case.

BuzzFeed News has uncovered new information in its ongoing investigation into the strange death of Russia Today founder and Vladimir Putin’s former media czar Mikhail Lesin on Nov. 5, 2015, thanks – in part – to a report by Christopher Steele.

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The [FBI] received his report while it was helping the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department investigate the Russian media baron’s death, the sources said.

(…)

Now BuzzFeed News has established:

• Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.

• The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.

• Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.

The Steele report is not the FBI’s only source for this account of Lesin’s death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele.

DC police said Lesin died from a series of drunken falls, which just happened to take place the evening before Lesin was scheduled to meet with U.S. Justice Department officials to discuss the inner workings of RT.

BuzzFeed News has been out front on the issue of questionable deaths under Putin’s regime, and in the wake of the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England on March 4th, the British government says it is taking another look at 14 incidents BuzzFeed has flagged as suspicious.

Meanwhile, the way authorities claim Lesin died in a Dupont Circle hotel in the heart of Washington, DC defies logic.

“What I can tell you is that there isn’t a single person inside the bureau who believes this guy got drunk, fell down, and died,” an FBI agent told BuzzFeed News last year. “Everyone thinks he was whacked and that Putin or the Kremlin were behind it.”

In December, DC police released 58 pages of its case file on Lesin’s death. While many parts are blacked out, what was released says nothing about the blunt force injuries that killed Lesin — or even about him falling down, which is how he is supposed to have died.

(…)

For his report to the FBI about Lesin, Steele gathered intelligence from high-level sources in Moscow, according to the two sources who read the whole report.

All four of the people who read Steele’s report said it pins Lesin’s murder on a professional relationship gone lethally awry. According to the report, they said, Lesin fell out with a powerful oligarch close to Putin. Wanting to intimidate Lesin, the oligarch then contracted with Russian state security agents to beat up Lesin, the report states, according to three of the sources. The goal was not to kill Lesin, all four sources said Steele wrote, but Lesin died from the attack.

The sources could not recall what, if anything, the report said about whether Putin knew of or sanctioned the attack.

Full story: Christopher Steele’s Other Report: A Murder In Washington (BuzzFeed News)

The British Government Will Review Allegations Of Russian Involvement In 14 Suspicious Deaths Exposed By BuzzFeed News (BuzzFeed News)

Related: More Mystery in Russia-Connected DC Death

From CIR’s Human Rights Abuses page:

Eight high-profile Russians have died since the November 8, 2016 U.S. presidential election. Buzzfeed has been investigating 14 suspicious deaths on British soil with ties to Russia that have taken place under Putin’s regime. The news site also has filed a lawsuit to speed up the FBI’s possible release of information pertaining to the suspicious death of Putin’s former media czar, Mikhail Lesin, in a DC hotel the night before he was scheduled to meet with the U.S. Department of Justice back in November 2015.

Assassinations of Russians, a Trend or Long Game?

Posted on March 20, 2018March 20, 2018 by Denise Simon

A registry of foreign agents to Russia, compiled by the Justice Department, includes many of Washington’s most powerful legal, communications and lobbying firms, including Sidley Austin, Venable, APCO and White & Case. A review of those records, by the Center for Responsive Politics, found 279 registrations of Russian agents in the United States. More here.

***

“Putin’s inner circle is already subject to personal U.S. sanctions, imposed over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s’ Crimea region,” the Reuters news agency points out. … “But the so-called ‘oligarchs’ list’ that was released on Tuesday … covers many
people beyond Putin’s circle and reaches deep into Russia’s business elite.”

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is among the 114 senior political figures in Russia’s government who made the list, along with 42 of Putin’s aides, Cabinet ministers such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and top officials in Russia’s leading spy agencies, the FSB and GRU. The CEOs of major state-owned companies, including energy giant Rosneft and Sberbank, are also on the list.

So are 96 wealthy Russians deemed “oligarchs” by the Treasury Department, which said each is believed to have assets totaling $1 billion or more. Some are the most famous of wealthy Russians, among them tycoons Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Prokhorov, who challenged Putin in the 2012 election. Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a figure in the Russia investigation over his ties to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is included.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich dismissed the list as simply a “who’s who” of Russian politics. He told Russian news agencies Tuesday he wasn’t surprised to find his name on the list, too, saying that it “looks like a ‘who’s who’ book.” Dvorkovich stopped short of saying how Russia would react to it, saying the Kremlin would “monitor the situation.” More here.

*** So when there are murder cases of Russian asylees in Britain, what are the agencies in the United States thinking?

Putin foe shot dead on Moscow street | New York Post photo

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Litvinenko: Not first Putin critic to end up dead - CNN.com photo

Well there was Mikhail Lesin, a former friend of Putin found dead in his hotel in Dupont Circle, Washington DC. Then there was Operation Ghost Stories, the massive spy swap.

Imagine what the context and case reference is for the FBI when it comes to Russian operations in the United States and in allied countries.Or how many planes have been shot out of the sky where clues and evidence point to Russia? More explained in video below.

Beyond the attempted assassination of Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury two weeks ago, there was yet another confirmed death.

Whoever is behind the murder of a prominent Russian exile, who believed he was on a Kremlin hit list, managed to get inside his home without breaking in, police believe.

Nikolai Glushkov, 68, was found dead at home last week at his home in southwest London, and officers are now hunting for the culprits. His official cause of death is “compression to the neck.”

Before his death, Glushkov warned that a close friend of his had been murdered, and that he would be next.

In a Monday morning update on the investigation, the Metropolitan Police said they examined Glushkov’s house and found no signs of forced entry.

*** How bad is this trend?