Allowing Kaspersky Labs in the U.S. Defies Logic

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

Germany next:Germany big target of cyber espionage and attacks: government report

Barack Obama’s sanction and executive order hardly went far enough on Russia. For Russian Laws and Regulations and Implications for Kaspersky Labs and certificates, go here.

Documents link Russian cybersecurity firm to spy agency

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies have turned up the heat on Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based cybersecurity giant long suspected of ties to Russia’s spying apparatus.

Now, official Kremlin documents reviewed by McClatchy could further inflame the debate about whether the company’s relationship with Russian intelligence is more than rumor.

The documents are certifications issued to the company by the Russian Security Service, the spy agency known as the FSB.

Unlike the stamped approvals the FSB routinely issues to companies seeking to operate in Russia, Kaspersky’s include an unusual feature: a military intelligence unit number matching that of an FSB program.

“That strikes me as much more persuasive public evidence,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security. “It makes it far more likely that much of the rumor and uncertainty about Kaspersky are true.”

For years, suspicions that Kaspersky is connected to Russia’s spying network have dogged the company, a leading global seller of anti-virus programs. Founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky studied cryptography, programming and mathematics at an academy operated by the KGB, the FSB’s Soviet-era predecessor, and then worked for the Ministry of Defense.

Since he established the company, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide, according to its website, and is the largest software vendor in Europe. Its security software is also widely available in the United States.

U.S. agencies also use it, with Kaspersky a subcontractor on federal software contracts. The Democratic National Committee has also used the software, even after its emails were breached last summer by Russian hackers.

But during investigations into Russia’s meddling in last year’s U.S. elections, concerns have grown that Kaspersky software could somehow be used to launch a cyberattack on the U.S. electric grid or other critical infrastructure, such as railroads, airlines or water utilities. ABC News reported in May that the FBI warned industry leaders about those risks last year at a meeting confirmed by McClatchy.

One of Kaspersky’s certificates that carries a military intelligence unit number.
GREG GORDON/MCCLATCHY/TNS

In recent days, two events kept Kaspersky in the news: FBI agents fanned out to interview Russian Kaspersky employees based in the United States, and a Senate committee approved legislation to curb federal use of the company’s products.

Even so, no proof has ever been made public to refute the company’s denials that it has connections to Russian intelligence.

The documents obtained by McClatchy, however, could provide additional evidence that the clandestine FSB has a tight relationship with Kaspersky.

In a statement to McClatchy, the company did not directly address the reference to an FSB military unit number in several of its certificates dating to 2007. The certificates are posted on Kaspersky’s website.

Kaspersky said the FSB’s certification review “is quite similar to that of many countries,” including those of the European Union and the United States. It includes an analysis of the company’s source code “to ensure that undeclared functionality and security issues — like backdoors — do not exist,” the company said.

However, Russia’s certification reviews do not require the company to divulge “the necessary information to permit those (spy) organizations to bypass products’ security mechanisms,” Kaspersky said.

After this story was initially published, the company said it and other high-tech companies that seek to sell products to the Russian government receive their certifications from the Center for Information Protection and Special Communications, known by the FSB military unit number on Kaspersky’s certificates.

A former Western intelligence official who examined the documents for McClatchy described as “very unusual” the assignment of a military intelligence number on Kaspersky’s certificates.

In Russia’s closed society, the FSB retains the right to access any company’s data transmissions, and no firm is allowed to use encryption to block the intelligence agency’s intrusions, the former Western spy said.

Kenneth Geers, a former NATO expert who is a fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, also reviewed the company’s FSB certificate.

Geers said he could not say with certainty the degree to which the documents show a connection between Kaspersky and the FSB.

But “the suggestion is that this is a government op (operation), a unit with a direct government affiliation,” he said.

“No one should be surprised if there are closer relationships between IT vendors and law enforcement, worldwide, than the public imagines,” Geers said.

Case in point: Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that American telecommunications companies shared vast amounts of personal data with the U.S. National Security Agency, where Geers once worked.

It’s possible, Geers said, that Kaspersky’s software contains a secret “backdoor” to allow Russian special services access for law enforcement and counterintelligence purposes.

“If such a secret backdoor exists, I would not be shocked,” Geers said. “A worldwide deployment of sensors may be too great a temptation for any country’s intelligence services to ignore.

“Kaspersky may also have been required by Russian authorities to participate in a quiet business partnership with the government,” he said.

A former CIA station chief in Moscow agreed that Kaspersky may have had little choice.

“These guys’ families, their well-being, everything they have is in Russia,” said Steve Hall, who later headed the agency’s Russian operations before retiring in 2015.

Kaspersky is “a Russian company,” Hall said. “Any time (Russian President Vladimir Putin) wants Kaspersky to do something — anything — he’ll remind them that’s where their families are and where their bank accounts are. There’s no doubt in my mind it could be, if it’s not already, under the control of Putin.”

Kaspersky has rejected any notion that it might be an intelligence front, citing its years of delivering quality products.

“As a private company, Kaspersky Lab has no ties to any government, and the company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyber espionage efforts,” Eugene Kaspersky said in May during an “Ask Me Anything” session on the website Reddit.

Many cyber experts, including those with federal government backgrounds, have praised the quality of Kaspersky software. The company also has a record of exposing cyberattacks, including the U.S. government’s Stuxnet attack that disabled Iran’s nuclear weapons development even though the Iranian equipment wasn’t connected to the Internet.

But several other experts said they were “not shocked” by the disclosure of the language in Kaspersky’s FSB certificate.

“It is common view around the intelligence community that (Kaspersky) is treated (by the Kremlin) like an arm of the Russian government,” said a former Obama administration cyber official, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Kaspersky has attracted an unwanted spotlight lately in the Justice Department’s investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller into whether the Kremlin colluded with President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in May, Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., raised concerns about Kaspersky.

Rubio asked of intelligence agency chiefs, “Would any of you be comfortable with the Kaspersky Lab software on your computers?”

Before him were, among others, the leaders of the FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency.

Each said “no.”

The FBI interviews of Kaspersky employees were conducted June 27, after disclosures that the company paid retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn more than $11,000 in consulting fees last fall before he began a short-lived stint as Trump’s national security adviser.

The day after the interviews, the Senate Armed Service Committee approved legislation that would bar the Pentagon from buying Kaspersky products.

“The ties between Kaspersky Lab and the Kremlin are very alarming,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. “This has led to a consensus in Congress and among administration officials that Kaspersky Lab cannot be trusted to protect critical infrastructure, particularly computer systems vital to our nation’s security.”

Her amendment to the defense authorization bill prohibiting Pentagon purchase of the software as of October 2018 won overwhelming approval.

If the amendment becomes law, there could be consequences, a Russian news agency reported. It quoted a top Kremlin communications official, Nikolai Nikiforov, as warning that if the United States freezes out Kaspersky, Putin’s government could not rule out retaliation.

The FBI declined to comment. But the bureau has long suspected that some of Kaspersky’s American-based employees were engaging in intelligence activities, said a U.S. government official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Federal agencies have at least 20 contracts in which Kaspersky products are used. The General Services Administration makes them available on an approved product list for much of the government.

CDW, a top government tech contractor that has provided Kaspersky software and maintenance through four contracts with the Consumer Safety Product Commission (as recently as May 23), declined to say whether it plans to continue offering Kaspersky software.

Dell, the giant computer manufacturer, offers Kaspersky in many of its products. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

So why do federal agencies still use Kaspersky software if there has been such uneasiness about it inside national security circles?

“Under acquisition rules, it is very difficult for an agency to rely on classified information in order to make purchasing decisions,” said J. Michael Daniel, White House cybersecurity coordinator during the Obama administration.

“A lot of acquisition officers didn’t seek out that information because they couldn’t use it in the decision-making process,” said Daniel, now president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a group committed to improving cyber defenses.

The U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian cyber operatives pirated thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee beginning in 2015 helped trigger the inquiries into possible Kremlin interference in the election.

But two months after the DNC disclosed that its servers had been hacked — in an apparent attempt to help prevent further intrusions — the party purchased Kaspersky software on Aug. 25, 2016, for $137.46, according to Federal Election Commission records. It was the only federal political committee that reported buying Kaspersky software in the 2016 cycle, according to FEC records.

A DNC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

For its part, the company publishes a blog that advises consumers about computer viruses. The U.S. government official said, though, that in the past Kaspersky has aroused suspicions as to why it warns about some computer bugs but not others.

The firm’s presence has become so embedded in the U.S. economy that the company sponsors a Ferrari Formula One racing team, robotic competitions for children and is among the corporate sponsors of an upcoming conference of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“They have a big public relations wing,” said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re fully aware they’re under the microscope.”

Supreme Court and the no-croak Frog

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

And you think government is not broken? Hold on for this one. It is legal terrorism.

The phone call came out of the blue in 2011.

A federal biologist on the other end of the line told Edward B. Poitevent II that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service intended to designate a large swath of Louisiana woods that had been in his family for generations a “critical habitat” for the endangered dusky gopher frog.

Poitevent was confused because the frog had been neither seen nor its croak heard on the land since the 1960s. Later he would learn that his land is not, in fact, a suitable habitat for the frog anyway.

“No matter how you slice it or dice it, it’s a taking of my land in that I can’t use it or sell it now,” said Poitevent, a New Orleans lawyer.

A half century after disappearing from the 1,500-acre parcel in Louisiana, the dusky gopher frog will likely appear this month in filings urging the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the matter after years of costly litigation.

The dusky gopher frog.

United States Fish and Wildlife Service

In one sense, the case illustrates the conflicts that arise as conservationists and the government use the Endangered Species Act to protect privately held lands. But legal scholars say the absent amphibian could provide a broader test of just how far the government’s regulatory reach can extend under the Constitution.

The case offers the high court a chance to revisit its “Chevron deference” precedent, named for a landmark 1984 ruling involving the oil giant and environmental activists. It held that when a federal law contains ambiguous language, the courts should defer to the agency’s interpretation unless it is unreasonable. Given that many laws contain ambiguous language – and that “unreasonable” is also a squishy term – Chevron gives federal agencies wide authority not just to interpret but to make law, many critics say.

Although the Trump administration has declared its intentions to rein in the regulatory state, the Interior Department declined to comment on this case, as did the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. Regardless, only the Supreme Court can overturn Chevron, and it is unclear how the addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch, a noted Chevron skeptic, may influence the litigation. But Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger, a trenchant critic of America’s administrative law system, doubts the dusky frog will join Brown, Roe and Citizens United in the annals of court history.

“I would love for them to take it up and overturn Chevron — and this is an opportunity for them to do so if they were so inclined,” he said, “but they’ve shown remarkable dexterity in avoiding it.”

Nevertheless, the case’s history demonstrates how Chevron can force judges to rule against what some perceive as simple common sense. From the outset of this process, some judges who have ruled against Poitevent and fellow plaintiffs have insisted their hands were tied.

“The Court has little doubt that what the government has done is remarkably intrusive and has all the hallmarks of government insensitivity to private property,” U.S. District Judge Martin L.C. Feldman wrote in his 2014 decision siding with the wildlife service and environmental advocacy groups. “The troubling question is whether the law authorizes such action and whether the government has acted within the law. Reluctantly, the Court answers ‘yes’ to both questions.”

The dusky gopher frog, a largely subterranean critter, is on a long list of species whose endangered designations restrict private land use. Currently, development rights are being challenged to protect the habitats of at least four other creatures: the Riverside fairy shrimp (California); the Northern spotted owl (Oregon, Washington and California); the Gunnison sage grouse (Colorado and Utah); and the jaguar (Arizona and New Mexico).

But the Louisiana case stands out because of the frog’s long absence from the land in question.

M. Reed Hopper, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which sued in 2013 on behalf of some of Poitevent’s relatives, called the gopher frog case an “extreme example” of officials enforcing the Endangered Species Act “contrary to its terms, without regard for other social values such as housing, jobs, food, and production, or when the burdensome cost of species protections fall unfairly on a few landowners that should be shared by society as a whole.”

Fifteen states have filed amicus briefs with the plaintiffs seeking some restriction on federal regulatory reach within critical habitats. But Feldman, an advocate of judicial restraint appointed by President Reagan, wrote in his ruling that in his view a court would be overreaching were it to side with the property owners. He hinted, perhaps facetiously, that what the land owners really needed was an activist judge. Otherwise, he said, Congress would have to amend the Endangered Species Act for the co-litigants to get relief.

Edward B. Poitevent II

Credit: Stone Pigman

Other jurists disagree. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Priscilla Owen, who dissented in the 5th Circuit’s initial upholding of Feldman’s ruling, said there must be regulatory limits. Otherwise the wildlife service would be able to declare any land at all “critical habitat.”

“If the Endangered Species Act permitted the actions taken by the Government in this case, then vast portions of the United States could be designated as ‘critical habitat’ because it is theoretically possible, even if not probable, that land could be modified to sustain the introduction or reintroduction of an endangered species,” she wrote.

What seems highly impractical is the reintroduction of the dusky gopher frog on the Louisiana tract. The dark, warty creature has very particular needs. It can only breed in ephemeral, or temporary, ponds, so no pesky fish can eat its tadpoles. It lives much of its life burrowed underground beneath a longleaf pine canopy. At the moment, about 100 of the creatures are believed to inhabit a small area in and around the DeSoto National Forest in Mississippi, some 80 miles due east of the Poitevent family’s land in St. Tammany Parish, near the Mississippi-Louisiana border.

Ephemeral ponds do form on the Louisiana tract, but the canopy of loblolly pines isn’t conducive to their survival. Additionally, the lack of regular fires creates underbrush the frog dislikes. In other words, the land could become a suitable habitat only if the landowners spent heavily to transform the foliage and re-introduced the frog – steps the government concedes it cannot compel.

So how did the Louisiana tract become entangled with the dusky gopher frog in the first place? Poitevent believes, and the record seems to support, that the case wouldn’t exist but for the prodding of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national environmental advocacy group. The frog was added to the endangered list in 2002 as a result of a lawsuit filed by the center against federal agencies, and it was another center lawsuit that first secured “critical habitat beyond the frog’s main home pond” in 2007. But the center felt those steps were insufficient for the frog’s survival and threatened yet another lawsuit in 2010. Poitevent’s land appears to have been a sacrificial pawn in this maneuvering, and the fateful call to him from the federal biologist came soon after.

Collette Adkins, a senior attorney with the advocacy group, said the frog’s needs trump a landowner’s rights. The fact that its former Louisiana home became uninhabitable because of natural rather than manmade changes does not mean people bear no responsibility for keeping the critter alive, she said. Taking a larger and longer view, she argues that human activity in that region over the centuries has reduced the frog’s habitat. “We are the ones who drove them to extinction,” she said.

At present, the lumber company Weyerhaeuser owns 5 percent of the land in question and has a timber management contract on the remainder with Poitevent and some of his relatives. But the land’s potential value lies in much more than timber. The wildlife service’s own economic impact study estimated the value at some $33 million – if development were unrestricted. But because the wildlife service decided there was no other potentially suitable gopher frog habitat besides his land, no buyer will touch it, Poitevent said.

Campers in DeSoto National Forest in Mississippi, habitat of the dusky gopher frog.

U.S. Forest Service

At least one outside environmentalist thinks a more compromising approach in such conflicts could satisfy the ambitions of landowners and the needs of endangered animals. “This isn’t about biological diversity; this is about land management,” said Reed Watson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center in Montana.

The wildlife service disputes the notion it is “taking” any land. The owners aren’t losing their title, regulators insist, just facing limits on what they can do with it. In comments made five years ago that the service says still reflect its position, an assistant regional director for ecological services said regulators would be happy to work with the Poitevents and other land owners.

“We don’t want to take his land,” assistant director Leopoldo Miranda said in a wildlife service video in 2012. “It’s his land to manage. This designation does not stop future development or land use.

“In fact, the service regularly works with landowners around the country to accommodate development while finding creative ways to save the wildlife that our citizens demand we protect.”

Poitevent is unconvinced. “This is a land grab by radical environmentalists,” he said.

Finally, a University is Sued over Discrimination

Posted on July 3, 2017July 3, 2017 by Denise Simon

Discrimination is happening at college campuses across the country. Not only is it happening by plots of students, campus selective organizations but it includes university administrators and professors.

Here comes a lawsuit that just may set legal standing and fire a shot across the bow of other universities. Lawsuits require discovery and once documents as well as electronic communications are submitted, we may see a larger coordination and collusion. Frankly, it could lead to RICO.

Hat tip the LP.

Image result for San Francisco State University BusinessInsider

Image result for San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University Accused of Pervasive Anti-Semitism in Groundbreaking Federal Lawsuit Filed by Students and Members of the Jewish Community

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, JUNE 19, 2017 — A group of San Francisco State University students and members of the local Jewish community today filed a lawsuit alleging that SFSU has a long and extensive history of cultivating anti-Semitism and overt discrimination against Jewish students. According to the suit, “SFSU and its administrators have knowingly fostered this discrimination and hostile environment, which has been marked by violent threats to the safety of Jewish students on campus.” The plaintiffs are represented by a team of attorneys from The Lawfare Project and the global law firm Winston & Strawn LLP.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and also names as defendants the Board of Trustees of the California State University System, SFSU President Leslie Wong and several other University officials and employees, alleges that “Jewish students at SFSU have been so intimidated and ostracized that they are afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus.”

The lawsuit was triggered following the alleged complicity of senior university administrators and police officers in the disruption of an April, 2016, speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. At that event organized by SF Hillel, Jewish students and audience members were subjected to genocidal and offensive chants and expletives by a raging mob that used bullhorns to intimidate and drown out the Mayor’s speech and physically threaten and intimidate members of the mostly-Jewish audience. At the same time, campus police – including the chief – stood by, on order from senior university administrators who instructed the police to “stand down” despite direct and implicit threats and violations of university codes governing campus conduct.

The lawsuit states that “SFSU has not merely fostered and embraced anti-Jewish hostility -it has systematically supported … student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education at SFSU.” SFSU continues to affirm its preference for those targeting the Jewish community, according to the lawsuit, by claiming to handle such incidents successfully by removing the Jewish students from their lawful assembly without allowing them the opportunity to exercise their free speech rights.”

Making matters worse, no actions were ever taken by SFSU against the disruptive students, no disciplinary charges were ever filed, and no sanctions were ever imposed against the groups or students responsible for committing these acknowledged violations.

“Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the underpinning of the modern American ethos of equal protection and anti-discrimination. This case isn’t about Jews, it’s about equal protection under the law,” says Brooke Goldstein, Lawfare Project Director. “If the courts fail to apply Title VI in this context, we are creating a massive loophole that will ultimately be exploited to target other marginalized minority communities. If we refuse to enforce anti-discrimination law for Jews, if we say Jews don’t deserve equal protection, it will erode constitutional protections for everyone. Jews must be protected the same as any other minority group, or the bedrock of civil rights law will crumble.”

In addition to the disruption of the speech by Nir Barkat, the lawsuit describes a long list of discrimination, intimidation and mistreatment of Jewish students at SFSU. Following are just a few examples:

In 1994, a ten-foot mural was erected on SFSU’s student union building that portrayed yellow Stars of David intertwined with dollar signs, skulls and crossbones, and the words “African Blood.”

In 1997, a banner depicting an Israeli flag with a swastika next to an American flag with a dollar sign was hung over the same wall where the 1994 mural had been painted.

In April of 2002, posters appeared around campus advertising an event called “Genocide in the 21st Century,” featuring a dead baby on the label of a soup can, surrounded on either side by Israeli flags.

In May of 2002, following a Peace rally, a small group of Jewish students were targeted by a large group of students who shouted bigoted and offensive remarks, including “Hitler didn’t finish the job,” “Get out or we’ll kill you,” and “Go back to Russia.”
In 2009, SFSU hosted on-campus events that advocated for the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel.

In 2016, President Wong complained that in all his years, he had never seen a university donor withhold a pledge because of a “political issue.” A Jewish Studies faculty member told him, “the physical safety of Jewish students is never a political issue.” President Wong replied, “on this, we will have to agree to disagree.”

In 2017, when specifically asked whether Zionists are welcome at SFSU, President Wong refused to provide the only proper answer: “Yes.” Instead, President Wong demurred, stating “That’s one of those categorical statements I can’t get close to. . . . Am I comfortable opening up the gates to everyone? Gosh, of course not.”

While SFSU actively supports virulently anti-Jewish and groups and events at the university, according to the lawsuit, its administrators have done just the opposite for Jewish students. “SFSU has repeatedly denied Plaintiffs’ student groups, including Hillel and the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi equal access to campus events that welcome other non-Jewish student organizations at the University… The anti-Jewish animus pervading SFSU’s campus is as ubiquitous as it is hostile. Jews are at best ignored, but more often ostracized in every corner of the university community. While other groups are able to host events, obtain permits and participate in “tabling” at student fairs, Jewish groups are customarily forced to fight for these basic rights as tuition-paying students, no matter how hard they work to follow processes correctly and avoid controversy.”

The lawsuit comes at a crucial time for Jewish students across the United States. According to the lawsuit, “Anti-Semitic incidents at colleges and universities have been rising at exponential rates, doubling from 2014 to 2015 and increasing from 90 to 108-another 20 percent-from 2015 to 2016…According to the FBI hate crimes statistics from 2015 (the most recent year calculated), anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 57 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes.”

Furthermore, the suit was filed just four days after an announcement by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is tasked with federal enforcement of Title VI on university campuses, stating that the office would be “scaling back” investigations into discrimination against “whole classes of victims.” It is abundantly clear that, unless courageous Jewish students like these plaintiffs bring lawsuits to enforce their own civil rights, they will have no other recourse than to suffer the discrimination in perpetuity.

“Anti-Semitism, like any other form of racism, is totally repugnant and cannot be countenanced. This lawsuit intends to address the rampant anti-Jewish animus pervasive at SFSU. Jews are entitled to the same civil rights as all Americans,” says Lawrence Hill, a senior partner at Winston & Strawn LLP and member of The Lawfare Project’s Board of Directors. “When our universities, which are supposed to be institutions of tolerance that encourage freedom of expression, instead foment prejudice and suppress free speech, we cannot stand idly by. College students are America’s future. Their minds shouldn’t be poisoned with hate and their voices shouldn’t be silenced by a mob.”

Amanda Berman, The Lawfare Project’s Director of Legal Affairs, who has been investigating SFSU for more than 14 months, added “Every couple of weeks, another anti-Semitic incident occurred; another Jewish student faced harassment or intimidation on campus; another member of Hillel or AEPi was targeted; another openly degrading comment surfaced from a member of the administration; or another student faced recalcitrance when trying to benefit, the same as all other students, from the opportunities and privileges of enrollment at SFSU. These defendants seem to believe that they are above the law, that discrimination against Jews is entirely acceptable, and that their response to criticism must go only so far as to placate Jewish donors. It is time for profound institutional change at SFSU, and since the faculty and administration is entirely unwilling to pursue such a goal, Jewish victims of this pervasively hostile environment have been left with no choice but to ask a federal court to compel it.”

A copy of the complaint can be found here.

Court Takes Iran’s Real Estate in New York

Posted on July 3, 2017July 3, 2017 by Denise Simon

Primer: Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, executive orders and U.S. Department of Treasury regulations, the violations were clear and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry chose to ignore all of this due to the back channel negotiations regarding the Iranian nuclear deal that was launched.

Iran Sanctions and Real Estate Investments in the U.S.

Trump inherited Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-controlled banks, as a tenant when he purchased the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, according to public records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Center for Public Integrity. The Trump Organization kept the bank on as a tenant for four more years after the U.S. Treasury Department designated Bank Melli in 1999 as being controlled by the Iranian government.

U.S. officials later alleged that Bank Melli had been used to obtain sensitive materials for Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. authorities also alleged that the bank had been used between 2002 and 2006 to funnel money to a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that has sponsored terrorist attacks — a period that overlapped with the time the bank rented office space from Trump. More here.

Hold on…..there are the Clinton’s interaction in this too. The Alavi Foundation bank accounts were held at Bank Melli.

Clintons Received Money from ‘Front for the Government of Iran’

As President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry close in on a nuclear deal with Iran, it’s worth remembering that the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation received money from “a front for the government of Iran” called the Alavi Foundation.

The front gave the Clintons $30,000 between April 2005 and March 2006, according to tax forms. This occurred years after law enforcement officials tied the group to Iranian radicals. “The center is funded by the New York-based Alavi Foundation, which law enforcement officials say is closely tied to the mullahs who dominate Iran,” the Washington Post reported in 2003. More here.

By the way, it goes beyond New York: Assets of the Alavi Foundation and Assa Corp., including bank accounts owned by 650 Fifth Avenue Company, the Alavi Foundation and Assa Corp.; and properties owned by the foundation are located in New York, Maryland, Virginia, Texas and California. Some are Iranian owned and managed mosques. More here.

Image result for alavi foundation new york DW

NEW YORK— A jury in New York on Thursday found that the U.S. government may seize a Manhattan office building from a nonprofit foundation accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The jury in a Manhattan federal court said the Alavi Foundation, majority owner of an office tower at 650 Fifth Avenue, knew that its partner and the building’s minority owner, Assa Corp, was a front for Iran, and helped conceal the fact.

Jurors said the government had proven that the property was involved in or traceable to money laundering.

The government wanted to seize the 36-story building, which could be worth nearly $1 billion, to benefit people with legal judgments against Iran relating to bombings and other attacks.

“In this trial, 650 Fifth Avenue’s secret was laid bare for all to see,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim in Manhattan, whose office represented the government.

“On behalf of all of our clients, we are extremely pleased with the decision and the verdict handed down today,” said James Bernard, a lawyer for the judgment holders.

“The Alavi Foundation is disappointed by today’s verdict and by the court’s decision in the related cases and is considering its options,” said John Gleeson, a former federal judge who represented the foundation at trial.

Alavi was founded in 1973 as the Pahlavi Foundation by the then-Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It describes its mission as promoting the study of Persian and Islamic culture in the United States, and also funds schools and free clinics.

The tower at 650 Fifth Avenue was built at the shah’s behest in 1978 to provide a source of income. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that ousted the shah, Iran’s new government replaced much of Alavi’s board of directors.

In 1989, Alavi entered into a partnership with Iran’s state-controlled Bank Melli under which Alavi owned a majority share of the building, and the bank owned the rest through a subsidiary, Assa.

The case turned on whether Alavi knew that Assa was still owned by Bank Melli after the United States imposed sanctions on Iran in 1995.

Lawyers for the government argued that it did, but kept distributing rental income to Assa anyway, while working to conceal its ownership from U.S. authorities.

Gleeson argued that the foundation was led to believe that Bank Melli was sold before the sanctions took effect.

FBI v. Presidents; Presidents v. FBI

Posted on July 1, 2017July 1, 2017 by Denise Simon

Today, we have a breakdown in trust not only with media but with any and all White House personnel. There is no presidential administration that is exempt since Nixon for sure.

The American people must keep an unemotional and clinical posture with what is being told to us to maintain a clearer capacity for critical thinking.

It all came to a head during the Nixon administration regarding taping conversations inside the White House and the Oval Office. These operations and equipment are managed, maintained, stored and investigated by the U.S. Secret Service.

An unknown factoid is the White House has microphones all over it and several taping units, while Camp David is not excluded.

For a fascinating read on the Nixon White House taping facts, check this document. The Secret Service coordinates and collaborates with the FBI on such investigations.

Image result for nixon watergate tapes NYTimes

Secret_Service_Nixon_taping

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the Nixon days, adding even more curious questions as to what subsequent presidents have used with taping equipment. In fact technology has taken us to the advanced digital realm. Ever wonder what we really don’t know?

Much has been said about tapes in the Trump White House, to which Trump denied having tapes of Former FBI Director Comey and Trump conversations. Okay, but is that really true? There are legacy FBI agents that well remember countless cases and heated interactions with presidents. We then hear this new term of ‘deep state’, where anonymous sources and leaks are causing scandals and headaches for the Trump White House. Can we know who those are alleged to be part of the ‘deep state’? Much of the blame is being pointed to Comey as the leaker. Well, maybe, or it could be the Secret Service. Remember Kerry O’Grady who refused to protect President Trump? Are there others? Conversely, there were Secret Service agents that had big issues with previous presidents and their wives, one notable scandal throughout the agency was due to Hillary Clinton.

We also cannot overlook all the Secret Service scandals under the Obama administration as some cases involved the USSS erasing tapes. Other cases included USSS and hookers in Cartegena, car accidents and drunk agents that had to be flown home in disgrace.

Image result for secret service white house video tapes CNN

Beyond the Secret Service, how about Obama loyalists that remain behind? This site published a piece in January of 2017 regarding Obama’s appointments of key loyalists that have ‘forever’ government positions, known as burrowing in.

Did Barack Obama tape conversations? According to Jim Acosta at CNN, the answer is no, but in the same article, the answer is yes and there was also a stenographer.

The White House press office had a stenographer in meetings with journalists in order to have an independent transcript of the interviews, a common practice, the former official said.

“None of that was hidden,” the former official said. “The stenographer sat in interviews with a tape recorder and sometimes even a boom mic — the same stenographers would tape and transcribe press briefings and gaggles. Journalists who interviewed President Obama would have been familiar with that.”

Below is a long but fascinating read. You can be sure that agents within the Secret Service, the FBI and the investigative wing at Department of Homeland Security have many stories to tell. To have some perspective, this gem if historical summary allows the reader to see facts and settings through the eyes of assigned agents.

Enjoy:

John Mindermann is part of an unusual fraternity. A former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now 80 and retired in his hometown, San Francisco, he is among the relative handful of law-enforcement officials who have investigated a sitting president of the United States. In June, when it was reported that the former F.B.I. director Robert Mueller would investigate whether President Trump had obstructed the federal inquiry into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, I called Mindermann, who told me he was feeling a strong sense of déjà vu.

Mindermann joined the F.B.I. 50 years ago, after a stint with the San Francisco police force, whose corruption he was happy to leave behind. He was soon transferred to the bureau’s Washington field office, housed in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue — the same 19th-century edifice that is now a Trump hotel. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 17, 1972, he was in the shower at home when the phone rang.

An F.B.I. clerk told him that there had been a break-in overnight at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex. He was to go to the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters and see the detective on duty. Then, lowering his voice, the clerk confided that the bureau had run a name check on one of the burglars, James McCord. It revealed that McCord had worked at both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. He would later be identified as the chief of security at the Committee to Re-elect the President, the Nixon campaign operation known as Creep.

Mindermann met the detective, who was wearing a loud sports jacket and smiling widely. The detective strode into the walk-in evidence vault and, wearing latex gloves, produced nearly three dozen crisp new $100 bills, each in a glassine envelope. He fanned them out on a desk, like a magician performing a card trick. They had been seized from one of the burglars. Mindermann noticed the consecutive serial numbers. ‘‘That alone told me that they came from a bank through a person with economic power,’’ Mindermann told me. ‘‘I got this instant cold chill. I thought: This is not an ordinary burglary.’’

McCord had been carrying wiretapping gear at the Watergate. This was evidence of a federal crime — the illegal interception of communications — which meant the break-in was a case for the F.B.I. Wiretapping was standard practice at the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, who had ruled the bureau since 1924. But Hoover died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and L. Patrick Gray, a lawyer at the Justice Department and a staunch Nixon loyalist, was named acting director. ‘‘I don’t believe he could bring himself to suspect his superiors in the White House — a suspicion which was well within the Watergate investigating agents’ world by about the third or fourth week,’’ Mindermann said.

A month after the break-in, Mindermann and a colleague named Paul Magallanes found their way to Judy Hoback, a Creep accountant. The interview at her home in suburban Maryland went on past 3 a.m. By the time Mindermann and Magallanes stepped out into the cool night air, they had learned from Hoback that $3 million or more in unaccountable cash was sloshing around at Creep, to finance crimes like the Watergate break-in. Both men sensed instinctively that ‘‘people in the White House itself were involved,’’ Magallanes, who is now 79 and runs an international security firm near Los Angeles, told me. Mindermann said he felt ‘‘a dark dread that this is happening in our democracy.’’ By 10:45 that morning, the agents had typed up a 19-page statement that laid out Creep’s direct connections to Nixon’s inner circle.Mindermann, the young ex-cop with five $27 department-store suits to his name, remembers the president’s men who stonewalled the investigation throughout 1972 and early 1973 as ‘‘Ivy Leaguers in their custom-fitted finery — these privileged boys born to be federal judges and Wall Street barons. They were gutless and completely self-serving. They lacked the ability to do the right thing.’’ By late April 1973, however, the stonewalls were crumbling. On Friday, April 27, as Nixon flew off to Camp David for the weekend, mulling his dark future, the F.B.I. moved to secure White House records relevant to Watergate.

At 5:15 p.m., 15 agents arose from their dented metal desks in the Old Post Office building and marched in tight formation, fully armed, up Pennsylvania Avenue. On Monday, a highly agitated Nixon returned to the White House to find a skinny F.B.I. accountant standing watch outside a West Wing office. The president pushed him up against a wall and demanded to know how he had the authority to invade the White House. Mindermann laughed at the memory: ‘‘What do you do,’’ he said, ‘‘when you’re mugged by the president of the United States?’’

‘‘I take the president at his word — that I was fired because of the Russia investigation,’’ James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, said in June, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee a month after his abrupt dismissal from his post by the president. Comey was referring to the account Trump gave in an NBC interview on May 11 — and Comey fought back on the rest of the story as Trump told it. Trump, he said, ‘‘chose to defame me and, more importantly, the F.B.I. by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the work force had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.’’

Trump, Comey said, had asked his F.B.I. director for his loyalty — and that seemed to shock Comey the most. The F.B.I.’s stated mission is ‘‘to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States’’ — not to protect the president. Trump seemed to believe Comey was dutybound to do his bidding and stop investigating the recently fired national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. ‘‘The statue of Justice has a blindfold on because you’re not supposed to be peeking out to see whether your patron is pleased or not with what you’re doing,’’ Comey said. ‘‘It should be about the facts and the law.’’

Trump might have been less confused about how Comey saw his job if he had ever visited the F.B.I. director in his office. On his desk, under glass, Comey famously kept a copy of a 1963 order authorizing Hoover to conduct round-the-clock F.B.I. surveillance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was signed by the young attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, after Hoover convinced John F. Kennedy and his brother that King had Communists in his organization — a reminder of the abuses of power that had emanated from the desk where Comey sat.

One of history’s great what-ifs is whether the Watergate investigation would have gone forward if Hoover hadn’t died six weeks before the break-in. When Hoover died, Nixon called him ‘‘my closest personal friend in all of political life.’’ Along with Senator Joseph McCarthy, they were the avatars of anti-Communism in America. Hoover’s F.B.I. was not unlike what Trump seems to have imagined the agency still to be: a law-enforcement apparatus whose flexible loyalties were bent to fit the whims of its director. In his half-century at the helm of the F.B.I., Hoover rarely approved cases against politicians. In the 1960s, he much preferred going after the civil rights and antiwar movements and their leaders, and his agents routinely broke the law in the name of the law.

In 1975, however, Congress, emboldened by Watergate and newly attuned to its watchdog responsibilities, began its first full-scale investigation of this legacy, and of similar abuses at the C.I.A. Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, gave the F.B.I. an unprecedented assignment: investigating itself. Fifty-three agents were soon targets of investigations by their own agency, implicated in crimes committed in the name of national security. Mark Felt, the agency’s second-in-command (who 30 years later revealed himself to have been Bob Woodward’s source ‘‘Deep Throat’’), and Ed Miller, the F.B.I.’s intelligence director, were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans. (President Ronald Reagan later pardoned them.) The F.B.I.’s rank and file felt it was under attack. ‘‘Every jot of wrongdoing — whether real, imagined or grossly exaggerated — now commands an extraordinary amount of attention,’’ Clarence Kelley, the F.B.I. director under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter, said in 1976. The American people, he argued, could not long endure ‘‘a crippled and beleaguered F.B.I.’’

The Iran-contra scandal provided the bureau with its first great post-Watergate test. On Oct. 5, 1986, Sandinistas in Nicaragua shot down a cargo plane, which bore an unassuming transport-company name but was found to contain 60 Kalashnikov rifles, tens of thousands of cartridges and other gear. One crew member was captured and revealed the first inklings of what turned out to be an extraordinary plot. Reagan’s national-security team had conspired to sell American weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and, after marking up the price fivefold, skimmed the proceeds and slipped them to the anti-Communist contra rebels in Nicaragua. This was a direct violation of federal law, as Congress had passed a bill cutting off aid to the rebels, which made Iran-contra a case for the F.B.I.

In a major feat of forensics, F.B.I. agents recovered 5,000 deleted emails from National Security Council office computers, which laid out the scheme from start to finish. They opened a burn bag of top-secret documents belonging to the N.S.C. aide Oliver North and found a copy of elaborately falsified secret testimony to Congress. They dusted it for fingerprints and found ones belonging to Clair George, chief of the clandestine service of the C.I.A. In short order, an F.B.I. squad was inside C.I.A. headquarters, rifling through double-locked file cabinets. Almost all the major evidence that led to the indictments of 12 top national-security officials was uncovered by the F.B.I.

George H. W. Bush pardoned many of the key defendants at the end of his presidency, on Christmas Eve 1992 — just as Reagan pardoned Mark Felt and Ford pardoned Nixon. This was the limit of the agency’s influence, the one presidential power that the F.B.I. could not fight. But over the course of two decades and five presidents, the post-Hoover relationship between the F.B.I. and the White House had settled into a delicate balance between the rule of law and the chief of state. Presidents could use secrecy, and sometimes outright deception, to push their executive powers to the limit. But the F.B.I., through its investigative brief, retained a powerful unofficial check on these privileges: the ability to amass, and unveil, deep secrets of state. The agency might not have been able to stop presidents like Nixon and Reagan from overreaching, but when it did intervene, there was little presidents could do to keep the F.B.I. from making their lives very difficult — as Bill Clinton discovered in 1993, when he appointed Louis J. Freeh as his F.B.I. director.

Freeh was an F.B.I. agent early in his career but had been gone from the agency for some time when he was named to run it — so he was alarmed to discover, shortly after he started his new job, that the F.B.I. was in the midst of investigating real estate deals involving the Clintons in Arkansas. Freeh quickly turned in his White House pass. He saw Clinton as a criminal suspect in the Whitewater affair, in which the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor bushwhacked through the brambles of Arkansas politics and business for four years — and, through a most circuitous route, wound up grilling a 24-year-old former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky in a five-star hotel. The bureau, through the White House physician, had blood drawn from the president to match the DNA on Lewinsky’s blue dress — evidence that the president perjured himself under oath about sex, opening the door to his impeachment by the House of Representatives.

‘‘He came to believe that I was trying to undo his presidency,’’ Freeh wrote of Clinton in his memoir. Clinton’s allies complained after the fact that Freeh’s serial investigations of the president were not just a headache but also a fatal distraction. From 1996 to 2001, when Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden bombed two American Embassies in Africa and plotted the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. spent less time and money on any counterterrorism investigation than it did investigating claims that Chinese money bought influence over President Clinton though illegal 1996 campaign contributions — an immense project that eventually became a fiasco on its own terms. One of the F.B.I.’s informants in the investigation was a socially prominent and politically connected Californian named Katrina Leung. At the time, Leung was in a sexual relationship with her F.B.I. handler, James J. Smith, chief of the bureau’s Los Angeles branch’s China squad. Smith had reason to suspect that Leung might be a double agent working for Chinese intelligence, but he protected her anyway.

The F.B.I. buried the scandal until after Clinton left the White House in 2001. By the time it came to light, Freeh was out the door, and President George W. Bush had chosen Robert Mueller as the sixth director of the F.B.I.

Born into a wealthy family, Mueller exemplified ‘‘the tradition of the ‘muscular Christian’ that came out of the English public-school world of the 19th century,’’ Maxwell King, Mueller’s classmate at St. Paul’s, the elite New England prep school, told me. Mueller arrived at F.B.I. headquarters with a distinguished military record — he earned a bronze star as a Marine in Vietnam — and years of service as a United States attorney and Justice Department official. It was a week before the Sept. 11 attacks, and he was inheriting an agency ill suited for the mission that would soon loom enormously before it. Richard A. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, later wrote that Freeh’s F.B.I. had not done enough to seek out foreign terrorists. Clarke also wrote that Freeh’s counterterror chief, Dale Watson, had told him: ‘‘We have to smash the F.B.I. into bits and rebuild it.’’

Mueller had already earned the respect of the F.B.I. rank and file during his tenure as chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department. When he started work at the Justice Department in 1990, the F.B.I. had been trying and failing for two years to solve the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. ‘‘The F.B.I. was not set up to deal with a major investigation like this,’’ Richard Marquise, an F.B.I. intelligence analyst who became the leader of the Lockerbie investigation under Mueller, said in an F.B.I. oral history. ‘‘I blame the institution.’’

Mueller used his power under law to obliterate the F.B.I.’s byzantine flow charts of authority in the case. ‘‘We literally cut out the chains of command,’’ Marquise said. ‘‘We brought in the C.I.A. We brought the Scots. We brought MI5 to Washington. And we sat down and we said: ‘We need to change the way we’re doing business. . . . We need to start sharing information.’ ’’ It was a tip from the Scots that put Marquise on the trail of the eventual suspect: one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s intelligence officers, whose cover was security chief for the Libyan state airlines. Qaddafi’s spy, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991. It took until the turn of the 21st century, but he was convicted.

It meant a great deal to Mueller, in the Lockerbie case, that the evidence the F.B.I. produced be deployed as evidence in court, not justification for war. In a speech he gave at Stanford University in 2002, concerning the nation’s newest threat, he spoke of ‘‘the balance we must strike to protect our national security and our civil liberties as we address the threat of terrorism.’’ He concluded: ‘‘We will be judged by history, not just on how we disrupt and deter terrorism, but also on how we protect the civil liberties and the constitutional rights of all Americans, including those Americans who wish us ill. We must do both of these things, and we must do them exceptionally well.’’

These views made Mueller something of an outlier in the Bush administration; five days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney was warning that the White House needed to go over to ‘‘the dark side’’ to fight Al Qaeda. Among the darkest places was a top-secret program code-named Stellar Wind, under which the N.S.A. eavesdropped freely in the United States without search warrants.

By the end of 2003, Mueller had a new boss: James Comey, who was named deputy attorney general. Comey was read into the Stellar Wind program and deemed it unconstitutional. He briefed Mueller, who concurred. They saw no evidence that the surveillance had saved a single life, stopped an imminent attack or uncovered an Al Qaeda member in the United States. In the first week of March, the two men agreed that the F.B.I. could not continue to go along with the surveillance programs. They also thought Attorney General John Ashcroft should not re-endorse Stellar Wind. Comey made the case to Ashcroft.

In remarkable congressional testimony in 2007, Comey would describe what happened next: Hours later, Ashcroft keeled over with gallstone pancreatitis. He was sedated and scheduled for surgery. Comey was now the acting attorney general. He and the president were required to reauthorize Stellar Wind on March 11 for the program to continue. When Comey learned the White House counsel and chief of staff were heading to the hospital of the night of March 10 to get the signature of the barely conscious Ashcroft, Comey raced to Ashcroft’s hospital room to head them off. When they arrived, Ashcroft lifted his head off the pillow and told the president’s men that he wouldn’t sign. Pointing at Comey, he said: ‘‘There is the attorney general.’’

Bush signed the authorization alone anyway, asserting that he had constitutional power to do so. Mueller took meticulous notes of these events; they were partly declassified years later. On March 11, he wrote that the president was ‘‘trying to do an end run around’’ Comey, at the time the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. At 1:30 a.m. on March 12, Mueller drafted a letter of resignation. ‘‘I am forced to withdraw the F.B.I. from participation in the program,’’ he wrote. If the president did not back down, ‘‘I would be constrained to resign as director of the F.B.I.’’ And Comey and Ashcroft would go with him.

Seven hours later, with the letter in the breast pocket of his suit, Mueller sat alone with Bush in the Oval Office. Once again, the F.B.I. had joined a battle against a president. Mueller’s notes show that he told Bush in no uncertain terms that ‘‘a presidential order alone’’ could not legalize Stellar Wind. Unless the N.S.A. brought Stellar Wind within the constraints of the law, he would lose his F.B.I. director, the attorney general and the acting attorney general. In the end, Bush relented — it took years, but the programs were put on what Mueller considered a defensible legal footing.

Trump’s showdown with Comey and its aftermath is the fifth confrontation between the F.B.I. and a sitting president since the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and the first in which the president’s principal antagonists, Mueller and Comey, have been there before. When Bush faced the same two men, he was acutely aware of the history that attended their confrontation. He wrote later that he realized their resignations could be the second coming of the Saturday Night Massacre, the penultimate disaster of Nixon’s presidency, when the embattled president keelhauled the special prosecutor pursuing the secret White House tapes and lost his attorney general and deputy attorney general in the process. The question is whether Trump cares enough about the consequences of history to avoid repeating it.

For the Watergate veterans John Mindermann and Paul Magallanes, the news of recent weeks has come with a certain amount of professional gratification. When I spoke with them on June 14, both agents said they wanted the bureau’s role as a check on the president to be in the public eye. For years, they felt that their own work had gone unacknowledged. ‘‘We never got an ‘attaboy’ letter from our superiors,’’ Mindermann said. ‘‘But we changed history, and we knew it.’’ Magallanes had always been bothered by how, in the collective American memory, Nixon’s downfall was attributed to so many other authors: Woodward and Bernstein, crusading congressional committees, hard-nosed special prosecutors. To the agents who were present at the time, it was first and foremost an F.B.I. story. ‘‘We were the people who did the work,’’ Magallanes told me. ‘‘It was we, the F.B.I., who brought Richard Nixon down. We showed that our government can investigate itself.’’