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Navigator Holdings Ltd., the shipping firm part-owned by U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, doubled the number of contracts it had with Sibur Holding PJSC just months after the U.S. imposed sanctions on a major shareholder of the Russian petrochemical company in 2014.
Sibur itself wasn’t subject to the restrictions, which the U.S. imposed over the Ukraine crisis, but they led to a broad chill in business ties between the two countries. Sibur’s shareholders have particularly close ties to the Kremlin. Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire energy trader, was cited as a member of the “inner circle” by the U.S. Treasury when it imposed a visa ban and asset freeze on him in March 2014, held a stake of as much as 32 percent by September of that year. Kirill Shamalov, who is married to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s younger daughter isn’t subject to U.S. restrictions, raised his Sibur stake to 21 percent in late 2014. He later sold all but 3.9 percent. More here.
Mikhelson is the founder and chairman of natural gas producer Novatek. He is also chairman of gas processing and petrochemical company Sibur; Billionaire Gennady Timchenko is his partner in both; Putin’s reported son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, is a partner in Sibur. Over 2015 and 2016, Mikhelson sold a 16% stake in Sibur to China’s state-owned Sinopec and China’s Silk Road Fund for $2.1 billion. An avid art collector, he has sponsored museum exhibits in Russia and the U.S. His father headed the largest pipeline construction trust in the Soviet Union, and Mikhelson began his career as foreman for a construction company building a gas pipeline in Russia’s Tyumen region.
China and Syria have already begun discussing post-war infrastructure investment with a ‘Matchmaking Fair for Syria Reconstruction’ held in Beijing
From Utah, Secretive Help for a Russian Oligarch and His Jet
Records leaked from an offshore law firm show how the wealthy elite sidestep prohibitions on foreigners registering private planes in the United States.
SALT LAKE CITY — Bank of Utah has that all-American feel. Founded in the 1950s by a veteran of both world wars, it offers affordable mortgages and savings accounts, sponsors children’s festivals and collects coats for the poor.
But in addition to its mom-and-pop customers, the bank has a lesser-known clientele that includes Russia’s richest oligarch, Leonid Mikhelson, an ally of the country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The bank served as a stand-in so Mr. Mikhelson could secretly register a private jet in the United States, which requires American citizenship or residency.
The work on behalf of Mr. Mikhelson, whose gas company is under United States sanctions, is part of a discreet niche business for Bank of Utah that allows wealthy foreigners to legally obtain American registrations for their aircraft while shielding their identities from public view. The bank does this through trust accounts, in its own name, that take the place of owners on plane registration records.
Bank of Utah manages more than 1,390 aircraft trust accounts, most of them for foreigners, generating millions of dollars in fees and making it the second-largest holder of such accounts in the country. A trove of records leaked from an offshore law firm, Appleby, shows that the services offered by Bank of Utah, Wells Fargo and other American companies were sought after by rich jet owners in Russia, Africa and the Middle East.
The files were obtained by a German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other news organizations, including The New York Times. Among other things, the records reveal how Appleby often packaged trust arrangements with a tax avoidance scheme on the Isle of Man, a British crown dependency that serves as a haven for aircraft owners to sidestep taxes in the European Union. Together, businesses like Bank of Utah and Appleby provide a suite of money-saving tricks for the wealthy elite around the world.
Members of Congress and federal auditors have grown increasingly concerned that the opaque aircraft trust arrangements, which are not closely tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration, could allow terrorists and criminals a back door for evading sanctions, intelligence officials or law enforcement. Some 10,000 private planes are registered in the United States to noncitizen trusts.
“There are serious national security risks when the F.A.A. approves an aircraft registration but does not have all the information, particularly if an aircraft is owned by a shell corporation or a foreign entity,” Representative Stephen F. Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, said when he introduced legislation in July that would require the F.A.A. to obtain and regularly update records on the ultimate owners behind aircraft trusts.
An inspector general report in 2013 found that more than half of noncitizen trusts registered with the F.A.A. “lacked important information such as the identity of the trusts’ owners and aircraft operators.” As a result, the report said, the agency “has been unable to provide information on these aircraft to foreign authorities upon request when U.S. registered aircraft are involved in accidents or incidents.”
Another inspector general report, in 2014, cited specific cases that it said demonstrated the potential for national-security or legal problems. Among them was an episode in which an unnamed American bank had to cancel an aircraft trust after learning that its beneficiary, a Lebanese politician, had ties to a terrorist group. Another involved a jet registered to Wells Fargo that made an unscheduled landing in Libya in 2011 just as a no-fly zone was imposed by the United Nations.
In 2014, a plane registered to Bank of Utah was spotted at an airport in Iran, raising questions about whether its presence violated American sanctions.Credit Thomas Erdbrink/The New York
And three years ago, a plane registered to Bank of Utah was spotted at an airport in Iran, raising questions about whether its presence violated American sanctions at the time. The bank told reporters it had “no idea” why the plane was there, and would not reveal who owned it; the Bombardier jet turned out to be owned by a Ghanaian company and had no Americans aboard.
That episode led to some soul-searching for Bank of Utah officials. In a recent interview at the bank’s corporate trust offices in Salt Lake City, Branden Hansen, the chief financial officer, said that the reputational risk of the trusts prompted the bank to consider whether “to shut this whole thing down.”
Ultimately the bank decided to continue the service, but with stronger due diligence and new staff to oversee it. Jon Croasmun, a trust officer who joined the bank last year, said that “knowing who the owners are is important,” adding that the bank searches public records, seeks passports and takes other steps to ensure it knows the background of aircraft owners.
Still, the Bank of Utah executives were surprised to learn that they had aided Mr. Mikhelson, the Russian oligarch. When told the name of the offshore shell company that Mr. Mikhelson used to manage his Gulfstream jet, Mr. Croasmun interrupted the interview to check the bank’s files. He confirmed that the shell company had been a client since 2013 — but information identifying Mr. Mikhelson as the man behind it “was nowhere that I saw in the files.”
“His name is not in there,” Mr. Croasmun said.
A Request From Moscow
Appleby, based in Bermuda, is one of the world’s largest offshore law firms. Its files offer a rare inside look at more than a dozen aircraft trusts structured by American financial institutions for privacy-seeking plane owners, primarily foreigners who otherwise would not be allowed to register with the F.A.A. There is a premium on American registration because it increases a plane’s resale value, the bureaucratic requirements are less costly and complex, and it is believed to draw less scrutiny as the aircraft moves around the world.
Among the plane owners seeking Appleby’s services were Shaher Abdulhak, a Yemeni businessman worth an estimated $9 billion whose investments included a Coca-Cola distributor in the Middle East; UPL, an Indian producer of industrial chemicals and pesticides; and Rashid Sardarov, a Russian oil billionaire and longtime client of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm whose leaked records in 2015 became known as the Panama Papers.
In serving these clients, files show, Appleby dealt with the two banks that are the most prolific creators of American aircraft trusts: Wells Fargo and Bank of Utah. It is easy to see how Wells Fargo, the third-largest bank in the United States, with nearly $2 trillion in assets and offices in 42 countries, might find a lucrative niche catering to the wealthy elite. Less obvious is how Bank of Utah, with 18 branches confined to one state, took the same path.
As it happens, a group of former Wells Fargo trust officers joined Bank of Utah about 10 years ago and created what would become a profitable part of the bank’s business. The bank collected $8.8 million in trust fees in 2016 — an increase of $1.1 million from the previous year, according to its most recent annual report.
Mr. Croasmun and Mr. Hansen took issue with the suggestion that they were exploiting a loophole to bypass restrictions on foreigners registering aircraft in the United States. By filling the role of “U.S. citizen” for registration purposes, the bank provided a valuable service for, say, multinational companies whose top executives might not be American, they said. The bank is clearly sensitive to concerns raised about the trusts. Its website carries a statement distancing itself from the planes it registers in its name, noting its only role is that of trustee.
In the case of Mr. Mikhelson, the trail leading from Russia to Utah began in September 2012, with an email to Appleby from the Moscow office of the accounting firm Ernst & Young. The firm wanted Appleby to set up a complex corporate structure for an unnamed client to purchase a Gulfstream jet, valued at roughly $65 million, and retain possession of it through a chain of companies in six countries.
From the outset, the goal was clear: “This structure,” wrote Svetlana Yakushina of Ernst & Young, “should allow registering the aircraft with the aviation authorities of the United States.”
The arrangement would also permit the owner to avoid certain taxes, most notably a value-added tax of 20 percent if the jet were registered and used in the European Union. A six-page memo prepared by Ernst & Young laid out a plan to exploit a tax loophole offered by the Isle of Man, where about 1,000 privately owned aircraft are recorded on a government registry for tax purposes. Appleby and other similar firms maintain offices there.
The Isle of Man allows owners to escape the value-added tax, or VAT, through a paper-shuffling scheme, wherein the jet is held by a company based there but leased to another company elsewhere, both controlled by the same owner. The tax is technically deferred into the future, through use of a special account managed by Ernst & Young, and then canceled out by the corporate structure. Research by the investigative journalists consortium suggests that Isle of Man-registered aircraft have escaped more than $1 billion in taxes.
According to a flow chart created by Appleby’s Isle of Man office for the Mikhelson account, the ownership chain for his jet began in Panama, with a company called Golden Star Aviation, which registered on the Isle of Man and then leased the aircraft to a Cayman Islands company called SWGI Growth Fund. Both companies were controlled by Mr. Mikhelson.
Mr. Mikhelson declined to answer questions about his plane. His representative released a statement saying, “Mr. Mikhelson acts strictly within the boundaries of the law and in compliance with applicable legislation at all times.”
By June 2013, lawyers at Appleby still had not learned of Mr. Mikhelson’s role, other than being told that the Gulfstream’s owner was Russian. Once the lawyers were informed of his identity by a Swiss firm that manages Mr. Mikhelson’s finances, they conducted a background check and concluded that, as with other clients from Russia, where the political and legal environment can be unstable, working for him would be “high risk.” But they decided to proceed.
Sanctions and ‘Citizenship’
A due-diligence report by Appleby noted Mr. Mikhelson’s source of wealth — valued currently at about $18 billion — from oil and gas investments, notably through Novatek, Russia’s largest nongovernment-owned gas company. Mr. Mikhelson’s main business partner is Gennady Timchenko, a close friend of Mr. Putin’s. The two businessmen are the primary investors in Sibur, a Russian gas-processing company.
Included in the report was a list of questions to determine if Mr. Mikhelson had any connections to the United States, including whether he had assets or maintained an address there. The answer to all of them was “no.” Flight records show that the plane has rarely, if ever, flown to the United States and instead makes trips within Russia or occasionally to cities in Europe and China.
Despite its lack of a connection to the United States, Mr. Mikhelson’s private jet was soon on its way to securing a registration with the F.A.A., thanks to Bank of Utah.
It is not clear if the bank was ever told, or inquired, about the identity of the owner of the aircraft. Mr. Croasmun said that files indicated the owner “was Russian” but that identifying details were missing.
Whatever the case, the trust agreement for Mr. Mikhelson’s Gulfstream, filed with the F.A.A., does not name him anywhere in the document. Instead, the owner is listed as Golden Star Aviation, the Panamanian company he used to buy the plane. Attached to it is an “affidavit of citizenship” signed by a bank officer, Brett King, attesting that the trustee — Bank of Utah — is a “citizen of the United States.”
Appleby’s conclusion that doing business with Mr. Mikhelson would be “high risk” began to look prescient by July 2014. That is when Washington hit a number of Russian individuals and companies with economic sanctions in response to Russian intervention in Ukraine.
Among those named by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Contro were Novatek, Mr. Mikhelson’s gas company, and Mr. Timchenko, his partner in other ventures. Mr. Mikhelson himself was not included in the sanctions, which tightly restricted Novatek’s access to American capital markets.
Almost immediately, lawyers at Appleby flagged the Novatek sanctions and began emailing one another, one of them seeking advice on “how this affects the structures that we manage.” Within a week, Appleby had sent a message to Mr. Mikhelson’s aide Igor Ryaskov explaining that the law firm was concerned about Mr. Mikhelson’s connections to a company subject to sanctions.
“Due to the ongoing issues and increased risk, it is with regret that I must advise that we will be looking to cease services in respect of these structures,” the note said.
Mr. Ryaskov protested, saying that Mr. Mikhelson was not on the sanctions list. Still, Appleby held fast, and referred Mr. Ryaskov to other firms; by 2015, Mikhelson’s aircraft account had been transferred to Fedelta Trust Limited, a financial services firm on the Isle of Man. Mr. Ryaskov did not respond to a request for comment.
As for Bank of Utah, it filed a registration renewal application with the F.A.A. in July last year, indicating that its trusteeship for the aircraft remained unchanged. During the recent interview, the bank executives suggested that Mr. Mikhelson’s case escaped scrutiny during an earlier period when their internal review process was less rigorous, and they vowed to review it.
“Russian involvement would score as a high risk by itself,” Mr. Hansen said. “It’s highly unlikely that something like this would have been approved in today’s climate.”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called WikiLeaks a hostile agent bent on taking down America. Meanwhile, Julian Assange continues to inject himself and WikiLeaks into all political affairs in the United States, to what end has not been determined.
Meanwhile, Congress has all the direct message communications between someone at WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr. that was apparently leading the Twitter communications during the campaign season. Many of those communications from WikiLeaks had a response from Donald Jr.
Immediately after this became public, Julian Assange took to twitter to push back.
He posted on Twitter the following:
I cannot confirm the alleged DM’s from @DonaldJTrumpJr to @wikileaks. @wikileaks does not keep such records and the Atlantic’s presentation is edited and clearly does not have the full context. However, even those published by the Atlantic show that: 1/
WikiLeaks loves its pending publications and ignores those who ask for details. Trump Jr. was rebuffed just like Cambridge Analytica. In both cases WikiLeaks had publicly teased the publications. Thousands of people asked about them. 2/
WikiLeaks can be very effective at convincing even high profile people that it is their interest to promote links to its publications. 3/
WikiLeaks has such chutzpah that it allegedly tried to convince Trump Jr to leak his father’s tax returns & his own “Russian lawyer meeting” emails (he did). WikiLeaks appears to beguile some people into transparency by convincing them that it is in their interest. 4/
He also asked to be the U.S. ambassador to Australia…sheesh. Anyway….Assange was referring to the Atlantic article about those communications of which Congressional committees have copies provided by his lawyer. Here is that summary:
Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)
The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”
The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.
“Over the last several months, we have worked cooperatively with each of the committees and have voluntarily turned over thousands of documents in response to their requests,” said Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr. “Putting aside the question as to why or by whom such documents, provided to Congress under promises of confidentiality, have been selectively leaked, we can say with confidence that we have no concerns about these documents and any questions raised about them have been easily answered in the appropriate forum.” WikiLeaks did not respond to requests for comment.
The messages were turned over to Congress as part of that body’s various ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. American intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of engaging in a deliberate effort to boost President Donald Trump’s chances while bringing down his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. That effort—and the president’s response to it—has spawned multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel inquiry that has led to the indictment of Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial crimes.
It’s not clear what investigators will make of the correspondence, which represents a small portion of the thousands of documents Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer says he turned over to them. The stakes for the Trump family, however, are high. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia’s powerful prosecutor general, is already reportedly a subject of interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, as is the White House statement defending him. (Trump Jr. was emailed an offer of “information that would incriminate Hillary,” and responded in part, “If it’s what you say I love it.”) The messages exchanged with WikiLeaks add a second instance in which Trump Jr. appears eager to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton, despite its provenance.
Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.
WikiLeaks played a pivotal role in the presidential campaign. In July 2016, on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s servers that spring. The emails showed DNC officials denigrating Bernie Sanders, renewing tensions on the eve of Clinton’s acceptance of the nomination. On October 7, less than an hour after the Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, Wikileaks released emails that hackers had pilfered from the personal email account of Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta.
On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again. “Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story,” WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
“Already did that earlier today,” Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she can get away with.”
Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.”
WikiLeaks didn’t respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications,” WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!”)
“Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. “There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,” WikiLeaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”
Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. “For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/,” he wrote.
After this point, Trump Jr. ceased to respond to WikiLeaks’s direct messages, but WikiLeaks escalated its requests.
“Hey Don. We have an unusual idea,” WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. “Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns.” WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump’s tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time “through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC).”
It is the third reason, though, WikiLeaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” WikiLeaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, “The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out.”
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.
WikiLeaks didn’t write again until Election Day, November 8, 2016. “Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump’s rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. “The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.,” WikiLeaks wrote.
Shortly after midnight that day, when it was clear that Trump had beaten all expectations and won the presidency, WikiLeaks sent him a simple message: “Wow.”
Trump Jr. did not respond to these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. “Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well!” WikiLeaks wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the president-elect. “In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC.”
WikiLeaks even imagined how Trump might put it: “‘That’s a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have!’ or something similar,” WikiLeaks wrote. “They won’t do it but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons.” (On December 7, Assange, proclaiming his innocence, had released his testimony in front of London investigators looking into accusations that he had committed alleged sexual assault.)
In the winter and spring, WikiLeaks went largely silent, only occasionally sending Trump Jr. links. But on July 11, 2017, three days after The New York Timesbroke the story about Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia’s powerful prosecutor general, WikiLeaks got in touch again.
“Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems,” WikiLeaks wrote. “We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today,” citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. “We think this is strongly in your interest,” WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father’s tax returns, including the argument that Trump’s enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. “Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding.”
The message was sent at 9:29 am on July 11. Trump Jr. did not respond, but just hours later, he posted the emails himself, on his own Twitter feed.
Kimberly Fritts, has resigned and announced no more paychecks from the Podesta Group after Tony, the founder stepped down. Fleeing to other corners, other lobby groups are cherry picking to hire former Podesta Group employees.
Less than two weeks after Democratic mega-lobbyist Tony Podesta stepped down from his firm amid questions over its foreign work, one of Washington’s most prominent lobbying shops is unraveling as its employees try to reconstitute under new leadership.
Chief Executive Officer Kimberly Fritts told employees Thursday afternoon she is working on launching a new firm that would take many of Podesta’s staff and clients with her, said two people familiar with the meeting. She told employees they shouldn’t expect a paycheck past Nov. 15, the people said.
It was not an entirely unexpected moment for the 30-year-old firm after Podesta’s sudden resignation Oct. 31, when he announced he was stepping down following an indictment issued against Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort by U.S. Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The charges detailed Manafort’s clandestine influence campaign on behalf of Ukraine’s deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, including work with two unidentified companies that “lobbied multiple members of Congress and their staff about Ukraine sanctions, the validity of Ukraine elections, and the propriety of Yanukovych’s imprisoning his presidential rival.”
Mueller’s indictment identified the firms as Company A and Company B and said they were allegedly paid by Manafort with more than $2 million in offshore funds. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that Company B is the Podesta Group, which disclosed in April that it had worked for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Company A is Mercury Public Affairs LLC, said another person familiar with the matter.
The Podesta Group represents some of the the world’ biggest companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Altria Group Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., Pfizer Inc. and other representatives of some of the most active industries in Washington.
Podesta’s next steps were not discussed at the meeting, one person said. A spokeswoman for Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group declined to comment.
Podesta is the brother of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, who also served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and was counselor to Barack Obama.
***
Kimberley Fritts, the longtime chief executive of the Podesta Group, is leaving the firm to start her own lobbying shop, according to three Podesta Group staffers.
Paul Brathwaite, a Podesta Group principal, said last week that he was leaving to start his own shop, Federal Street Strategies.
Rival lobbying firms, meanwhile, see this is a prime moment to poach the Podesta Group’s top lobbyists. At least six other firms have reached out to Podesta Group staffers about leaving since Tony Podesta stepped down. More here.
*** It must be chaos as there are contracts with countless companies, organizations and foreign entities that must be either cancelled or completed under a new process. According to Open Secrets, the Podesta group has $15,780,000 in lobby income for 2017.
Tony Podesta’s lavish art collection is coming down off the walls at the Podesta Group, as the lobbying firm — among the largest and most powerful in Washington — prepares to close up shop.
Workers started removing dozens of pieces in Podesta’s collection of photography and other artworks from the walls of the firm on Thursday, the same day Kimberley Fritts, the firm’s longtime chief executive, abruptly resigned, according to a Podesta Group staffer.
“The firm as it existed is essentially over,” one Podesta Group staffer said. “The vast majority of people are going their own way.”
At an emotional staff meeting late Thursday afternoon, Fritts told staffers they could clear out their offices and said that Wednesday might be their last payday.
“We will try to compensate you on the 30th, but we can’t make any promises,” Fritts said, according to one staffer who was in the meeting.
Fritts had been expected to relaunch the Podesta Group under a new name in the days after Podesta stepped down. But she instead announced in the meeting on Thursday that she was leaving to start her own firm after negotiations with Podesta broke down. Her last day was Friday, according to Podesta Group staffers.
Fritts is now hustling to find new office space and get her new firm off the ground. Staffers, meanwhile, are struggling to figure out what will happen to the Podesta Group with Fritts gone and Podesta — an outsized presence in Washington known for his flamboyant ties and ubiquity at Democratic fundraisers — nowhere to be found.
Staffers are wondering why a firm that brought in $24 million last year suddenly can’t pay their salaries, and why Podesta and Fritts were unable to strike a deal to transfer ownership of the firm.
“There’s a lot of anger at Tony because of that,” one Podesta Group staffer said.
Some Podesta Group lobbyists are now planning to join Fritts at her new firm, which The New York Times reported on Friday would be named Cogent Strategies.
Others are considering joining rival lobbying firms or starting their own shops. One lobbyist, Paul Brathwaite, sent a note to clients last week announcing he was starting his own firm, Federal Street Strategies. More here.
FNC: The Justice Department reportedly has garnered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government operatives with hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers during the 2016 presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors could bring charges early next year. The Journal reported that dozens of others may have also played a role in the cyberattack.
19,000 malicious links collected by Secureworks after Fancy Bear mistake.
4,700 Gmail users across the globe were targeted by the state hacking team.
Alongside Democrats, a handful of Republican targets were also identified.
The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defence contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.
The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.
“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”
The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.
Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet.
The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.
“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data. “I have no doubts.”
New evidence
Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.
In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, US Army Gen. Wesley Clark.
The list skewed toward workers for defence contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.
The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.
Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.
“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”
In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.
The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.
In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists.
Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.
“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.
Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organisation in Kazakhstan.
“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington.
He was also on the list.
“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”
Working 9 to 6 (Moscow Time)
Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.
Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol.
In the wake of the 2016 election, US intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.
But the US intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.
That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.
Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.
He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.
The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders.
The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET.
The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95% of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 am and 6 pm Monday to Friday.
The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.
Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.
Fancy Bear have long been linked to the Russian security servicesiStock
And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.
“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”
The myth if the 400-pound man
Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivalling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.
For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.
The AP’s effort offers “a little feel for how much labour went into this,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
He said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
“The notion that it’s just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd,” Rid said.
***
Axios: Marathon congressional hearings on Russian election interference and social media left execs from Facebook, Google and Twitter badly bruised and with a new view of just how mad Washington is about their handling of content aiming to divide Americans.
The big takeaway: Lawmakers’ rebukes went far beyond the companies’ responses to Russia’s interference. They also repeatedly revealed a discomfort with the size, power and limited accountability of the large web platforms.
Washington isn’t buying that Facebook, Google and Twitter aren’t media companies. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed baffled at times by an assumption that has been fundamental to Google, Facebook and Twitter’s growth: that they are neutral platforms for information, not judges of content. Multiple lawmakers questioned that argument: “That may well be a distinction that is lost on most of us, that you’re just a platform for other people to express their views as opposed to being a publisher in their own right of those views,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
We now know what the Russian ads look like. Lawmakers released some of the Russian-bought ads, which were focused largely on divisive political issues like civil rights, immigration and religion. According to the metadata released, the ads targeted both Republicans and Democrats and were paid for in rubles. For example, one “Black Matters” ad targeted adults in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri and Virginia and received more than 200,000 impressions and more than 12,000 clicks. It cost 53,425 rubles ($915).
Still no backing for a regulatory fix. The only piece of concrete legislation tied to this issue is the Honest Ads Act, which would require disclosure for online political ads. While the companies all committed to improving transparency, and companies indicated that they could work with lawmakers on the bill, they did not endorse it.
Lawmakers felt slighted by the CEOs’ absence. “I wish your CEOs were here,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, one of many lawmakers who voiced that sentiment. “They need to answer for this.”
The companies are putting significant resources toward vetting content. During nine hours of hearings, they repeatedly touted how much they were investing in both money and personnel to solve the election interference issue. Facebook is doubling the people working on safety and security issues to 20,000 by the end of 2018, for example.
Democrats were the harshest critics. Silicon Valley has long had a strong relationship with the liberal left, but that didn’t stop California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, as well as tech ally Sen. Ron Wyden, from lacing into the witnesses. Republicans, while critical of the companies, stopped short of conceding that social media manipulation was a deciding factor in Donald Trump’s win.
Congressional investigators are still learning the basics. One lawmaker asked Twitter’s general counsel to explain the difference between a bot and a troll. Several inquired about the definition of “impressions.” This highlights how steep the learning curve is for elected officials to fully grasp the nuances of what went wrong online in 2016.
Tech made a huge political miscalculation in not moving faster. Again and again, the companies were chided for how long it took them to deliver the goods to investigators. “I hear all your words,” said Sen. Mark Warner, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”
What’s next? All of the companies indicated their investigations are ongoing, so the scale of the Russian disinformation campaign could turn out to be even bigger than we know now.
His indictment contains 12 counts including conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
This development comes after months of news stories about Manafort’s alleged business dealings with foreign governments. These stories inspired curiosity in the minds of computer security researchers, reports Motherboard’s Louise Matsakis.
That curiosity caused a couple of security researchers to dig in and discover that Paul Manafort appeared to be fond of the James-Bond-inspired password “bond007”.
Their interest was piqued in February, after Manafort confirmed to Politico that hackers broke into Manafort’s daughter’s iPhone. As Business Insider previously reported, hackers then published roughly 300,000 of what they said were her text messages — about four years’ worth — to the “dark web.” The dark web is a secret version of the internet often used for criminal activity accessible only via a special browser.
Those messages apparently contained Manafort’s former email address, uncovered by a security researcher who goes by the online name Krypt3ia. Another researcher discovered that accounts that used this same email address were compromised in two big security hacks: the 2013 Adobe hack, and the 2012 Dropbox hack.
The password hints for the Adobe account were things like “secret agent” and “James Bond.” Those hints basically allowed the researchers to correctly guess that the password itself was “bond007.” The same Bond-inspired password worked for both the Adobe and Dropbox accounts. More here.
*** He is no longer a flight risk, the Feds have his passport. Hope they have ALL of them.
So, wait for it….there is more….
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort owns multiple passports and used a phone and email account registered under a fake name while traveling, according to a new court filing obtained by CNN on Tuesday.
Manafort, who surrendered to the FBI on Monday after being indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into Russian election meddling, currently has three different U.S. passports and has submitted 10 applications for passports over the last several years, according to the filing.
Manafort used the fake name for his phone and email account while traveling to Mexico, China and Ecuador this year, the filing shows.
The new filing provided by CNN details Manafort’s extensive travels and use of multiple banks to house the millions of dollars gained through his work as a consultant for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine.
It also shows that Manafort reported vastly different figures regarding the value of his assets, from $19 million in April of 2012 to $136 million in May 2016. More here.
*** At center, from left to right: Paul Manafort, Yan Jiehe, Brad Perkins and Brad Zackson
Manafort had a long history of being a player….crony player asking for money.
In 2008, Manafort and Zackson made an unsuccessful run at the Drake Hotel site (now home to 432 Park Avenue), backed by equity investments from a Russian metals billionaire and a Ukranian natural gas mogul who are both now suspected of criminal activity. That deal triggered a federal investigation now being run by Mueller.
In the decade since the Drake plan fizzled, Zackson, a convicted felon who became a protégé of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, has tried to position himself as a master developer whose best projects are yet to come. Among these, he said, is a plan to build an apartment complex in Queens’ Willets Point neighborhood that would dwarf Stuyvesant Town and a run at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown.
Much like Manafort, Zackson’s real estate career is dotted with controversy. Deals tend to include a revolving cast of foreign tycoons, assorted cronies and, in at least one instance, Trump himself. In comparison with the likes of Bayrock Group principals Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, Zackson is a lesser-known character from Trump’s old stomping grounds of high-stakes property deal-making. But understanding him is key to understanding the bare-knuckled, truth-optional world Trump inhabited and continues to reflect in his approach to the presidency.
“On the surface when he speaks to you, it seems like a great story,” Kevin Maloney, founder of Property Markets Group, said of Zackson, whom he’s battling in court. ”When you dig down, it’s not true — or it’s only 10 percent true. That’s the truth of it. There’s nothing beyond his stories, and when he gets to the end of the story, he will inevitably ask you for money.” More here.
photo
At center, from left to right: Paul Manafort, Yan Jiehe, Brad Perkins and Brad Zackson