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What Congresswoman Maxine Waters neglected to mention in her letter to Fidel Castro was the resolution by the 105th Congress in 1998. Read the two page document here. In the end, Waters is cool with prison escape and murder? Further, Governor Christie of New Jersey wrote a letter to then president Barack Obama in 2014 asking that he demand extradition of Joanne Chesimard, which too went unheeded. Maybe we should ask Maxine about her thoughts on the Black Liberation Army, as in 1979, members of the Black Liberation Army helped Chesimard break out of prison.
Primer: In deference to the ATF, it is known with historical cases that tobacco smuggling does fund terror, see document at end of post)
In 2013, Sixteen Palestinian men, some with ties to convicted terrorists, were indicted in a scheme of cigarette smuggling that spanned New York, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and New Jersey states. Some of them had ties to known terrorist organizations. See the official case here.
A.T.F. Filled Secret Bank Account With Millions From Shadowy Cigarette Sales
Charlie Batten, a fifth-generation tobacco farmer and U.S. Tobacco Cooperative Inc. board member, at his farm in Four Oaks, N.C. The co-op negotiated a deal to buy a tobacco distribution company whose owners had secret ties to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
NYT’s/WASHINGTON— Working from an office suite behind a Burger King in southern Virginia, operatives used a web of shadowy cigarette sales to funnel tens of millions of dollars into a secret bank account. They weren’t known smugglers, but rather agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The operation, not authorized under Justice Department rules, gave agents an off-the-books way to finance undercover investigations and pay informants without the usual cumbersome paperwork and close oversight, according to court records and people close to the operation.
The secret account is at the heart of a federal racketeering lawsuit brought by a collective of tobacco farmers who say they were swindled out of $24 million. A pair of A.T.F. informants received at least $1 million each from that sum, records show.
The scheme relied on phony shipments of snack food disguised as tobacco. The agents were experts: Their job was to catch cigarette smugglers, so they knew exactly how it was done.
Government records and interviews with people involved reveal an operation that existed on a murky frontier — between investigating smuggling and being complicit in it. After The New York Times began asking about the operation last summer, the Justice Department disclosed it to the department’s inspector general’s office, which is investigating. The inspector general “expressed serious concerns,” court records show.
It is unclear how broadly the A.T.F. adopted this practice, at what level it was approved, and whether it continues. Nearly all references to the A.T.F. have been blacked out of public court records, and most documents are entirely sealed.
The investigation and the looming racketeering trial will bring renewed scrutiny to the A.T.F., which has been buffeted in recent years by the botched gun-tracking operation known as Fast and Furious and its mismanagement of undercover investigations. Members of Congress, particularly Republicans, have heaped criticism on the agency for decades, and the National Rifle Association has lobbied to limit the agency’s authority and funding.
While government auditors have previously cited problems with A.T.F.’s tobacco investigations, this operation went beyond what was identified in that audit, released in 2013. The A.T.F. and the Justice Department declined to comment.
Documents in the racketeering lawsuit outline the A.T.F. operation. The tobacco cooperative is suing a former employee and a consultant who, according to court documents, both worked as A.T.F. informants. The informants have denied all wrongdoing.
Discarded cigarettes at a U.S. Tobacco manufacturing plant in Timberlake, N.C. The U.S. Tobacco co-op is made up of about 700 tobacco farmers who pool their crops and share the profits.Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Part of their defense, records show, is that they acted on behalf of the government. In response, a judge recently added the United States government as a defendant.
Since last summer, The Times has fought to make all the documents public, but the Justice Department has argued successfully in court to keep them secret. Crucial details, however, have been revealed through poor redaction, documents that were filed publicly by mistake and the sheer difficulty of keeping so much a secret for so long.
Buying Into an Operation
In spring 2011, U.S. Tobacco Cooperative was looking to expand its distribution network. The co-op is made up of about 700 tobacco farmers — from Virginia to Florida — who pool their crops and share the profits. Based in Raleigh, N.C., the company is a major exporter to China and produces discount-brand cigarettes including Wildhorse, Traffic and 1839.
“These are really, really good people,” said Stuart D. Thompson, the cooperative’s chief executive. “Every year, they take all their chips. They put them on the table, and they hope they get them all back.”
The company began negotiating to buy a tobacco distributor in Bristol, Va., Big South Wholesale. Big South’s owners, Jason Carpenter and Christopher Small, had a network of customers and owned a warehouse.
They also had an existing secret relationship with the A.T.F., records show.
The two men have filed court documents acknowledging “participation in undercover law enforcement activities.” And a judge’s sealed order, which is publicly available online, revealed that the two men worked “on behalf of various government agencies, primarily the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
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Jason Carpenter and Christopher Small, who owned Big South Wholesale in Bristol, Va., have acknowledged participating in undercover law enforcement operations.
The basics of cigarette smuggling are simple. Each state sets its tobacco taxes. Buying cigarettes in low-tax states, like Virginia, and secretly selling them in higher-tax states, like New York, generates large profits. More complicated schemes have shipped cigarettes to Indian reservations, where they are not taxed, then rerouted them for sale on the black market.
A.T.F. agents try to disrupt these networks. Often that means working with informants to buy and sell tobacco on the black market, much the way agents pose as drug dealers to investigate cartels.
Because so much of the case remains sealed, Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small are prohibited from answering questions about nearly every aspect of the case. “Everything we did that is being attacked now in litigation, we did in good faith,” they said in a statement.
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Stuart D. Thompson, chief executive of U.S. Tobacco, on the manufacturing floor of the plant in Timberlake, N.C.Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Exactly who at U.S. Tobacco knew about their A.T.F. ties and what they knew are a matter of dispute. But there were signs that Big South was not a simple tobacco distributor. Its assets included more than two dozen vehicles, including expensive S.U.V.s and a fleet of Mercedes, B.M.W., Audi, Lexus and Jaguar sports cars.
Early 2011 was a time of intense pressure inside the A.T.F. The agency was under fire from Congress over the Fast and Furious operation, in which agents allowed gun traffickers to buy weapons and ship them to Mexico, hoping the shipments could lead them to major weapons dealers. Justice Department auditors began scrutinizing how A.T.F. agents managed their tobacco smuggling investigations.
With that audit continuing, the A.T.F. issued new rules to tightly monitor undercover investigations. Soon after those rules went into effect, U.S. Tobacco completed its purchase of Big South for $5.5 million, a deal that gave Big South the authority to buy and sell cigarettes on behalf of the cooperative. Almost immediately, the farmers say, Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small began defrauding them.
It worked like this: An export company working with the A.T.F. placed an order for cigarettes to be shipped internationally — thus not subject to American taxes. Big South would instead ship bottled water and potato chips, making it look as if cigarettes had been exported. Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small would then buy the tobacco at a slight markup through a private bank account. Lastly, they would sell the tobacco to Big South, again at a markup.
Because they had the authority to buy on behalf of the tobacco cooperative, “Carpenter and Small simply sold products to themselves,” the farmers wrote in court documents. All of these transactions occurred on paper. The cigarettes never left the Virginia warehouse.
“It’s what I saw with my own eyes,” said Brandon Moore, the warehouse manager and one of the people who discussed the transactions in the case. Their accounts fit with descriptions in court records.
Mr. Moore said he was aware of the A.T.F. operation but became troubled by it as he learned more. “It shouldn’t be going on, even if it is the A.T.F.,” he said.
In one deal described in the lawsuit, the informants bought tobacco at $15 a carton and sold it to U.S. Tobacco at $17.50. The profit, about $519,000, went into what was known as a “management account.” That account, while controlled by Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small, helped pay for A.T.F. investigations.
Mr. Moore, the warehouse manager, said agents often told him what to buy on the company’s credit card. For instance, he recalled spending tens of thousands of dollars at Best Buy on iPads, televisions and other gifts to curry favor with potential criminal targets.
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A testing room at U.S. Tobacco’s Timberlake facilities, where buyers can sample types of tobacco.Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small have also acknowledged in court documents receiving more than $1 million each, though it is not clear from public documents whether that was profit or reimbursement for expenses paid on behalf of the government.
How that arrangement began is unclear. Ryan Kaye, an A.T.F. supervisor, testified that the management account was created “as a result of verbal directives from the A.T.F. program office and other headquarters officials.” Mr. Kaye’s full statement is sealed, but excerpts are cited in one publicly available document.
The defendants in the lawsuit contend that U.S. Tobacco got a good deal on the cigarettes, even at the prices they paid. The farmers tell a different story, saying they never would have purchased Big South if they understood that Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small had a side arrangement that involved selling them tobacco at inflated values.
Thomas Lesnak, a retired A.T.F. agent who was involved in the operation, dismissed suggestions that anything was done improperly. He said he could not discuss Big South because the Justice Department was still conducting investigations based on information developed during operations based at the warehouse.
The arrangement began to break down in late 2012, when Mr. Thompson joined U.S. Tobacco as the chief financial officer. He was curious why his warehouse was placing so many orders for a brand of cigarette that competes against U.S. Tobacco. He could not get a straight answer, the company said in court documents.
In March 2013, Mr. Moore picked up the phone, called Mr. Thompson and explained what was happening. “I did what I did because of the ethics of it,” Mr. Moore said recently. “What was happening there was wrong.”
Once U.S. Tobacco discovered the bookkeeping irregularities, it reported them to the Justice Department, which investigates white-collar crime and government misconduct. Records show that the Justice Department, which includes the A.T.F., investigated some aspects of the case but no charges were filed.
“We voted unanimously to give everything we had to the government,” said Charlie Batten, a U.S. Tobacco board member whose family has worked the same North Carolina soil for generations. “We thought they would take it and run with it. What happened was, they’ve fought us tooth and nail.”
Because of the sealing order, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Batten and others are prohibited from discussing what happened to the money — even with their own farmers.
Three years into its lawsuit, U.S. Tobacco still cannot disentangle itself from the government. The cooperative recently told a judge that it was under investigation by the Treasury Department.
All those secret tobacco sales, it turns out, should have been taxed. And the government wants its money.
Blocks away from the swearing in on Inauguration Day for Donald Trump, there were several pockets where all kinds of nasty things were going on by people associated with the Black Bloc. As reported by USA Today in early February:
Swarms of people dressed in black invaded what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration against right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulous on Wednesday evening.
The group tossed smoke bombs, set fires and started fights on the University of California – Berkeley campus where Yiannopoulous was slated to speak. He never would.
The protest’s organizers, the Berkeley Against Trump coalition, said the peaceful acts of the 1,500 demonstrators were marred by 50 to 75 anti-fascist Black Bloc protestors.
Outside of Berkeley, media outlets have linked Black Blocs to a number of modern protests, most recently in efforts opposing President Donald Trump. The Nation credits a Black Bloc protestor with punching alt-right leader Richard Spencer in the face on Trump’s inauguration day. The Washington Post said Black Blocs were involved with violent protests in Washington, D.C. on inauguration day and in Portland following Trump’s election win.
A Glimpse Into How Much Google Knows About Russian Government Hackers
A 2014 leaked private report from Google shows how much the internet giant knows about government hacking groups.
Motherboard: In October of 2014 an American security company revealed that a group of hackers affiliated with the Russian government, dubbed APT28, had targeted Georgia and other Eastern European countries in a wide-ranging espionage campaign. Two and a half years later, APT28—also known as “Fancy Bear” or “Sofacy”—is a household name not just in the cybersecurity industry, but in the mainstream too, thanks to its attack on the US Democratic party and the ensuing leaks of documents and emails.
Before that report by FireEye, APT28 was a well-kept secret within the cybersecurity industry. At the time, several companies were willing to share information about the hacking group. Even Google investigated the group, and penned a 40-page technical report on the hacking group that has never been published before.
This sort of document, which Motherboard obtained from two independent sources, may be a common sight in the threat intelligence industry, but the public rarely gets to see what such a report from Google looks like. The report draws from one of Google’s most interesting sources of data when it comes to malware and cybersecurity threats: VirusTotal, a public malware repository that the internet giant acquired in 2012.
Sofacy and X-Agent, the report read, referring to the malware used by APT28, “are used by a sophisticated state-sponsored group targeting primarily former Soviet republics, NATO members, and other Western European countries.”
“It looks like Google researchers were well aware of Sofacy before it was publicly disclosed.”
While Google security researchers don’t dwell into who’s really behind these operations, they do hint that they agree with the now widespread belief that APT28 works for the Russian government in a clever, indirect, way—in the very title of the report: “Peering into the Aquarium.”
While that might seem like an obscure title, for those who follow Russian espionage activities, it’s a clear reference to the headquarters of the military intelligence agency known as GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, which are popularly known as “The Aquarium.”
“It looks like Google researchers were well aware of Sofacy before it was publicly disclosed,” Matt Suiche, a security researcher and the founder of Comae Technologies and the OPCDE conference, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the report. “And also attributed Sofacy and X-Agent to Russia before it was publicly done by FireEye, ESET or CrowdStrike.”
In its report Google security researcher note that APT28 attacks a large number of targets with its first-stage malware Sofacy, but only uses the more tailored and sophisticated X-Agent, which was recently used against Ukraine’s military units, for “high-priority targets.”
“Sofacy was three times more common than X-Agent in the wild, with over 600 distinct samples,” Google’s report stated.
Asked for comment, a Google spokesperson said via email that the company’s “security teams are constantly monitoring potential threats to internet users, and regularly publish information to better protect them.”
The report noted that Georgia had the highest ratio of submissions of Sofacy malware, followed by Romania, Russia and Denmark.
While this report is now a bit dated, it shows that for all its sophistication, APT28 has been often caught in the act of hacking politically interesting targets, betraying the origin of the hackers behind the dry nickname. It also reveals how much a company like Google, which doesn’t have software installed on thousands of customers computers like other antivirus and security vendors that is designed to specifically detect malware, can still learn a lot about government hacking groups thanks to the other data it has access to.
*** Related reading:
State-sponsored hackers targeting prominent journalists, Google warns
Politico: Google has warned a number of prominent journalists that state-sponsored hackers are attempting to steal their passwords and break into their inboxes, the journalists tell POLITICO.
Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine said he received several messages from Google warning him about an attack from a government-backed hacker starting shortly after the election. He said the most recent warning came two to three weeks ago.
Julia Ioffe, who recently started at The Atlantic and has covered Russia for years, said she got warnings as recently as two weeks ago. (See one of the warnings: http://bit.ly/2kMUyRb)
Some journalists getting the warnings say they suspect the hackers could be Russians looking to find incriminating emails they could leak to embarrass journalists, either by revealing alleged liberal bias or to expose the sausage-making of D.C. journalism.
“The fact that all this started right after the election suggests to me that journalists are the next wave to be targeted by state-sponsored hackers in the way that Democrats were during it,” said one journalist who got the warning. “I worry that the outcome is going to be the same: Someone, somewhere, is going to get hacked, and then the contents of their gmail will be weaponized against them — and by extension all media.”
The Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
Russian embassy Washington DC
Google cautioned that the warnings did not mean the accounts had been compromised already and were sent due to “an abundance of caution.”
“Since 2012, we’ve notified users when we believe their Google accounts are being targeted by government-backed attackers,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. “We send these warnings out of an abundance of caution — they do not indicate that a user’s account has already been compromised or that a more widespread attack is occurring when they receive the notice.”
Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox, said he had received the warning as recently as a few days back. CNN senior media reporter Brian Stelter said he has been getting the alerts for the past few months.
Other journalists who confirmed they’ve recently gotten the warnings include New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger, Times columnist Paul Krugman and Yahoo Washington bureau chief Garance Franke-Ruta.
GQ special contributor Keith Olbermann said the warnings started a few weeks after the election, and he received the most recent alert earlier this week, a “big bright red bar” across the top of his Gmail. Some of the reporters say they are tightening up their email security to try to prevent the hackers from getting in.
Chait also said he was “contacted over email by a stranger who offered to help me by giving me an encryption key to protect me from hackers. He would not give me his name, meet me or talk on the phone, despite repeated requests.”
The stranger also emailed The Atlantic’s David Frum, James Fallows and Adam Serwer, Andrew Sullivan and Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin.
Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said he also received hacking warnings from Google. He added: “Given my background, one would have to guess that it’s the Russians.”
When it comes to asylum seekers, a person under the Obama administration only needed to say they were seeking asylum. Trump’s plan raises the bar where conditions for being granted asylum must be proven.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, an applicant must generally demonstrate “a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Immigration lawyers say any applicants who appear to meet that criteria in their initial interviews should be allowed to make their cases in court. They oppose encouraging asylum officers to take a stricter stance on questioning claims and rejecting applications.
Interviews to assess credible fear are conducted almost immediately after an asylum request is made, often at the border or in detention facilities by immigration agents or asylum officers, and most applicants easily clear that hurdle. Between July and September of 2016, U.S. asylum officers accepted nearly 88 percent of the claims of credible fear, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.
Asylum seekers who fail the credible fear test can be quickly deported unless they file an appeal. Currently, those who pass the test are eventually released and allowed to remain in the United States awaiting hearings, which are often scheduled years into the future because of a backlog of more than 500,000 cases in immigration courts.
Between October 2015 and April 2016, nearly 50,000 migrants claimed credible fear, 78 percent of whom were from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala or Mexico, according to statistics from USCIS.
The number of migrants from those three countries who passed credible fear and went to court to make their case for asylum rose sharply between 2011 and 2015, from 13,970 claims to 34,125, according to data from the Justice Department. More here from Reuters.
FNC: Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly moved Tuesday to implement a host of immigration enforcement changes ordered by President Trump, directing agency heads to hire thousands more officers, end so-called “catch-and-release” policies and begin work on the president’s promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.
“It is in the national interest of the United States to prevent criminals and criminal organizations from destabilizing border security,” Kelly wrote in one of two memos released Tuesday by the department.
The changes would spare so-called “dreamers.” On a conference call with reporters, a DHS official stressed that the directives would not affect Obama-era protections for illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and others given a reprieve in 2014. But outside those exemptions, Kelly wrote that DHS “no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”
A DHS official said the agencies are “going back to our traditional roots” on enforcement.
The memos cover a sprawling set of initiatives including:
Prioritizing criminal illegal immigrants and others for deportation, updating guidance from previous administration
Expanding the 287(g) program, which allows participating local officers to act as immigration agents – and had been rolled back under the Obama administration
Starting the planning, design and construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall
Hiring 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and officers
Hiring 5,000 Border Patrol agents
Ending “catch-and-release” policies under which illegal immigrants subject to deportation potentially are allowed to “abscond” and fail to appear at removal hearings
It’s unclear what timelines the secretary is setting for some of these objectives, and what budgetary and other constraints the department and its myriad agencies will face. In pursuing an end to “catch-and-release,” one memo called for a plan with the Justice Department to “surge” immigration judges and asylum officers to handle additional cases.
While congressional Republicans have vowed to work with Trump to fund the front-end costs associated with his promised border wall, the same memo also hints at future efforts to potentially use money otherwise meant for Mexico – following on Trump’s repeated campaign vow to make Mexico pay for the wall. The secretary called for “identifying and quantifying” sources of aid to Mexico, without saying in the memo how that information might be used.
Mexican officials repeatedly have said they will not pay for a border barrier. DHS said it has identified initial locations to build a wall where current fencing is not effective, near El Paso, Texas; Tucson, Ariz.; and El Centro, Calif.
The DHS directives come as the Trump White House continues to work on rewriting its controversial executive order suspending the U.S. refugee program as well as travel from seven mostly Muslim countries. The order was put on hold by a federal court, and Trump’s team is said to be working on a new measure.
The directives also come as the Trump administration faces criticism from Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups for recent ICE raids of illegal immigrants.
DHS officials on Tuesday’s conference call stressed that they are operating under existing law and once again shot down an apparently erroneous news report from last week claiming National Guard troops could be utilized to round up illegal immigrants. That will not happen, an official said.
“We’re going to treat everyone humanely and with dignity, but we are going to execute the laws of the United States,” a DHS official said on the conference call.
A global operation that began apparently in 2001. 
Techviral
Russian embassy Washington DC
