Category Archives: Russia

Carter Page Sues all of Them

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As closing arguments are delivered in the Senate impeachment trial, one must note that the House Manager’s Team has made the same points day in and day out while overlooking the other part of the whole concocted scheme against President Trump. The other part is the successful plot against Donald Trump that was launched many months before he even took the Oath of Office for the presidency, Crossfire Hurricane. Carried through to Mueller investigation, it is proven that the ‘dossier’ was complied using foreign entities, some still unnamed.

That plot, using foreign interference was to interfere in our domestic election process. The choreographed operation continued through to the end of the impeachment trial in the Senate. Once, Trump is acquitted, brace for impact as the LEFT will not stop unless they are exposed in full and perhaps that will begin in earnest by two channels. The work pledged by Senator Lindsey Graham is characterized as a systematic examination of all things stemming from the contentious phone call between President(s) Trump and Zelensky. The other channel is the lawsuit filed by former volunteer foreign policy advisor, Carter Page.

Did Carter Page contacts give Obama FBI window into Trump ...

Page is suing the Democrat National Committee, Perkins Coie, LLP. and Michael Sussman. Carter Page has requested a trial by jury.

In a short summary of the Carter complaint:

As part of this effort, Defendants developed a dossier replete with falsehoods about numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign—especially Dr. Page. Defendants then sought to tarnish the Trump campaign and its affiliates (including Dr. Page) by publicizing this false information.

Defendants’ efforts mobilized the news media against Dr. Page, damaging his reputation, and effectively destroying his once-private life. The Defendants’ wrongful actions convinced many Americans that Dr. Page is a traitor to the United States, and as a result he has received—and continues to receive—multiple death threats. Dr. Page’s businesses have suffered greatly from the false, malicious information spread by Defendants.

In short, Defendants’ actions have not only damaged Plaintiffs’ reputations and financial prospects, they have even caused Dr. Page to reasonably fear for his safety. Defendants misrepresented Dr. Page’s connections to and interactions with certain foreign nationals in order to create the false impression that Dr. Page—who served his country honorably in the United States Navy and in the private sector—was in fact an agent of a foreign power, Russia. Defendants leveraged these fabrications within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”), leading these agencies to present false applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”).

As a result, Dr. Page was wrongfully and covertly surveilled by the United States government pursuant to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) warrants for more than a year, and has seen his reputation ruined and his personal safety threatened.

For clarity on the Defendants:

Defendant Perkins Coie LLP (“Perkins Coie”) is an international law firm with over 1,000 lawyers. Perkins Coie has twenty offices worldwide, and its Chicago office has about 144 lawyers and officers. Approximately 67 Perkins Coie partners operate out of the Chicago office.

Defendant Marc Elias is a natural person who is domiciled in Washington, DC. He is a Partner at Perkins Coie. Elias represents the DNC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Priorities USA, Senate Majority PAC and House Majority PAC. Elias also represented then-U.S. Senator from Illinois Barack Obama from at least as early as 2006, including throughout the period that Obama served as United States President and titular head of the DNC. Elias has served as chair of Perkins Coie’s political law practices since after the start of the Obama Administration in 2009. In 2016, he organized the opposition research which led to the U.S. Government’s surveillance abuse against Plaintiff.

Defendant Michael Sussman is a natural person who is domiciled in Washington, DC. He is a Partner at Perkins Coie and has represented the DNC.

The timing of this complaint will assist the Lindsey Graham investigative team in the Senate under what is known in legal jargon as discovery. This is the process where documents, communications and interrogatories are gained by both sides of the case.

For additional clarity:

In April 2016, as agents of the DNC, Elias, Sussman and Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS on the DNC’s behalf to produce negative information on then-candidate Trump.Defendants funded Fusion GPS’s research. Fusion GPS reported to Elias the information from its research.

You are encouraged to read the full complaint to expel false notions found in news media and in social media for context and accuracy found here.

 

 

Have You Met Andrii Telizhenko?

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So, we have the phone call whistle-blower, Eric Ciaramella visiting the Obama White House according to visitor logs an estimated 200 times. What?

Ciaramella held the positions of National Security Council director for Ukraine under Susan Rice and director of Baltic and Eastern European Affairs in the Office of Vice President Joe Biden. Ciaramella was advised by Adam Schiff’s staff to fill out a complaint on the Trump/Zelensky phone call and given the text of the complaint, it is obvious it was drafted by lawyers likely out of Schiff’s office, maybe even Daniel Goldman himself.

Coming from Senator Rand Paul’s Twitter feed is this little gem posted on January 16, 2020.

Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) | Twitterhttps://twitter.comType a message

Anyway, Eric Ciaramella hosted a particular meeting on January 16, 2016 in room 230A at the Obama White House to discuss Ukraine, especially Burisma and the ‘Bidens’. Eric Ciaramella also hosted and chaired a meeting in Room 374 of the Eisenhower Executive Office, which seems to be a planning session to re-open an investigation of Paul Manafort which was to review the information that Alexandra Chalupa had gathered on Manafort and she was paid by the DNC to do so.

Artem Sytnyk, the director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), a Soros group. Sytnyk was put on the public register of person who committed corrupt related crimes in Ukraine.

Others at the meeting included:

Jeffrey Cole: Resident Legal Advisor at U.S. Embassy, Ukraine (FBI)

Anna Iemelianova: Special Legal Counsel for the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine

Nazar Kholodnitsky: Ukraine’s Chief anti-corruption Prosecutor

Svitlana Pardus: Operations, DoJ, U.S. Embassy, Ukraine

David Sakvarelidze: Deputy General Prosecutor, fired in March of 2016

Andris Razans: Ambassador of Latvia in Belgium (important, read below)

Liz Zentos: National Security Council Director of Eastern Europe

Catherine L. Newcombe: Eurasia legal programs at the DoJ Criminal Division

This meeting was where the Ukraine corruption and the Biden/Burisma plot was launched to protect the infectious relationships.This meeting’s central objective was to tell Ukraine to no longer investigate/probe Burisma and to allow the FBI to take full control. Kiev did not agree and hence later Biden stepped in with his threat to withhold the $1 billion loan guarantees unless Ukraine complied.

Andrii Telizhenko was in that meeting too and has since been cooperating in full with Rudy Giuliani and is essentially a whistleblower.

My Dinner With Andrii | Talking Points Memo Andrii Telizhenko

Telizhenko was previously a political office in the Ukrainian embassy. Ukraine was financially desperate to follow all instructions put forth by the United States during the Obama administration and now is having to do the same with a new administration under President Trump and the new Ukraine president Zelensky for any kind of survival to maintain stability and not fall to Russian aggression or annexation.

Confusing right?

Then it seems the FBI did gain some control and curiously, a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Buretta was hired to defend Burisma president Nikolay Zlochevskyi for income tax evasion and money-laundering. The truth be told, Burisma bought justice by agreeing to pay $7.4 million in back taxes and fines. Burisma can hire who they want and did but having Devon Archer and Hunter Biden on the Board did allow for political cover, access and favors.

In 2014, Prime Minister Theresa May held a summit for where leaders from a handful of countries attended to plot out a plan to provide Ukraine with some leadership guidance and financial assistance after the billions stolen by the former Ukraine president Yanukovich and others in the government from the coffers of the Ukrainian treasury and various banks. Over the years, in fact, hundreds of billions had been stolen…you read that right. Those monies traced to various countries and accounts (tax havens) around the world including South East Asia, the Caribbean, Cyprus, London, Latvia, Luxembourg, and even Liechtenstein.

One account held in a London bank belonged to Mykola Zlochevsky who at the time was not only the Ukraine Resource Minister but the CEO of Burisma. All the while, Russia had officially annexed Crimea and had immediate plans to do the same with Ukraine. Ukraine had no money to fight a war and needed immediate financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and guidance from the United States, hence then President Obama assigned the Ukraine portfolio to Vice President Biden. Various banks around the world that could be attributed to belonging to Ukraine, or by corrupt oligarchs were frozen. This was to stop the bleeding and begin a full and comprehensive investigation by various financial fraud experts of Western nations.

It is no wonder that big print and cable news media is attacking Rudy Giuliani as he as Trump’s personally attorney and former prosecutor has been investigating all of this for a very long time and has a cache of tangible evidence. To complicate matters even more, we have Andrii Derkach who initiated the criminal case of the interference in the U.S. elections.

In part from a long Guardian article published on April 12, 2017:

On 19 January, the day before Trump’s inauguration, Zlochevsky’s gas company announced it was becoming a funder of the Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington thinktank. The Atlantic Council declined to say exactly how much money the tycoon had offered, only that his donation had been between $100,000 and $249,000. A month later, Burisma hired a new director. Joseph Cofer Black does not appear to have any more experience of Ukraine than his colleague Hunter Biden but – as an ex-ambassador and a former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism centre under George W Bush – he is likely to have lots of useful contacts in Washington.

Zlochevsky’s last public appearance was in June 2016 at a Burisma-organised alternative energy forum, co-hosted in Monaco by Prince Albert II, who made the keynote speech. Photographs of the event showed Hunter Biden posing with various comfortably retired ex-politicians, wearing a blue suit twinned with highly-polished brown shoes. Zlochevsky was tanned and healthy in an open-necked shirt, while a more formally dressed Prince Albert placed a solicitous hand on his back.

Perhaps there should be witnesses in the Trump impeachment trial in the Senate, in fact there should be 200-300 of them and not only should Hunter Biden and the whistleblower be among the witness list, but Eric Holder needs to be on the hot seat too.

Complicated…right?

 

Context of US Aid to Ukraine, Schiff’s Team is Teeming with Deception

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Ever heard of an organization called U.S. Ukraine Foundation? The organization has Directors and and Advisory Board that lobbies Congress and does a good job at that apparently. The organization calls itself a ‘do-tank’ with headquarters in Washington DC., that works for fostering a legitimate human rights, democratic government that enhances Ukraine’s stability and place in the community of nations.
After Russia invaded Ukraine five years ago, reliance of monetary and military aid to Ukraine has been critical to fight back against Russian aggression on several fronts. Since 1992, the United States has given Ukraine more than $7.2 billion from many domestic agencies that include: the Department of Defense, USAID, Energy, Agriculture, Justice and Commerce. Smaller U.S. agencies have also been quite involved in Ukraine including Peace Corps. All these resources are to ‘bolster civil society supporting the reform process where anti-corruption is a priority.
USAID, which operates under the U.S. State Department manages all assistance programs for Ukraine shoring up vulnerabilities of the country. Ukraine obviously does need help but control and oversight of U.S. assistance is tantamount. Seems since the Obama administration, it had none.

There actually is a USAID audit report for Ukraine found here.

Image result for usaid ukraine

Impeachment is hardly deserved and below proves that fact. Gotta wonder what the real posture of Col. Vindman actually was. Further, did anyone in Congress go back and read congressional records as they related to Ukraine or tap the State Department, Ukraine desk for a summary of diplomatic efforts including corruption and what our own Justice Department or FBI did and is doing still for the benefit of Ukraine? Ah perhaps Lev Parnas is part of that eh?
Published on the website for this organization is the following in part:

The Ukrainian American community and other friends of Ukraine have long advocated for U.S. government aid and for a few years in the mid-1990s, under the Clinton administration, Ukraine was one of our largest recipients of bilateral aid. Some readers may recall that the current Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, championed Ukraine assistance in his capacity as chairman of the relevant appropriations subcommittee, and was sometimes referred to as “Mr. Ukraine” at the time. He enjoyed bipartisan support back then, and, thankfully, assistance to Ukraine continues to enjoy strong bipartisan support to this day, despite the difficult budget climate.

U.S. assistance, which increased substantially following Russia’s invasion, was backed by the Obama administration and funded by Congress. With the proposed severe cuts in foreign assistance called for by the Trump administration, there were fears that Ukraine aid, too, would be affected. Based on my sources, it looks as if assistance to Ukraine for Fiscal Year 2018 will most likely be maintained at levels similar to the last two fiscal years – underscoring the importance that the United States attaches to Ukraine. And while there is always room for improvement in how it is implemented, U.S. assistance has been substantial and vital to Ukraine – a good use of taxpayer money. Friends of Ukraine, including the Ukrainian American community, need to make sure that this practical, consequential support for Ukraine remains a priority for the United States.

The importance of those two paragraphs is the fact that President Trump questioned foreign aid to Ukraine long before the phone call with the newly elected Ukraine president Zelensky, in fact going back to the summer of 2018. When President Trump inquired what other countries were doing on behalf of Ukraine was and is the right question then and now. It is no wonder aid was held given facts, context, conditions and future plans and estimates for the country.

Focusing on Pending Ukraine-Related Action on Capitol Hill August 2018: Members of the Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN), the Ukrainian-American community, the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation and other supporters of Ukraine met on August 7th to discuss pending and future legislative action on Capitol Hill regarding Ukraine.

The lobbying on The Hill went into overdrive and members of Congress visited by members of the organization clearly know/knew of all conditions in Ukraine and how sending U.S. taxpayers dollars to the struggling country should be circumspect because of human-trafficking, financial corruption, military hostilities and Ukraine military doctrine effectiveness along with split loyalties within the Ukraine government, security challenges and reforms across the board.

Putin to Lead Russia for Life?

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In his annual state-of-the-nation speech on Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shook up the country and its political class by calling for constitutional changes that would give him a new path to holding onto power after his current — and, in theory, last — term ends in 2024.

With that, the entire cabinet, led by a long-serving Putin ally, Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, abruptly resigned. The head of the Federal Tax Service, Mikhail V. Mishustin — a little-known but skilled technocrat — will become the next prime minister.

The spate of moves offers some clues about Mr. Putin’s plans and priorities, but also raises questions about what may lie ahead for the Russian president. Here are answers to some of them.

Mr. Putin with Prime Minister Dmitry A. Medvedev last year. Credit…Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Putin’s hold on power in Russia is unrivaled, built up over the last 20 years in his posts as president and prime minister.

But Russia’s Constitution bars a president from serving more than two consecutive terms. To maintain his grip on power, as he has hinted he intends to do, Mr. Putin needs to find a way to engineer a leadership transition that will allow that to happen.

To that end, it appears, he has proposed changes to the Constitution that would weaken the presidency while increasing the sway of the Parliament and the prime minister.

He said, for example, that the president should in the future be required to accept the prime minister’s cabinet appointments. This and other changes could give Mr. Putin more leeway to find a position in which he can maintain power without violating the Constitution.

That’s not entirely clear.

Mr. Putin could become prime minister again, taking advantage of the position’s expanded influence. Alternatively, some analysts have pointed to a leadership maneuver engineered by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the longtime president of Kazakhstan, another former Soviet republic.

In 2018, Mr. Nazarbayev increased the power of Kazakhstan’s Security Council and made himself its chairman for life. When he resigned from the presidency last year in favor of a handpicked successor, his position at the helm of the Security Council allowed him to hold on to key levers of power.

On Wednesday, offering few details, Mr. Putin dangled the possibility of a similar move in Russia. The State Council — currently an advisory body made up of the governors of Russia’s regions — should have its “status and role” fixed in the Constitution, he said.

That quickly raised speculation among Russian political analysts that a revamped State Council could become a vehicle for Mr. Putin to maintain power if he relinquishes the presidency, particularly over the military and foreign policy.

Despite Mr. Putin’s immense sway, he’d be taking a risk if he simply declared himself president for life.

Mr. Putin served two consecutive presidential terms from 2000 to 2008, and then became prime minister. His announcement in 2011 that he would seek the presidency again, followed by parliamentary elections widely seen as rigged, helped trigger Russia’s biggest street protests since the 1990s.

This time around, Mr. Putin looks determined to orchestrate his next move in a slow-motion fashion that’s less likely to produce a backlash. The changes to the Constitution he called for give him several options to hold on to power — while affording him as much as four years’ time to set his course.

“Our society is clearly calling for change.” Mr. Putin said at the beginning of his speech on Wednesday.

Indeed, over the last year, Russia has seen its most vigorous street protests since the anti-Putin rallies of 2011 and 2012.

Polls show that Russians increasingly distrust pro-Kremlin TV channels and are getting their news on the internet, which remains largely uncensored.

And the Kremlin’s appeal to patriotism — so effective after Mr. Putin’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 — has lost its visceral power, overshadowed by Russia’s economic problems.

All of this means that the Kremlin is likely to portray the resignation on Wednesday of Mr. Medvedev and every cabinet minister as a sign that Mr. Putin has heard Russians’ demand for change.

While Russians do increasingly blame Mr. Putin for their ills, many more blame the bureaucrats below him. Mr. Putin’s approval rating has fallen to 68 percent from 82 percent in April 2018, an independent pollster, Levada, says. But Mr. Medvedev is in far worse shape, with an approval rating of 38 percent.

Mr. Putin’s choice of Mr. Mishustin seems to reflect his concerns about Russia’s declining standard of living, which has contributed to spasms of unrest over the last year.

Mr. Mishustin is widely seen as one of Russia’s most effective technocrats. He has headed Russia’s Federal Tax Service since 2010, modernizing a notoriously ineffective and corrupt tax-collecting system. The Financial Times dubbed the computerized, real-time approach to taxation he developed as “the taxman of the future.”

In his early years as president, Mr. Putin built his popularity on soaring living standards, which coincided with a period of rising oil prices. But with lower oil prices and Western sanctions, those steady improvements are now a thing of the past. Disposable incomes are still effectively below what they were in 2013.

Mr. Putin also used his state-of-the-nation speech to make a raft of pledges to improve Russians’ daily lives. For example: free hot meals for all elementary school students from grades one through four.

Unlike Russia’s more prominent economic reformers, the 53-year-old Mr. Mishustin has no political base of his own, reducing the likelihood that he might use the powers of his new office to chip away at Mr. Putin’s authority.

Not at all.

In theory, at least, Russia’s system of governance echoes that of France — a powerful presidency checked by an independent judiciary, by parliament and by a cabinet of ministers headed by a prime minister with his own locus of authority.

But Mr. Putin has steadily subsumed the authority of all those institutions, often justifying crackdowns on political pluralism as necessary in the face of external threats. He reprised that language in his speech on Wednesday, signaling that no political thaw is in the offing.

“Russia can be and can remain Russia only as a sovereign state,” he said.

That was an allusion to Mr. Putin’s frequent charge the West is fomenting political opposition to undermine Russian sovereignty.

To drive home the point, Mr. Putin proposed a constitutional amendment that offered the day’s clearest statement of how he views his successor: Russia’s future president, Mr. Putin said, may not ever have had citizenship or permanent residency in another country.

Daily Gas Pump Prices are Based on the Strait of Hormuz

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Experts said Iranian officials are trying to demonstrate to the U.S. and its allies that the Islamic Republic is able to push back and gain leverage against the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policy, which intensified after President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the landmark nuclear deal in May 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions, making it difficult for Iran to export oil, the foundation of the country’s economy.

China, Russia and leading Western European countries have sought ways around the U.S. sanctions, but it has been difficult to bypass them.

“The message that Iran is sending is that it is capable of making international waters unsafe not just for the U.S., but for international trade,” said Reza H. Akbari, a program manager and Iran expert at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

These are the reasons for oil tanker seizures and attacks by Iranian limpet mines.

Tensions between the West and Iran bubbled to a historic height in recent days after the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and Tehran bombed two Iraqi bases that housed US troops.

They have sparked fears of wider US-Iran attacks in the greater region, which could take place in and around the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow body of water linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, which feeds into Arabian Sea and the rest of the world.

strait of hormuz jan 2020

A satellite image of marine traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz as on January 9, 2020.MarineTraffic.com

While Iran’s leaders claim to have “concluded” their revenge for Soleimani’s death — and President Donald Trump appears to believe them — many regional experts and diplomatic sources say Iran could unleash other modes of attack, which include unleashing allied militias to disrupt the Middle East.

One strategy could include Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, which would stop oil tanker traffic, disrupt global oil supply, and send prices shooting up.

Here’s what you need to know about this valuable strait.

Some 21 million barrels of crude and refined oil pass through the strait every day, the EIA said, citing 2018 statistics.

That’s about one-third of the world’s sea-traded oil, or $1.2 billion worth of oil a day, at current oil prices. The majority of Saudi Arabia’s crude exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning much of the oil-dependent economy’s wealth is situated there. Saudi state-backed oil tanker Bahri temporarily suspended its shipments through the strait after Iran’s missile strikes in Iran, the Financial Times reported.

Last June Iran shot down a US drone flying near the strait, and a month later a US warship — USS Boxer — also shot down an Iranian drone in the same area.

Shortly after Iran’s drone attack, President Donald Trump questioned the US’ presence in the region, and called on China, Japan, and other countries to protect their own ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump noted that much of China and Japan’s oil flow through the strait, and added: “So why are we protecting the shipping lanes for other countries (many years) for zero compensation.”

While a large proportion — 76% — of oil flowing through the chokepoint does end up in Asian countries, the US still imports more than 30 million barrels of oil a month from countries in the Middle East, Business Insider has reported, citing the EIA.

That’s about $1.7 billion worth of oil, and 10% of the US’s total oil imports per month.

Iranian leaders, who have also vowed retaliation for the death of Soleimani, have threatened to close down the strait multiple times in the past.

If Iran followed through with these threats, it would likely cause huge disruption to the global oil trade. As the strait is so narrow, any sort of interference in tanker traffic could decrease the world’s oil supply, and send prices shooting up.

Global oil prices have proven vulnerable to tensions between Iran and the West before. After the Trump administration said in April 2019 it would stop providing sanctions waivers to countries who purchase Iranian oil, prices rose to their highest level since November the year before, Axios reported.

How likely is Iran to shut down the strait?

Iran is more likely to disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz than to engage in an all-out conventional war with the US, which is much stronger militarily.

But doing so comes with high costs to Iran.

To close down the entire strait, Iran would have to place at least 1,000 mines with submarines and surface craft along the chokepoint, security researcher Caitlin Talmadge posited in a 2009 MIT study. Such an effort could take weeks, the study added. (taken in part from here)