Category Archives: Presidential campaign

Even CNBC is Sounding Alarm on Smuggling at Southern Border

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I would say that when a liberal network media outlet is asking the hard questions and investigating the human smuggling at the Southern Border, it is time to challenge the Department of Homeland Security and Jeh Johnson much more aggressively, meaning calling for his removal as well as the Director of ICE.

When the coordinator of the smuggling operations is actually a resident inside the United States, we have issues that are not being debated or remedied.

‘A dangerous world’: What’s at stake when Syrian refugees are smuggled to US

CNBC: On July 27, 2015, five men appeared on the Mexican side of the sprawling Laredo port of entry at the United States border in Texas. They were all from Homs, Syria, which had seen ferocious fighting between ISIS and Syrian government forces over the previous months. All were in their early to mid-20s, except one, who was in his early 40s. And all five requested asylum in the United States.

This presented an immediate dilemma for U.S. officials. Who were these men? What did they want? And most pressingly, exactly how did five military-age males from one of the most gruesome battlefields in the world make their way to the U.S. border with Mexico?

Answers to many of those questions were spelled out in a detailed memo written by the Laredo field office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Department of Homeland Security investigators. The document, which was obtained by CNBC, details the operations of a previously unreported entity the U.S. government calls the “Barakat Alien Smuggling Organization.”

The leader of that group, the report found, specializes in smuggling Syrian men from Homs to the United States thought the southern U.S. border and St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The memo identifies many of the key players: A naturalized Syrian woman in California, an Iraqi man in Turkey and smugglers and phony passport providers on four continents.

The report is stamped “Unclassified//Law Enforcement Sensitive,” and CNBC, for potential personal security risks, is withholding certain details from it, including dates of birth and numerical identification information of the Syrian refugees themselves as well as names and contact information for U.S. government officials involved in the investigation. Details in this account come from the report, as well as interviews with U.S. government officials and an attorney for one of the men.

The events laid out in the report came at a time the U.S. government was grappling with a rapidly unfolding Syrian refugee crisis worldwide. Ultimately, President Barack Obama would pledge to admit as many as 10,000 refugees to the United States. But critics said allowing any influx of immigrants from the war zone risked allowing ISIS infiltrators to come into the United States in the guise of refugees. They said that risk was highlighted by the ISIS inspired or coordinated attacks in Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino, California.

Related reading from GOA: Alien Smuggling: DHS Could Better Address Alien Smuggling along the Southwest Border by Leveraging Investigative Resources and Measuring Program Performance

A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency has added 300 officers to its transnational criminal investigation units to work with foreign governments to target and dismantle human smuggling networks.

Controversy swirled over the vetting process for immigrants, and the difficulty for U.S. officials in determining who was coming to the United States in pursuit of a better life, and who may have darker motives. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was storming toward the Republican presidential nomination on the strength of his call to build a massive wall on the southern border with Mexico.

Even as that campaign rhetoric was reaching a crescendo in 2015, officials privately noted they were seeing a rise in Syrian immigrants trying to cross the border. “Over the past eighteen months there has been an increase of Syrian and Lebanese Nationals attempting to enter the United States along the southwest international border via Mexico,” the report found. “A majority of these individuals have arrived at major land ports of entry in the U.S. claiming credible fear of returning to their home countries.”

The Barakat Alien Smuggling Organization, the report found, was active along the Texas and California borders. The organization specialized in smuggling people who said they were Orthodox Syrian Christians.

The Barakat group, the report found, “is sophisticated enough to exploit the entire southern border.”

‘God be with you brother’

For the five Syrian men, the journey halfway around the world began on the internet, where they first made contact with the Barakat organization on Facebook. Elias was 25 years old. The other men were Albeer, 21, Rawad, 21, George, 26, and Alkhateb, the oldest of the group at 42.

Each of the men had a reason to leave Syria immediately. Elias, for example, said Syrian rebel forces had threatened him and demanded money. To show they were serious, they killed his dog.

It’s not clear whether the men traveled together for the entire trip. But U.S. officials pieced together the story step by step: From the Facebook page, the men were referred to the Baremoon Travel Agency in Homs, Syria. They paid $350 to $400 to a woman named Lucy for travel from Syria to Beirut, Lebanon, by taxi.

Related reading: From the U.S. State Department: Border Security/Alien Smuggling

On May 28, 2015, a post on the Facebook page of a man whose full name and biographical details match those of Elias shows a selfie of a young man with close cropped-hair and trim beard posing at the modern, sky-lighted departure lounge of the Beirut International Airport. The man identified as Elias is wearing a purple shirt and black vest, posing with a young woman in a leopard-print top. The caption says, “Traveling to Istanbul, Turkey.” Alongside the picture, friends posted more than 80 encouraging messages in Arabic, including “Good luck guys,” and “God be with you brother.”

The flight from Beirut to Istanbul is less than two hours. But once in Turkey, the men hit some kind of delay. In Istanbul, two of the men waited for more than 30 days before making contact at a coffee shop in the Aksaray neighborhood — a Syrian expat district in Istanbul crowded with refugees escaping the war and known as a major hub for sex trafficking.

At the coffee shop, the men met with a smuggler, Abu, who would arrange travel from Istanbul to the United States. They described Abu as in his 30s, thin, balding, and about 5-feet-10. Abu’s services did not come cheap. Two of the Syrian men said they paid him $15,000 for travel to the United States, a package deal including phony passports, airline tickets, guides in each country, food and transportation. It was a surprisingly businesslike operation: Abu even offered a grace period for the Syrians to obtain a refund if they didn’t make it to the United States within a certain time.

It’s not clear how the Syrians were able to afford such steep fees. One man said he had saved the money over three years. Another said his family sold land and property to raise funds. He also received $3,000 in a wire transfer initiated by a person in Burbank, California.

Wherever it came from, the money was good enough for Abu. He gave the travelling Syrians their documents: airline tickets and phony passports from Israel. The travel papers would now identify two of the men under the false Israeli names “Miller Idan” and “Halam Rotem.”

Abu also gave the men airline tickets from Turkey to Mozambique, with a layover in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But they never intended to go to Mozambique. Instead, the men switched destinations in Ethiopia, and used their new, phony Israeli passports to board a flight to either Rio de Janerio or Sao Paulo, Brazil. Instead of the African coast, the men took off for South America.

The men had no idea whom they would meet in Brazil. They didn’t have a name or phone number to call. But when they landed in South America, the smuggling organization had someone on the ground to meet them, identifying the Syrians using photos sent by Abu directly to the smugglers’ cellphones in South America. The men turned over their real Syrian passports to the smugglers — from here on out, they would be posing full time as Israelis. The smugglers, in turn, put the passports in packages and mailed them to final destination addresses in the United States. The passports would cross the U.S. border without their bearers.

From Brazil, the men boarded flights to Bogota, Colombia, still posing as Israelis. Then they caught yet another flight, this time to Guatemala City, Guatemala. There, the Syrians said they met a 30-year-old man they describe as tall and slender, with blond hair. The man spoke no Arabic and very little English. To the Syrians, the mysterious smuggler did not appear to be Guatemalan. The tall blond man drove them to the Guatemala-Mexico border, where the Syrians were transferred into the custody of yet another smuggler. The men said they crossed the border into Mexico without being approached at all by Mexican immigration officials.

It was a long drive north through Mexico: Five days in a late-model white four-door Toyota sedan. The Syrians say their latest smuggler was in contact with Abu in Turkey throughout the trip, which ended in the brutally hot border town of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

The border city is a far cry from the chaos of their hometown of Homs, but Nuevo Laredo is also wracked with violence: the rampages of the brutal Los Zetas drug cartel have prompted the State Department to warn Americans to defer travel to the region because of the prevalence of murder, robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion and sexual assault.

But the Syrians didn’t intend to stay long. On July 27, they requested asylum at the Laredo point of entry to the United States. American Customs and Border Protection Agents processed them and sent them to a detention center in Pearsall, Texas, where they were interviewed by officials.

One of the men, Rawad, gave his destination as an address in Fall River, Massachusetts. But officials discovered that the telephone number he provided was linked to visa denials for three other Syrians. The oldest Syrian, Alkhateb, listed a friend named “Amnar” as a contact in the United States and provided a phone number for him with a California area code. U.S. officials found that number was linked to five other rejected visas from Syrian immigrants.

The Americans asked Elias — the refugee who said his dog had been killed — if he had ever volunteered or been paid to carry a weapon for any political or religious organization in Syria. Elias said he had not been part of any group or received weapons training. Instead, he told American officials, “God would provide protection.”

“Any underground smuggling operation is dangerous and even more so when you get to falsifications and people moving through many different countries. It’s a dangerous world.” -Lauren Mack, spokeswoman, Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The U.S. government intercepted the package the Syrians had mailed from Brazil when it arrived in Miami. Inside, they found military ID in Elias’ Syrian passport. The document indicates Elias was exempt from military service due to the death of his father. Still, the American interviewer thought Elias showed “nervous behavior” when asked about his military service.

It’s not entirely clear what happened to the five men after that. According to the report, Customs and Border Protection officers conducted what’s called a “credible fear” interview to determine their status. They were remanded to the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, Texas.

According to Facebook pages that appear to match the names and life histories of three of the men, they are still in the United States, either currently or formerly in California.

U.S. officials would not comment to CNBC on the report or the status of the five men. “Due to the sensitivity and nature of this report we are not going to be able to discuss anything about this case,” said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego, who requested that CNBC not identify the five men. “One of our top priorities is to investigate international human smuggling worldwide,” she said. “Our goal is to get ringleaders and people who are at the top levels of criminal networks who prey on individuals and put them at risk.”

Asked if the Barakat organization itself posed any danger to the United States, Mack said, “Any underground smuggling operation is dangerous and even more so when you get to falsifications and people moving through many different countries. It’s a dangerous world.”

An attorney for one of the Syrian men, who also requested his name not be used, said that his client’s asylum case was still pending before an immigration judge while he lives and works in the United States. The attorney said he represents several Syrians who applied for asylum at the U.S. border. “A lot of these people have never left Syria before, and suddenly they’re traveling through countries around the world. They come from a police state, they’re not very trusting. Back in Syria, their political beliefs are imputed to them because they’re Christians. People say, oh, you’re a Christian, so you’re fair game. They’re in a really bad situation.”

‘I always tell the truth, even when I lie’

The government document lists several “intelligence gaps” that investigators were left with after their interviews and research. Among the loose ends, the officials wanted to know how the Barakat organization got the Israeli passports, and whether they were forged or legitimately issued. They want to identify the specific smugglers in Guatemala and Mexico. They want to figure out just how the passport scheme worked in Addis Ababa, and why Ethiopian customs didn’t spot it.

And at the end the report asks one more question: “Are there more Syrian nationals destined for South Texas?”

Nearly four months later, the U.S. officials may have gotten their answer. In November, authorities in Honduras detained five Syrian men trying to reach the United States, this time on stolen Greek passports. Reuters reported that Honduran officials found the men had passed through Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and Costa Rica.

A Honduran police spokesman told reporters those men had nothing to do with terrorism. “They are normal Syrians,” he said.

Today, a Facebook page for a person with the same name and biographical details as Elias features as its main image a splashy image of Al Pacino in the 1983 gangster movie “Scarface.” The page says Elias is living in Los Angeles and working as a tattoo artist. As a sort of a personal motto, the Facebook page prominently features a quote from Pacino’s character: “You need people like me, so you can point your f—–‘ fingers and say, ‘that’s the bad guy.'”

It’s a line from an arresting scene in the classic film. Pacino’s character, a Cuban refugee who arrives in the United States with nothing and rises to become a drug kingpin, finds himself confused and out of place in an upscale American restaurant. He lashes out in a rage at the well-dressed Americans who surround him.

The outburst may seem to be an odd maxim for the Syrian refugee. But in the same speech, Pacino’s character also says this: “I always tell the truth, even when I lie.”

Does the Kremlin Really Have Hillary’s Emails?

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Wouldn’t you love to read the most recent and current emails between Sidney and Hillary right now?

Putin’s Army Of Internet Trolls Is Influencing The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal

Paul Roderick Gregory/Forbes

The Hillary Clinton email scandal broke more than three years ago—on March 19, 2013—with the Russian news service RT’s publication of Sidney Blumenthal’s emails to the then-Secretary of State. What most American journalists don’t realize is that Putin’s internet army continues to influence the evolution of the story.

 

My article on the Blumenthal emails, published on the same day, attracted 361,000 viewers, meaning the story was not a secret. The mainstream press ignored the story, only to see it burst upon the 2016 election scene where it occupies daily headlines. As I pointed out in my more recent piece entitled “What if Vladimir Putin Has Hillary’s Emails,” the Clinton campaign and the country could be sorely damaged if Hillary’s emails (including those she deemed “personal”) are in Kremlin hands. Even if they are not, Putin can gain leverage simply from the suspicion that he has them.

Despite the New York Times’ weak assurances that there is “no evidence of hacking,” experts agree, including a former defense secretary and head of the CIA, that Kremlin cyber forces most likely hacked Hillary’s emails, which we now know include a number of top secret documents.

I have been following the Russian and English language blogosphere using Google searches like “Does Putin/the Kremlin have Hillary’s emails?” Included are rumor-mills such as Sovershenno sekretno.ru (“Completely secret”) and kompromat.ru (“Compromising material”). In a country that thrives on gossip and rumors, even on delicate matters such as the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the Russian search yields absolute silence. The Kremlin is holding information about any possession of Hillary’s emails as close to the vest as possible.

Not that the Kremlin is not enjoying Hillary’s discomfort. The FBI investigation, the testimony of the hacker Guccifer, and the release of the state-department Inspector General report are covered daily and with glee. My own Forbes articles are prominently featured. Russia’s information technologists have elevated me from a moronic paid Forbes hack to a distinguished scholar writing for a respected publication. My words seem to count when I suggest that Putin has outsmarted Hillary Clinton.

Contrary to the Russian media silence, the U.S. media began buzzing with the May 6 publication on an obscure conspiracy-oriented website (whatdoesitmean.com) entitled “Kremlin War Erupts over Release of Top Secret Hillary Clinton Emails.” The article, written under the exotic pseudonym of Sorcha Faal, claims that a faction within the Kremlin wants Hillary’s email cache released. Fox News pundits (Sean Hannity and Judge Anthony Napolitano) cited the article as evidence that Putin has the Clinton emails. Their comments were triumphantly and derisively panned by Media Matters, who pointed out that the same website published articles on British jets fighting UFOs and a new planet threatening existence on earth.

Both Fox News and Media Matters, in my view, are both unwitting victims of a classic Putin troll attack. Whereas Washington works on the basis of leaks, Kremlin information technologists first plant their narrative in an obscure blog (like whatdoesitmean.com) and then use its blogosphere network to cascade the story until it reaches more mainstream outlets. In this case, they struck gold with references by major figures on Fox News. With the Kremlin’s psychological operations, no one knows fact from fiction (Is this just some crackpot or the Kremlin?) and first impressions tend to stick, even if the story is proven false.

There are good reasons to believe that a Putin troll attack is at work here.

First, it spins an alternate-world narrative that serves Kremlin interests in a number of ways. The Sorcha Faal article explains to the world that, yes, the Kremlin does have Hillary’s emails, thanks to Russia’s vigilant cyber forces, who obtained them in a perfectly legitimate way. After they detected hacker Guccifer’s attempted hacking of their own RT, they claim to have followed him as he attacked Hillary’s server and ended up coincidently with the cache of Hillary’s emails. The lesson: Russia has good cyber security; the incompetent U.S. does not.

The even more important message is that the CIA, knowing that the Kremlin has damaging secrets (such as the truth of Benghazi), launched a false Panama Papers operation to discredit Putin’s inner circle. The Panama Papers gambit was fabricated as a threat to prevent Russia from revealing the contents of Hillary’s emails. Thus, revelations about financial misdeeds of Putin’s inner circle can be written off as a CIA disinformation counter attack.

The story’s lightning-fast spread through the blogosphere is a second reason for believing in an organized troll attack. Faal’s crazy headline stories that Media Matters derides do not spread through the blogosphere.  Granted that the Clinton email story is hot, its cascading through the internet smells of a planned operation by Putin’s troll army.

In the case of the Clinton emails, the Kremlin appears to be using its classic “Madeline Albright declaration” approach. In the Albright case, an obscure and unidentified blogger, “Natalia 1001,” made the unsubstantiated claim that then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had declared that Siberia, with its rich resources, should belong to the United States, not to Russia. This false claim was repeated by multiple sources (including an FSB mind reader) until it has become an integral part of the Putin doctrine that the U.S. is an aggressive power intent on Russia’s demise.

We are no closer to proof of whether Putin has Hillary’s emails or not. What we have is a troll attack that lays out a Kremlin narrative linking the Clinton emails to the Panama Papers. We expect the Kremlin to build on this narrative as time passes. In either case, Putin is sitting in the catbird seat. The mere suspicion that he has the email cache gives him leverage over the U.S. election. Those who argue that Clinton’s use of an insecure private server is a minor dereliction do not understand the consequences of having the Secretary of State’s correspondence in the hands of a hostile nation.

We can expect the Kremlin to use Hillary’s email scandal to its advantage. It is up to Putin to determine the timing, which will be most likely related to the U.S. election cycle. Let’s hope that Donald Trump uses this lesson to retract his favorable comments about Vladimir Putin.

State Dept Blocking Hillary’s Emails on TPP

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It was several months ago that there was a major controversy on the Transpacific Partnership Pact. Everyone was and sorta is against it, when no one especially knew why as none of the text has been released that spells out any controversy. It is quite curious that even the leader of WikiLeaks put out a reward for anyone to provide chapters of the trade pact. Many in Congress have not even seen the documents while others have to go to a special room and read under an ‘eyes only’ condition.

If Hillary has a position in electronic communications over the trade deal, it is a legitimate part of her vetting but now we have John Kerry the current Secretary of State apparently running interference for Hillary or….for the trade deal….or both. It appears this is once again a case where FOIA requests on certain topics and certain people are forwarded to the White House for pre-approval, so in this case, the Obama top leadership could have their fingerprints on this matter as well.

The other curious item is, are these emails part of a separate Hillary release that is unknown to us?

This is like trying to nail jello to a wall. Could it be that Hillary’s emails prove she is against the TPP?

State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election

IBTimes: Trade is a hot issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But correspondence from Hillary Clinton and her top State Department aides about a controversial 12-nation trade deal will not be available for public review — at least not until after the election. The Obama administration abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times’ open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

Clinton’s shifting positions on the TPP have been a source of controversy during the campaign: She repeatedly promoted the deal as secretary of state but then in 2015 said, “I did not work on TPP,” even though some leaked State Department cables show that her agency was involved in diplomatic discussions about the pact. Under pressure from her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton  announced in October that she now opposes the deal — and has disputed that she ever fully backed it in the first place.

While some TPP-related emails have been released by the State Department as part of other open records requests, IBT’s request was designed to provide a comprehensive view of how involved Clinton and her top aides were in shaping the trade agreement, and whether her agency had a hand in crafting any particular provisions in the pact. Unions, environmental organizations and consumer groups say the agreement will help corporations undermine domestic labor, conservation and other public interest laws.

If IBT’s open records request is fulfilled on the last day of November, as the State Department now estimates, it will have taken 489 days for the request to be fulfilled. According to Justice Department statistics, the average wait time for a State Department request is 111 days on a simple request — the longest of any federal agency the department’s report analyzed. Requests classified as complex by the State Department can take years.

Earlier this year, the State Department’s inspector general issued a report slamming the agency’s handling of open records requests for documents from the Office of the Secretary. Searches of emails “do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness,” the inspector general concluded.

Last year, a Government Accountability Office report found that at the agencies it surveyed, there was not political interference in responding to open records requests. However, last month, a conservative group filed a lawsuit alleging that an Obama administration directive has deliberately slowed the response to open records requests that deal with politically sensitive material.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archive told IBT that whether or not the State Department’s move to delay the release of TPP-related correspondence is politically motivated, it reflects a systemic problem at the agency.

“In my opinion it is more incompetence than maliciousness, but either way, it is a gross error by FOIA processors to not get these documents out before the election,” said Jones, whose group helps journalists obtain government records. “Their inefficiency is doing great harm to the democratic process.”

 

Trump and the Baku Business Partner

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Just going to leave this here but with the question: Have the Trump voters really fully vetted him?

Tale of Trump and partner in Azerbaijan real estate project

WASHINGTON (AP) – Six months before he entered the presidential race, Donald Trump announced a new real estate project in Baku, Azerbaijan. His partner was the son of a government minister suspected by U.S. diplomats of laundering money for Iran’s military and described as “notoriously corrupt.”

Eighteen months later, and only weeks after daughter Ivanka Trump released a publicity video of the nearly finished project, references to the Baku project have disappeared from Trump’s website. Trump’s general counsel, Alan Garten, told The Associated Press that it was on hold for economic reasons.

Trump often talks of hiring the best people and surrounding himself with people he can trust. In practice, however, he and his executives have at times appeared to overlook details about the background of people he has chosen as business partners, such as whether they had dubious associations, had been convicted of crimes, faced extradition or inflated their resumes.

The Trump camp’s screening skills are important as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee turns to selecting a running mate. They would only become more crucial if he won the White House. Then, Trump would have to name more than 3,600 political appointees to senior government positions, including critical jobs overseeing national security and the economy.

In the Azerbaijani case, Garten said the Trump Organization had performed meticulous due diligence on the company’s partners, but hadn’t researched the allegations against the Baku partner’s father because he wasn’t a party to the deal.

“I’ve never heard that before,” Garten said, when first asked about allegations of Iranian money laundering by the partner’s father, which appeared in U.S. diplomatic cables widely available since they were leaked in 2010.

Garten subsequently said he was confident the minister alleged to be laundering Iranian funds, Ziya Mammadov, had no involvement in his son’s holding company, even though some of the son’s major businesses regularly partnered with the transportation ministry and were founded while the son was in college overseas. Ziya Mammadov did not respond to a telephone message the AP left with his ministry in Baku or to emails to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Washington.

Garten told the AP that Trump’s company uses a third-party investigative firm, which he did not identify, that specializes in background intelligence gathering and searches global watch lists, warrant lists and sanctions lists maintained by the United Nations, Interpol and others.

Trump has described his background research as presidential in quality. Asked in a 2013 deposition why he had not performed formal records of due diligence on a business partner – a man Trump later deemed “a dud” – Trump said he considered word-of-mouth inquiries to be adequate.

“We heard good things about him from a couple of different people,” he said of his partner in the deposition. “That’s true with the president of the United States. You get references and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not so good.”

Trump’s lawyer, Garten, who was in the room at the time of Trump’s statement, told the AP that it was unreasonable to expect Trump to know the full range of the company’s diligence efforts.

Any American contemplating a business venture in Azerbaijan faces a risk: “endemic public corruption,” as the State Department puts it. Much of that money flows from the oil and gas industries, but the State Department also considers the country to be a waypoint for terrorist financiers, Iranian sanctions-busters and Afghan drug lords.

The environment is a risky one for any business venture seeking to avoid violating U.S. penalties imposed against Iran or anti-bribery laws under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Trump’s choice of partners in Baku was Anar Mammadov, the son of the country’s transportation minister. Anar Mammadov did not respond to AP’s emails or messages sent to his social media accounts or messages left with his company.

Garten said the Trump Organization had performed background screening on all those involved in the deal and was confident Mammadov’s father played no role in the project.

Experts on Azerbaijan were mystified that Trump or anyone else could reach that conclusion.

Anar Mammadov is widely viewed by diplomats and nongovernmental organizations as a transparent stand-in for the business interests of his father. Anar’s business has boomed with regular help from his father’s ministry, receiving exclusive government contracts, a near monopoly on Baku’s taxi business and even a free fleet of autobuses.

“These are not business people acting on their own – you’re dealing with daddy,” said Richard Kauzlarich, a U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s who went on to work under the Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration.

“Whatever the Trump people thought they were doing, that wasn’t reality,” Kauzlarich said.

Anar Mammadov, who is believed to be 35, has said in a series of interviews that he founded Garant Holdings’ predecessor – which is involved in transportation, construction, banking, telecommunications and manufacturing – in 2000, when he would have been 19. Anar received his bachelor’s degree in 2003 and a master’s in business administration in 2005 – both from a university in London.

Mammadov’s statement that he founded the business in 2000 appeared in a magazine produced by a research firm in partnership with the Azerbaijani government. In other forums, he has said he started the business in 2005, though several of its key subsidiaries predate that period.

Garten declined to discuss specific background research on Anar but said such checks were “comprehensive.” The file for the Baku project would not have included anything on Ziya Mammadov, Garten said, because the Trump Organization concluded that he would play no role in the project.

“The younger Mammadov did not build his business empire simply by delivering newspapers,” said Matt Bryza, a former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan. Bryza served on the National Security Council in George W. Bush’s administration and was appointed ambassador from 2010 to 2012 under President Barack Obama.

Ziya Mammadov was described in March 2009 in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables as “notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan” and accused of working closely on government highway construction contracts awarded to a former senior Iranian military official in the Republican Guard, Kamal Darvishi. “We assume Mammadov is a silent partner in these contracts,” the State Department cable said.

Though the Baku hotel project has not been completed, it has earned Trump a significant payday. He earned between $2.5 million and $2.8 million in hotel management fees from a hotel that has never opened, according to the financial disclosures filed by his campaign. Trump licensing details generally involve the receipt of a significant minority stake in the property, too.

The Azerbaijani case is not the only one involving partners with unusual pasts.

At least twice, Trump has been involved in development deals with convicted criminals. In 2001, Trump announced he was partnering with developer Leib Waldman to build a massive condo and hotel tower in Toronto.

Two months later, Canadian newspapers revealed that Waldman had fled the United States after pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud in the mid-1990s. His extradition sent the project into a tailspin. Another developer eventually stepped in: Alex Shnaider, a former Ukrainian metals trader who survived the often violent privatization of the post-Soviet steel industry in the 1990s.

“We heard fantastic things about (Shnaider),” Trump told Forbes in 2005. “But sometimes people say wonderful things whether they mean them or not.”

Trump and Shnaider’s development company are now in litigation. Trump alleges that Shnaider was an incompetent developer and was bilking condo owners; Shnaider wants to remove Trump’s name from the building.

In the early years of the last decade, Trump also struck an alliance with Bayrock Group LLC, an upstart property development firm that had recently moved into the Trump Tower.

As a partner, Bayrock didn’t have much of a track record. The firm was created in July 2001. Its two top officials were Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet hospitality minister whose previous development experience had been in Turkey, and Felix Satter.

Digging into the background of Satter wouldn’t have turned up much because Satter did not actually exist. But a man with a similarly spelled name, Felix Sater, had been sentenced to prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass and barred for life from selling securities. A subsequent complaint by federal prosecutors named Sater as an unindicted co-conspirator, and prosecutors also disclosed that he had been convicted in a mafia-linked stock fraud scheme.

The New York Times revealed in 2007 that Satter was Sater and had historical ties to the Mafia. Trump pleaded ignorance.

“We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals,” Trump said.

Garten said Sater was merely an employee at Bayrock, not an owner. “There would have been no reason to perform any diligence on Mr. Sater,” Garten said, though Sater has described himself variously as Bayrock’s founder and a top executive.

Sater publicly separated from Bayrock in 2008, but Trump named him a senior adviser and gave him an office in Trump Tower in 2010.

“I don’t see Felix as being a member of the Mafia,” Trump said in a 2013 deposition in a case over a failed Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condo deal in which Sater had been involved. “I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia.”

“Do you have any evidence or documentation to back that up?” the lawyer taking the deposition asked.

“I have none,” Trump responded. Trump said he did not recall having asked Sater about it.

In addition to possible oversights related to his real estate partners’ background, Trump has sometimes brought people with shaky pasts into Trump-branded business ventures. In 2006, Trump helped launch Trump Mortgage, an ill-fated attempt to sell subprime loans. Trump appeared on stage alongside E.J. Ridings, billed by Trump Mortgage as formerly “a top executive at one of Wall Street’s most prestigious investment banks.”

Ridings’ actual resume was more modest. He had been an entry-level broker at Morgan Stanley, for a total of six days, as Money Magazine first reported. Ridings resigned. He did not return a message from AP that was left on his cellphone or respond to contacts on active social media accounts.

Similar problems affected hires for Trump University, a defunct real estate investing seminar company. Though the instructors were supposedly “hand-picked” by Trump, he left the selection to others, who didn’t successfully vet all of them, either.

Some of the instructors had filed for bankruptcy protection. Others were unqualified.

“He defrauded us, OK?” Trump said of one former instructor’s declaration that he knew little about real estate.

Garten said Trump’s organization performed background checks on every instructor, mentor and employee it hired for Trump University, and said some instructors were affiliated with a third-party licensee.

In the deposition, Trump was sanguine about his hiring process.

“In every business, people slip through the cracks,” he said. “No matter how well-run a business, people come in and they’re not good, and you wonder, you know, how did they get there, et cetera.”

___

Associated Press writer Desmond Butler contributed to this report.

Time to Challenge Separation of Church and State

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He is 7 years old. The schools don’t know the law. Political correctness has our country completely sideways. Beyond schools, how many other places are Constitution free zones?

Click here to see how this phrase of separation of church and state came to be.

Elementary School Calls Police on 7-Y-O Boy for Sharing Bible Verses

ChristianNews: First grader Adam Kotzian (C) does a spelling drill with classmates in his classroom at Eagleview Elementary school in Thornton, Colorado, March 31, 2010.

A California public school called a Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff in Palmdale to reprimand a 7-year-old student for handing out Bible verses, warning that such actions are “offensive.”

Santa Monica Observer reported that the student, who attends Desert Rose Elementary, had been handing out Bible verses given to him in the form of short notes from his mother, Christina Zavala, alongside his lunch.

The young boy distributed the Bible verses while standing on a public sidewalks outside the school.

He also shared other verses and short Bible stories among his friends, until a first-grade teacher saw one of those notes. The teacher reportedly publicly rebuked the boy, and then called his parents, warning them that such actions go against the separation of church and state.

The boy, however, allegedly continued to distribute Bible verses out at the school gate, and subsequently he and his parents were told by the school’s principal that what they were doing is not permitted.

Later that day, a Los Angeles deputy sheriff went to the family’s home to inform the parents that Desert Rose Elementary School had filed a report against the child for sharing Bible verses.

The Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit litigation organization which specializes in defending religious freedom, has since sent a letter to the Palmdale School District to inform the administration of the correct interpretation of the clause establishing separation of church and state, arguing that pupils have the right to exercise freedom of speech through printed materials.

“Therefore, it was improper to ban student religious discussion during lunchtime. The district cannot suppress and censor this discussion, or the one-page notes consisting of Bible stories and verses placed by C’s mother in C ‘s lunch for his own personal enjoyment and edification; which he voluntarily chose to share with his little friends during non-instructional time; which interested classmates were free to accept or refuse, at their own discretion,” the letter stated.

“The additional copies requested by C from his mother, for his friends (who had specifically requested them from him), are likewise protected, and fall into no classification of material that might be lawfully prohibited by the school district,” it added.

“The consigning of C’s speech to the ‘schoolhouse gate,’ and then the prohibition of it even there, is unconstitutional, and must fall. Finally, if being censured for religious expression by one’s First Grade teacher in front of one’s classmates is not intimidating and humiliating enough, the message of hostility to a child’s religious expression is underscored by the District calling law enforcement for a ‘follow-up visit ‘ to his house.”

Public schools in America often face questions regarding the separation of church and state when it comes to Bible verses used on school campus.

Some compromises include allowing the distribution of biblical material have allowed other groups to hand out their religious, or anti-religious material, such as atheist handbooks, and satanist pamphlets.