Numbers Even Backdoor to Front-door entry into U.S.

Posted on July 12, 2015July 12, 2015 by Denise Simon

There are almost 20 different visa applications forms, each for unique circumstances to enter into the United States. Some are easier and more likely used than others for fast processing and requiring less background investigations.

The State Department outsources the processing of visas and in some visa classifications there are annual quotas that can be finessed by waivers and or exemptions. There are even legal cottage industry members that handle the complex legal process with enough money, they know how to skirt the process and hasten the approval process.

Now, that these people have front-door entry, who are they and what happens if they overstay the visa time limit? Short answer is not much.

In March of 2012, John Cohen, the Deputy Counter-terrorism Coordinator for DHS provided written testimony to the House Sub-committee on DHS which fully explains the convoluted process and lack of resources. In the same hearing, Peter T. Edge, Deputy Executive Associate Director of DHS Investigations for ICE offered his written testimony on the scope of fraud of the visa program. This was in response to Amine el-Khalifi, an individual who allegedly attempted to conduct a suicide attack at the U.S. Capitol, is not the first time terrorists have exploited the visa process. In fact, el-Khalifi follows a long line of terrorists, including several of the 9/11 hijackers, who overstayed their visa and went on to conduct terror attacks.

Of particular note, the Visa Security program of 2002 is the basis of law today and reads in part from 2012 statistics:

The Visa Security Program
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assist in the identification of visa applicants who seek to enter the United States for illegitimate purposes, including criminal offenses and terrorism-related activities. The visa adjudication process often presents the first opportunity to assess whether a potential nonimmigrant visitor or immigrant poses a threat to the United States. The Visa Security Program (VSP) is one of several ICE programs focused on minimizing global risks.
Through the Visa Security Program (VSP), ICE deploys trained special agents overseas to high-risk visa activity posts in order to identify potential terrorist and criminal threats before they reach the United States. ICE special agents conduct targeted, in-depth reviews of individual visa applications and applicants prior to issuance, and recommend to consular officers refusal or revocation of applications when warranted. DHS actions complement the consular officers’ initial screenings, applicant interviews, and reviews of applications and supporting documentation.
ICE now conducts visa security investigations at 19 high-risk visa adjudication posts in 15 countries. In FY 2012 to date, VSP has screened 452,352 visa applicants and, in collaboration with DOS colleagues, determined that 121,139 required further review. Following the review of these 121,139 applications, ICE identified derogatory information on more than 4,777 applicants.

In 2012: The Obama administration doesn’t consider deporting people whose only offense is overstaying a visa a priority. It has focused immigration enforcement efforts on people who have committed serious crimes or are considered a threat to public or national security.

A House Homeland Security subcommittee is conducting an oversight hearing Tuesday. The panel’s chairwoman, Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., said El Khalifi “follows a long line of terrorists, including several of the 9/11 hijackers, who overstayed their visa and went on to conduct terror attacks.” His tourist visa expired the same year he arrived from his native Morocco as a teenager in 1999.

Going back to 2006, it was stated: “Many immigrants who are in the United States illegally never jumped a fence, hiked through the desert or paid anyone to help them sneak into the country. According to a recent study, 45 percent of illegal immigrants came here on a legal visa, and then overstayed that visa.” For the audio interview and Pew Research summary report, click here.

In closing, the LA Times proves the process on visa overstays with a few key cases.

* Laura Lopez first came to the U.S. at 15. She had joined a group of students from Guatemala who were visiting Orange County.

She remembers her first trip to Disneyland, eating at Taco Bell and strolling through the streets of downtown Santa Ana, with its impressive red sandstone courthouse.

“I felt so much energy,” said Lopez, now 30. “I looked around and saw that courthouse, and it was like something that spoke about freedom. I just didn’t want to leave.”

Lopez returned to Santa Ana two years later on a tourist visa. This time, she never left.

*Billy Lee came to California from South Korea with his mother when he was 5. Their trip included exploring Hollywood and spending time with relatives. “They told my mother they had great jobs, great schools — that this was a wonderful, open place to live and that we should take a risk and copy them,” said Lee, now 31.

So they stayed.

“Homeland Security Department officials estimate that up to 40% of the roughly 11 million people in the U.S. illegally arrived this way. Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “It happens all the time.”

Yet, he said, no system exists “to follow up on what these folks do once they’re in the States. There’s no process by which officials can track if someone stayed the proper amount of time or beyond that.” For more cases covered by the LA Times, click here.

In the Obama administration, nobody knows anything or for that matter really investigates or reports the numbers.

Nobody is sure how many people are in the U.S. on expired visas.

A long-standing problem in immigration enforcement — identifying foreigners who fail to go home when their visas expire — is emerging as a key question as senators and President Barack Obama chart an overhaul of immigration law. The Senate is discussing an overhaul that would require the government to track foreigners who overstay their visas. The problem is the U.S. currently doesn’t have a reliable system for doing this.

The Center for Immigration Studies is the best source for visa overstays, yet few listen.

The General Accountability Offices does offer some insight that is useful.

Lastly, the piece parts are offered here from a 2013 hearing.

Written testimony of ICE Homeland Security Investigations Executive Associate Director James Dinkins, CBP Office of Field Operations Acting Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Wagner, and NPPD Office of Biometric Identity Management Deputy Director Shonnie Lyon for a House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security hearing titled “Visa Security and Overstays: How Secure is America?”

In closing, the system is broken simply due to lack of will, enforcement and resources. Adjustments do need to be made especially when it comes to ‘visa waiver companies and countries, which should both be terminated.

Sinaloa Leader Escape Prison, 2nd Time Fast and Furious

Posted on July 12, 2015July 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

From testimony, reported by The Blaze: A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is.

It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.

The explosive allegations are being made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator.” He was extradited to the Chicago last year to face federal drug charges. More here.

The DEA went rogue and made a deal with the Sinaloa cartel to rat out other rival cartels to stem the violence in Mexico. Court testimony is found here.

From the BusinessInsider: Sinaloa, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.

Mexico’s president Nieto said Guzman will never escape again, yet today it is reported that El Chapo Guzman did just that through a tunnel in his cell bathroom. Nieto was in route to a visit to France as this escaped occurred.

NBC left out a few details but here is some background on El Chapo

Who Is ‘El Chapo?’: A Look at the Master of the Underground Tunnel

He’s known as “Shorty,” but perhaps “The Mole” would be more accurate.

That’s because Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman lives by his underground tunnels, frustrating all those who try to catch him.

The secretive and barely literate Mexican drug lord oversaw the explosion of subterranean networks used to smuggle massive amounts of narcotics across the U.S. border. After escaping prison in a laundry cart in 2001, the head of the Sinaloa cartel outfitted many his safe houses with secret doors that opened to tunnels leading to municipal sewer systems. He used one of them, accessed through the bottom of a bathtub, to escape authorities in February 2014.

Guzman was caught a few days later, an arrest that was hailed as a major victory in the international war on drugs. He ended up in a maximum security federal prison in southern Mexico, where he began plotting another underground escape.

On Saturday, he disappeared underneath the prison through an elaborate tunnel that must have taken months to build. Equipped with ventilation ducts, stairs and a motorbike on rails, the tunnel was about the same height as Guzman, who stands 5 feet 8 inches tall, and ran for 1,600 yards, emerging in a house under construction in a nearby neighborhood.

Guzman, believed to be about 60, has made a living of dodging death and evading capture while building the multibillion-dollar Sinaloa cartel into the world’s most powerful — and ruthless — drug trafficking organization. Tales of his avoiding bullets and handcuffs burnished a legend that is chronicled in folk song. Young people in his impoverished home state rally in support of him, despite his being responsible for the murders of thousands of Mexicans, including police officers and innocent civilians.

The son of a poor farmer, Guzman was born in Sinaloa and entered the local drug economy in the 1970s, after dropping out of school. He rose gradually within the Sinaloa cartel, and in the early 1990s took control.

In 1993, Guzman was arrested in Guatemala, and extradited to Mexico, where he was put in a maximum security prison. He continued to run the organization behind bars while maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, surrounded by associates and paid-off guards. In January 2001, some of them helped him slip out of the prison while hidden in a laundry cart.

As one of the world’s most sought-after fugitives, Guzman amassed even more power, taking over trade routes in South America and across the globe. He protected himself within a network of loyal workers, paid-off informers and corrupt officials. Despite his secrecy, however, Guzman enjoyed living the high life, including lavish dinners and a coterie of mistresses and prostitutes. He’s reportedly been married multiple times, his current wife being a former teenage beauty queen with American citizenship.

In addition to being wanted for his original 20-year prison sentence, Guzman is under federal indictment for drug trafficking in San Diego, Brooklyn, N.Y., El Paso, Miami and Chicago, which named him the city'[s first “public enemy No. 1” since Al Capone. The DEA announced a $5 million reward for his capture in 2005.

“The U.S. government stands ready to work with our Mexican partners to provide any assistance that may help support his swift recapture,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement Sunday after his escape.

As his power grew, Guzman relied on increasingly ingenious tactics to stay ahead of authorities. That included the use of trains, submarines, and tunnels.

By several accounts, including an examination by The New Yorker, Guzman helped invent the drug tunnel, commissioning his personal architect, Felipe de Jesus Corona-Verbera, to design several that burrowed beneath the U.S. border and emerged in warehouses on the other side. Together, they built dozens, some equipped with mini rail cars.

For years, American investigators tracked Guzman through wiretaps, and fed that information to Mexican officials. But Guzman always slipped their grasp at the last minute, including the Feburary 2014 escape from a home in the Sinaloan town of Culiacan. But authorities tracked him to another home, where they arrested him a few days later.

At the time, authorities boasted that the arrest was a milestone in the cross-border drug war. Then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called Guzman’s capture “a landmark achievement, and a victory for the citizens of both Mexico and the United States.”

Federal prosecutors in several cities said they wanted to have Guzman extradited to the United States to stand trial. But Mexican officials said they were confident they could keep him imprisoned at home.

Now, he’s gone. Again.

IRS Mafia Tactics Proven in Wisconsin Against Gov. Walker

Posted on July 12, 2015July 12, 2015 by Denise Simon

It begins with something in Wisconsin called the ‘Wisconsin Government Accountability Board’….what is in a name after all. How bad can it be?

Fire all of them and then prosecute all of them.

Alright, start here with the lawsuit against GAB and Kevin Kennedy.

From The Watchdog: Kevin Kennedy, the director of Wisconsin’s speech regulator integrally tied to the probe into dozens of conservative organizations, is a longtime “professional friend” of former IRS tax-exempt director Lois Lerner.

Lerner led the Obama administration’s IRS division accused of targeting conservative groups seeking 501(c)(4) nonprofit status. The Senate Finance Committee is looking into more than 6,000 emails from Lerner once thought to be lost.

The Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Thursday and headlined “Wisconsin’s friend at the IRS” reveals that Lerner and Wisconsin Government Accountability Board’s Kennedy were in contact between 2011 and 2013 — when the GAB assisted partisan prosecutors in investigating scores of conservatives and in raiding several of their homes.

“Emails we’ve seen show that between 2011 and 2013 the two were in contact on multiple occasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsin’s recall elections,” the op-ed notes.

“The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for dinner and kept in professional touch. ‘Are you available for the 25th?’ Ms. Lerner wrote in January 2012. ‘If so, perhaps we could work two nights in a row.’”

Kennedy’s GAB is Wisconsin’s political speech regulator. It oversees elections, campaign finance and lobbying laws.

It is also the subject of a state lawsuit that claims the agency manipulated state campaign finance laws and regulations in advising Democrat Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, his assistants and other prosecutors in their political probe.

The multi-year, multi-county investigation included pre-dawn, paramilitary-style raids at the homes of John Doe targets, including a raid that, according to a recent story in National Review, victimized a 16-year-old boy who was home alone at the time.

As Wisconsin Watchdog has reported, John Doe prosecutors conducted an extensive spying operation on conservatives described by one target as worse than the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Affidavits reviewed by Wisconsin Watchdog show prosecutors seeking and receiving warrants and subpoenas to tap into conservatives’ Internet service providers, some of whom still don’t know they were targets of the investigation.

The probe followed the partisan recall campaigns by unions and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin against Republican Gov. Scott Walker and several state senators. Walker and most of the senators survived.

But the secret John Doe investigation would drag Walker and his conservative allies through the political mud for years to come, thanks to many, many leaks.

POLITICAL SPEECH COP: Kevin Kennedy and the GAB are the subject of a state lawsuit alleging the agency manipulated campaign finance laws in an abusive investigation at taxpayers expense. Sources say top GAB officials have been deposed in the lawsuit.

Prosecutors confiscated more than 3 million records — a conservative count in a Wisconsin Watchdog analysis — of targets. The investigation has been based on the idea the groups illegally coordinated with Walker’s campaign during the recall campaigns. Multiple courts have rejected that theory, including the John Doe presiding judge, who tossed out several subpoenas because they had failed to show evidence a campaign finance crime had been committed.

While all of this was going on, the IRS was increasing its harassment of conservative nonprofits.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Lerner’s lawyer declined to comment. Kennedy, in an email, told the newspaper “Ms. Lerner is a professional friend who I have known for 20 years.” He declined to say more.

The opinion piece notes:

“In an email exchange in July 2011, Mr. Kennedy sent Ms. Lerner an article in the Racine Journal-Times on the declining relevance of public campaign financing amid more private and ‘special interest’ money. ‘Note the last paragraph where the paper supports more transparency,’ Mr. Kennedy writes to Ms. Lerner. ‘The Legislature has killed our corporate disclosure rules.’”

John Doe investigators asked the IRS to look into a conservative group that was a primary target of the probe, sources told the Journal.

“The IRS doesn’t appear to have followed up, but the request shows Wisconsin prosecutors saw their pursuit of independent groups as part of a common agenda with national Democrats,” the op-ed states.

That’s the point, the Wall Street Journal contends. John Doe transcends Wisconsin, with interconnections revealing “the use of tax and campaign laws to limit political speech was part of a larger and systematic Democratic campaign.”

President Obama laid it all out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010 when he blasted the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

“Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, (Republicans) are being helped along this year, as I said, by special interest groups that are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on attack ads. They don’t even have to disclose who’s behind the ads,” Obama said.

“Conservative nonprofits like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce were later subpoenaed and bound by secrecy orders as their fundraising all but ceased,” the opinion piece notes.

“Liberals worked together to turn the IRS and the GAB into partisan political weapons.”

Earlier this week, Judicial Watch reported that newly discovered Department of Justice and IRS documents show there was “an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity.”

Eric O’Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, told Wisconsin Watchdog the Wall Street Journal has “exposed a whole new dimension of government abuse.”

“The permanent government does not believe that we, the people, are capable of governing ourselves. They want to control everything,” said O’Keefe, who is suing the GAB for its costly investigation.

Part 217 of 218 in the series Wisconsin’s Secret War

Many more details here. Consider: collusion, fraud, RICO, financial terror, targeting, who gave the orders and where it all leads. Imagine that the IRS got with the FBI and the DoJ to investigate and prosecute conservatives too. These are White House mafia tactics…..there is no dispute.

WH Visitor Logs Shows the Pro-Iran U.S. Posture

Posted on July 10, 2015July 10, 2015 by Denise Simon

In 2013, NAIC, National Iranian American Council was ordered to pay almost $200,000 due to failure to disclose and comply with lobby rules.

Trita Parsi, the founder of NAIC has frequent access to the White House and exploits that access for the mission to lift sanctions on Iran of which has been most effective during the talks of the P5+1.

Parsi has been at it a very long time and he drafted this fancy document on the sanctions and in full defense of Iran. “Never Give In, Never Give Up”

Parsi also has an interesting

In part from FreeBeacon:

“Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been accused of lobbying on the regime’s behalf, has met a handful of times with the White House between 2013 and 2014, according to visitor logs.

Parsi and NIAC have been key advocates for the administration’s diplomacy with Iran and have been present during various rounds of negotiations.

Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund—a group that has been at the center of attempts to try to sell a deal with Iran—is also listed on White House visitor logs.

Cirincione’s organization has been a key funder of organizations such as NIAC and J Street as they seek to promote a final nuclear deal with Iran and the administration’s efforts.

Ploughshares has been identified in reports as working on a “behind the scenes strategy” with senior White House officials such as Ben Rhodes to help promote the deal.

Plougshares has spent more than $7 million funding organizations and experts that have publicly defended the administration’s concessions to Iran in talks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The Ploughshares coalition includes a former Iranian government spokesman, the liberal Jewish organization J Street, and a group of former American diplomats who have held private talks with Iranian government officials,” the Journal reported in March.

In the case of Sfard, a White House NSC official declined to provide further details about his meeting or comment when contacted by the Free Beacon. In addition to the PLO, Sfard also has worked with Breaking the Silence, a far-left group that seeks to launch war crimes charges against Israelis and those in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to a dossier published by NGO Monitor, which tracks anti-Israel groups and actors.”

The lobby work begins on lawmakers on the missiles

Pro-Tehran Lobby Demands Iran Be Given Ballistic Missiles

Group pushing Iranian arms on Capitol Hill by Adam Kredo

FreeBeacon:

A pro-Tehran advocacy group long accused of concealing illicit ties to the Iranian regime is lobbying Congress in support of a demand that America repeal a United Nations arms embargo limiting the Islamic Republic’s ability to stockpile arms, including ballistic missiles, which could be used to carry nuclear payloads, according to a copy of an email sent by the group to various lawmakers.

The National American Iranian Council (NIAC), which has long been suspected of acting as Tehran’s lobbying shop in Washington, D.C., sent lawmakers an email on Friday asserting that “the Iranian arms embargo will need to be disposed of as part of a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.”

The email comes roughly a week after Iranian diplomats issued a similar demand during ongoing talks in Vienna between world powers and Iran. The new condition has been blamed for grinding negotiations to a halt, as diplomats blew through a third self-imposed deadline this weekend.

The NIAC email on ballistic missiles is in step with Iran’s potentially deal-breaking demands.

“The UN embargo imposed on Iran’s trade in certain conventional arms was specifically imposed by the Security Council to deal with the nuclear dispute,” wrote Tyler Cullis, who is identified in the email as a legal fellow at the council.

Cullis writes: “Starting with [United Nations Security Council resolution] UNSCR 1747 in 2007, the Security Council imposed a ban on Iranian arms exports. The Council followed up this export ban with more comprehensive restrictions on the sale to or from Iran of certain heavy-weapons, including battle tanks, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and the like in 2010 via UNSCR 1929.”

NIAC maintains that such restrictions should be lifted as part of a nuclear agreement, even though they are not specific restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.

A range of sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon—including analysts, former intelligence officials, as well as current and former congressional staffers—challenged both the legal analysis and motivation of NIAC’s letter to lawmakers.

Critics remain concerned that such a move could legally allow Iran to funnel arms to terror groups such as Hezbollah and militias in Yemen.

One former congressional staffer involved in the crafting of sanctions legislation over the years dismissed NIAC’s claims as unfounded and flatly misleading.

“NIAC is the same group that lobbies Congress to defund human rights and democracy promotion programs in Iran for fear of undermining the mullahs,” said one former senior Senate aide with intimate knowledge of Iran sanctions. “What the Iran lobby doesn’t want you to know is that UN Security Council sanctions are directly tied to the dismantlement of Iran’s ballistic missile program—a key element being excused from the P5+1 agreement.”

One senior congressional aide familiar with efforts to sanction Iran said NIAC is widely viewed as Tehran’s in-house lobbying shop.

NIAC has absolutely no credibility on Capitol Hill, where that organization is viewed as a de facto lobbyist for the Iranian regime,” said the senior congressional staffer.

“To cite the latest example, for many months NIAC has opposed the inclusion of ballistic missile limitations or anything else non-nuclear in the negotiations with Iran, yet today NIAC sent an email to congressional staff that actually backs up the Iranian regime’s ridiculous, last-second demand that the United Nations drop its non-nuclear arms embargo on Iran,” the source said.

Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser for George W. Bush, said the Iranian arms embargo will become even more critical in future years.

“The arms embargo on Iran is even more critical today than when it was imposed in 2007 in UN Security Council Resolution 1747,” Abrams explained. “Since then Iran has helped kill or maim thousands of Americans in Iraq, has sent more and more arms to Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria, has intervened in Yemen, and now has an expeditionary force of Revolutionary Guard troops fighting in Iraq and Syria.”

“To end the arms embargo now would be throwing gasoline in a fire: the flames would spread. It is dangerous and absolutely against U.S. national security interests to lift the arms embargo on Iran,” Abrams said.

One Western source present in Vienna and apprised of the talks cast doubt on NIAC’s legal analysis concluding that the arms embargo was only aimed at Iran’s nuclear program.

“The Security Council had moved beyond Iran’s nuclear work before the first arms embargo was even imposed,” said the Western source. “UNSCR 1737 sought ‘to constrain Iran’s development of sensitive technologies in support of its nuclear and missile programs.”

“Subsequent resolutions reaffirmed that language, and ultimately UNSCR 1929 demanded an arms embargo ‘until such time as the Security Council determines that the objectives of these resolutions have been met,” the source explained.

NIAC has long been viewed as a pro-Tehran lobbying outfit that tows the regime’s line in the halls of Congress.

In 2012, NIAC was ordered to pay reparations to an Iranian dissident who sued the organization for allegedly concealing its ties to the Iranian regime. NIAC was ordered to pay thousands to the defendant and was upbraided by a federal judge for hindering the discovery process in the case.

In recent years, NIAC has spearheaded lobbying efforts on the Hill to threaten lawmakers into supporting a deal with Iran that fully removes economic sanctions and permits the Islamic Republic to retain key aspects of its nuclear infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry announced late Friday that talks will continue through next week.

“We have a couple of different lines of discussion that are going on right now, but I think it’s safe to say that we have made progress today,” Kerry said in a statement to reporters. “The atmosphere is very constructive.”

Meet Vahid Alaghband, a Clinton Donor and Pelosi?

Posted on July 10, 2015July 10, 2015 by Denise Simon

I’m Iranian

Treasury Designates Iranian Commercial Airline Linked to Iran’s Support for Terrorism (2011)

Bloomberg: After completing the 1.1 billion euro ($1.4 billion) buyout of Germany’s Kloeckner & Co., the world’s largest independent steel distributor, Vahid Alaghband was a perfect candidate to address “cross-border mergers — challenges and pitfalls” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The Iranian-born founder and chairman of London-based steel trading company Balli Group Plc never got the chance. As he traversed the Zurich airport on Jan. 23, 2003, immigration police detained him on a German arrest warrant.

Without Alaghband’s knowledge, WestLB AG, Germany’s third-biggest state-owned bank and his partner in the Kloeckner takeover, had filed a criminal complaint almost a year earlier accusing him of unlawfully removing 120 million euros from Kloeckner.

Instead of starring in Davos, Alaghband, 53, spent the next 11 months in jail, first in Zurich and then in Duisburg, the German city where Kloeckner was based. In February 2003, the same prosecutor’s office that’s investigating Alaghband charged Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann with breach of trust for his role as a Mannesmann AG director in paying bonuses during Dusseldorf-based Mannesmann’s unsuccessful attempt to fend off a takeover by Vodafone Group Plc. In both cases, foreign acquirers bought German icons and suffered as a result.

Excerpt from I’m Iranian: Fifteen months after his release from jail, Alaghband is back to running Balli. Last year, the company increased revenue 50 percent to $2 billion as demand and prices for steel surged. Alaghband is busy as a member of the international council of the Asia Society, the New York-based organization that John D. Rockefeller founded to promote understanding between Asia and the U.S.

Alaghband says even if the Kloeckner acquisition ran afoul of German laws, he could have resolved the differences.

“In any cross-border merger, there are things that fall between the cracks,” he says. “When you have a plumbing problem, you fix it, not blow up the house.”

As for the circumstances that stripped the Iranian millionaire’s fortune in the 1970s and then allowed him to rebuild, only to have his freedom and his property seized again, Alaghband says: “I had lost my assets in Iran once. I didn’t think it was going to happen again in Germany, in the middle of Europe.”

Now the real read begins

Clinton Foundation Donor Violated Iran Sanctions, Tried to Sell 747s to Tehran

From the DailyBeast:

Vahid Alaghband’s firm did business with an Iranian airline accused of shipping guns and troops to Syria.

An Iranian businessman accused by the U.S. government of violating sanctions on Tehran donated money to the Clinton Foundation, The Daily Beast has confirmed.Vahid Alaghband’s Balli Aviation Ltd., a London-based subsidiary of the commodities trading firm Balli Group PLC, tried to sell 747 airplanes to Iran, despite a federal ban on such sales. The company pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal information in 2010. In its plea agreement with the Department of Justice, Balli Aviation agreed to pay a $2 million criminal fine, serve five years corporate probation, and pay an additional $15 million in civil fines. The hefty sum was “a direct consequence of the level of deception used to mislead investigators,” Thomas Madigan, a top Justice Department official, said at the time.

Alaghband is one of an array of questionable actors who’ve been found in recent months to give to the Clinton Foundation. The gifts – from foreign governments with human rights violations like Qatar, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and China as well as FIFA, soccer’s corrupt governing body – have complicated Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president and raised questions as to whether these entities were trying to curry favor with the former Secretary of State.

But Alaghband stands out from the rest, because the beneficiary of his firm’s deals with Tehran was an Iranian airline accused by the U.S. government of working with the regime’s foreign intelligence operatives and shipping arms and troops to Syria. Plus, if an agreement between Iran and the world’s major powers is concluded in the coming days – as is widely expected – operators like Alaghband could stand to benefit. Hillary Clinton will be put in the awkward position of either defending the act of the Obama administration in which she once served or criticizing the culmination of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement effort, which her State Department began.

One of the two counts against Balli Aviation was that it “conspired to export three Boeing 747 aircraft from the United States to Iran,” according to a Justice Department statement, without first obtaining the necessary export licenses from the U.S. government. The company then used its Armenian airline subsidiary to buy the 747s with financing obtained from Mahan Air, Iran’s largest private airline, which is thought by the State Department to be controlled by former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In 2011, the Treasury Department sanctioned the airline for “providing financial, material and technological support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF),” or the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Republic’s praetorian military division, now heavily active in both Syria and Iraq. At the time, the Treasury Department accused the Qods Force of “secretly ferrying operatives, weapons and funds” on Mahan flights.

On the Clinton Foundation website, Alaghband’s company is listed as a donor in the $10,001 to $25,000 bracket. Moreover, on the website for Balli Real Estate, a property investment and development subsidiary also based in the UK, his personal bio describes him as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

This affiliation, along with his donation to the Foundation, came as a surprise to Alaghband.

“I am not a member of the Clinton Global Initiative,” he told The Daily Beast from London. “I attended a few meetings. The last meeting was 10 years ago. I don’t recall having ever made a contribution.” Asked why he was listed as a member of the CGI on his own corporate website, he said: “I haven’t seen this website recently. If attending a few meetings makes you a member, I don’t know.”

A source familiar with the Clinton Foundation told The Daily Beast that “Vahid Alaghband was never a member of CGI in a personal capacity.” However, the source added, “In 2007, Balli Group paid a onetime CGI membership fee and they designated him as their delegate to the meeting.”

Alaghband did recall giving money to another influential organization — the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Brookings Institution. The donation he gave was to Brookings’ former Middle East policy shop, the Saban Center, which had been named for its major benefactor, the Israeli billionaire Haim Saban. (Staunchly pro-Israel, Saban is also, coincidentally, an avowed supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.)

In 2007, Alaghband offered to give a $900,000 donation to run for three years to Brookings via the U.S.-based PARSA Foundation, “the first Persian community foundation in the U.S. and the leading Persian philanthropic institution practicing strategic philanthropy and promoting social entrepreneurship around the globe,” as the foundation’s website describes it.

Keynote Speaker Pelosi

Emails obtained in the discovery process of a separate libel case show that Alaghband, who had already donated at least $50,000 to PARSA, initially intended to make a pass-through donation via the foundation to Brookings.

But Alaghband says that he never ultimately used PARSA as a conduit for his donation; instead made his contribution directly to the Saban Center. He claims that the amount given was “far less” than $900,000 but declined to specify how much. Furthermore, he insisted, the money wasn’t ear-marked for any specific project or research use. “Our donation went to the Saban Center and they had full discretion as to what to do with it,” Alaghband said. “Martin Indyk had discretion over the use of the funds.”

Indyk, who headed the Saban Center from 2002 to 2013, is today the Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy at Brookings. He also served— twice—as U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration. In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry named Indyk the U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

“When we took the donation nobody knew there were any problems with Alaghband,” David Nassar, the Vice President of Communications for Brookings, told The Daily Beast, speaking on behalf of the think tank. Nassar also specified that the donation came from Balli Group bank accounts, not from Alaghband’s personal accounts. (Full disclosure: Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman previously did work as a non-resident fellow in Brookings’ foreign policy division.)

A former Brookings staffer with direct knowledge of the donation told The Daily Beast said that, on the contrary, Alaghband’s problems with the U.S. government were known to the think tank at the time and that the money helped finance the work of Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy advisor and Republican advocate of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.

Nassar told The Daily Beast that the suggestion that Alaghband’s donation was intended to bolster Maloney’s pro-rapprochement research was false. “The money was general funding for the Persian Gulf Initiative and not directed at any particular issue or any particular scholar,” he said. Nevertheless, the Persian Gulf Initiative was a program run by the Saban Center and Maloney worked on it.

Maloney is married to Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar who served in the Obama White House in 2009 and who, during that period, was one of the lead advocates of engagement with Tehran.

Since leaving the administration, Takeyh has emerged as a scathing critic of his former employer’s nuclear diplomacy. But in 2008, Maloney and Takeyh jointly published a 34-page white paper with the Saban Center titled, “Pathway to Coexistence: A New U.S. Policy toward Iran.” Arguing that the longstanding U.S. policy of containment “is actually obsolete because Iran is no longer an expansionist power,” they called not for a mere “policy shift but for a paradigm change” in Washington.

In many ways, the paper essentially forecasted what Obama administration’s approach to dealing with Iran, from the largely hands-off approach to Iran’s bloody 2009 Green Revolution to the present-day compromises on its nuclear program.

Alaghband’s legal troubles did not appear to affect his relationship with Brookings a year after Balli Aviation was hit by the U.S. Commerce Department with a temporary ban on his Iranian export business. In February 2009, he spoke at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, where Brookings has another Middle East center, this one bankrolled by the Qatari government. The forum, in fact, was organized by the Saban Center on behalf of that government.

Alaghband, for his part, insists that he did nothing wrong, despite his company’s guilty plea.

“The settlement [with the Justice Department] was one under which we did not have to accept liability. We just agreed to make a payment and settle out of court,” he told The Daily Beast. “We had to establish a compliance program and do all of those things. The transactions we were engaged in was reviewed by and subject to a legal to a legal opinion both in the UK and U.S. about the compliance of with sanctions. We proceeded on this basis.”

The settlement also represented the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.

PARSA’s second largest recipient of grants is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobby group close to the Iranian regime, which advocates an end to all U.S. sanctions on Iran. It received a total received a total of $591,500 from the foundation. Alaghband’s brother, Hassan Alaghband, who is also the CEO of the Balli Group, spoke at a organized conference in Tehran by one of NIAC’s founders in June 2007, at which he spoke about Western companies doing business in Iran and cited Balli’s client, Caterpillar, as a case study.

The Balli Group PLC had once been the world’s second-largest steel trader but it declared bankruptcy in 2013. A major reason for its folding? U.S. sanctions on Iran.