Breaking Sanctions with Cuba?

Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism, that is until the White House decided it was no longer.

Cuba supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions and opposed IAEA rebukes of secret Iranian enrichment sites. The two countries have banking agreements (Islamic Republic News Agency), economic cooperation and lines of credit ( FNA), and three-way energy-focused treaties with Bolivia (CSMonitor). Cuba and Iran hold regular ‘Joint Economic Commission’ meetings; the latest, in November 2009, further expanded bilateral trade and economic ties.

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The LIBERTAD Act, known as the Helms-Burton law as stated in the text, Fidel and Raul Castro cannot be part of the governing structure. Cuba has supported and provided safe haven to members of the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Both are U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). The Obama administration would therefore need to remove ETA and FARC from the FTO list, before removing Cuba from the state-sponsors-of-terrorism list.

The State Department terrorism report also makes references beyond ETA and FARC — most significantly that Cuba harbors several fugitives of U.S. justice. Terrorists, murderers, and other violent criminals are being protected, well fed, and supported by the Communist regime. Among these is a woman convicted of first-degree murder, Joanne Chesimard. Also known as Assata Shakur, she is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list for executing a New Jersey State Police trooper. With the help of the Black Liberation Army, she broke out of prison and found refuge in Cuba. According to the FBI, Chesimard “continues to profess her radical anti-U.S. government ideology.” Read more here from NRO. 
Anyone remember Cuba sending arms to North Korea that was captured by Panama? The United Nations even declared that Cuba broke the Arms Resolution.
Image result for cuba arms to north korea Image result for cuba arms to north korea CNN

Russia may build a large international airport in Cuba with investors from the United Arab Emirates, Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said in an interview with a newspaper in Abu Dhabi.

Manturov told newspaper The National that Russia is in discussions with Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala investment company to invest in building a hub in Cuba for flights to Latin America. Russia is ready to invest $200 million in the project. More here.

For a complete list and timeline of sanctions against Cuba, go here. Most of the sanction activity occurred in 2016 due to the Obama White House normalizing relations with the country, the Castro brothers and appeasing Russia. It must also be noted that Cuba has been propping up Venezuela for many years.

October 10, 2003: In response to a crackdown on human rights by the Castro regime, President George W. Bush announced a measure to tighten sanctions on the country, including increased border inspections of travelers and shipments between the two countries.

May 2009: The Obama administration lifted restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling and sending money to Cuba, also allowing U.S.-based telecommunications firms to seek business on the island. More here.

Why is any of this important? Who is who and breaking sanctions perhaps via the United Arab Emirates and shadow companies?

Some key names and positions:

Larry Glick, EVP, Strategic Development

Jason Greenblatt, Chief Legal Officer

Ron Lieberman, VP, Special Projects

Edward Russo, Lawyer and Director of Florida-Cuba Environmental Coalition, Inc.

Melissa Nathan, Spokesperson

Antonio Zamora, Managing Member at Cuba Portal, LLC, Investment Promoter and here

Bloomberg: Cuba has only one 18-hole golf course: the government-run Varadero Golf Club, about two hours east of Havana. Built on the 1930s estate of chemicals magnate Irénée du Pont, it was refurbished in the 1990s when the government turned to tourism to bolster its economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Du Pont’s former residence, Xanadú Mansion, serves as the clubhouse. On the third floor, a wood-and-marble bar offers sweeping views of the Florida Straits.

The course, expanded by Canadian architect Les Furber, is largely flat and littered with palm trees, and the greens fee runs $70. One reviewer described it as “inoffensive golf at its finest.” Yet lining up a putt on the 8th or 18th holes, both of which are right on the azure water, even a duffer can’t miss Cuba’s potential. With fertile soil, plentiful green coastline, and topography that spans plains, rolling hills, and rugged mountains, the island is a golf course architect’s Shangri-La.

On an afternoon late last year, the golfers teeing off included a group of U.S. executives from the Trump Organization, who have the enviable job of flying around the world to identify golf-related opportunities. The company operates 18 courses in four countries, including Scotland and the United Arab Emirates. It would like to add Cuba. Asked on CNN in March if he’d be interested in opening a hotel there, Donald Trump said yes: “I would, I would—at the right time, when we’re allowed to do it. Right now, we’re not.” On July 26 he told Miami’s CBS affiliate, WFOR-TV, that “Cuba would be a good opportunity [but] I think the timing is not right.”

That, however, hasn’t stopped some of his closest aides from traveling to Cuba for years and scouting potential sites and investments. The U.S. trade embargo, first established in 1962, prohibits U.S. citizens from traveling to the island. But over the years, the U.S. has carved out allowances for family visits, journalism, and other social causes. Most commercial activity is still forbidden, though, with a few exceptions, such as selling medical supplies or food. Golf isn’t on that list.

The Varadero Golf Club after its redesign.
Photographer: David Alan Harvey/Magnum Photos

Trump Organization executives and advisers traveled to Havana in late 2012 or early 2013, according to two people familiar with the discussions that took place in Cuba and who spoke on condition of anonymity. Among the company’s more important visitors to Cuba have been Larry Glick, Trump’s executive vice president for strategic development, who oversees golf, and Edward Russo, Trump’s environmental consultant for golf. On later trips, they were joined by Jason Greenblatt, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, and Ron Lieberman, another Trump golf executive. Glick, Greenblatt, and Lieberman didn’t respond to requests for interviews. Melissa Nathan, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, declined to answer a list of detailed questions.

In a series of telephone interviews, Russo confirmed he’s traveled to Cuba about a dozen times since 2011. Although he’s spearheading the company’s Cuban golf efforts, according to three people familiar with his role, Russo says these trips haven’t been on behalf of the Trump Organization. He says he’s taken at least one with Glick to go bird-watching and “check out some habitats”—activities that could conceivably qualify for exemptions to the travel ban.

Despite saying his trips with Trump executives were unrelated to the Trump Organization, Russo referred questions about those trips to Eric Trump, the 32-year-old son of the Republican presidential nominee and the company’s executive vice president for development and acquisitions, including golf. “In the last 12 months, many major competitors have sought opportunities in Cuba,” Trump said in an e-mailed statement. “While we are not sure whether Cuba represents an opportunity for us, it is important for us to understand the dynamics of the markets that our competitors are exploring.”

So which was it: a little birding? Keeping an eye on the competition? Maybe neither. According to Antonio Zamora, a well-known Cuban-American lawyer, who says he’s advised the Trump Organization on Cuba for about a decade, he and Russo visited a prospective golf site east of Havana in an area called Bello Monte several years ago.

Russo, Trump’s environmental consultant, enjoys Havana in a photo posted to Facebook in December.

Based in Miami, Zamora took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion but is now an outspoken critic of the U.S. sanctions. “An embargo that has been in place by a world power like the United States for 50 years and has not accomplished anything substantial is a disgrace,” Zamora writes in his 2013 book, What I Learned About Cuba By Going To Cuba. “This is not what great powers do.” He advises U.S. investors throughout Latin America. He’s circulated conceptual drawings of a Trump tower in Havana beside refurbished versions of the Hotel Neptuno-Triton, a dilapidated pair of 1970s buildings in the city’s business district, according to a person who saw them. (Zamora denies this.)

Zamora does say that he discussed with the Trump Organization the possibility of teaming up with a foreign company to give Trump a minority position in a venture. He says the deal failed to materialize. Zamora dismisses any legal concerns about this, saying he’s been to Cuba dozens of times for conferences, and that the U.S. Department of the Treasury doesn’t bother with these kinds of trips. “It’s a nonissue,” he says.

Farhad Alavi, managing partner of Akrivis Law Group in Washington and an adviser to companies on U.S. sanctions, says that, before 2015, exploring most potential deals in Cuba was “not even in the realm of what Treasury might have licensed.” He adds that “prior to 2015, a fact-finding trip by a U.S. person for a business activity, like building a golf course or hotel, was prohibited. It’s not under one of the categories of permissible travel to Cuba.”

In January 2015, the Treasury Department broadened an exception for “professional research.” That’s viewed by attorneys to encompass all sorts of potential investment activity—short of signing deals. To finalize an investment in Cuba requires a specific license from Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Marriott each announced in March they’d received authorization. (A Treasury spokeswoman says it is agency policy not to confirm or deny whether specific licenses have been issued.) Russo says the Trump Organization hasn’t secured one.

“Professional research” makes it easier for companies to explore business opportunities in Cuba, but it may not put the Trump Organization in the clear. Golf could be seen as promoting tourism, which remains illegal for U.S. companies. (President Barack Obama can’t change that—the tourism ban cannot be repealed without an act of Congress.) “If the Treasury Department believed that a new golf course in Cuba were intended to attract tourists from outside Cuba, then U.S. persons who meet in Cuba to develop the golf course could be charged with promoting tourism in Cuba,” says Richard Matheny, chair of the national security and foreign trade regulation practice group at Goodwin Procter in Washington. “This is unlawful under the current sanctions.”

“You can’t help but say, ‘Wow, here’s a hotel that could be renovated’

Golf’s history in Cuba is tinged with the absurd. In the 1950s the country staged tournaments that weren’t on the official PGA Tour but still attracted top players. In 1958 famed mobster Meyer Lansky—who’d been deported from the U.S. a decade earlier and was running a number of successful casinos in Cuba—set out to build the greatest hotel Havana had ever seen and further showcase the sport. With backing from Frank Sinatra, his Monte Carlo de La Habana was to feature a casino, a helicopter landing pad, and several glorious courses.

Lansky’s timing was spectacularly bad. A few weeks after construction started, Fidel Castro began his final rebel offensive against Cuba’s president, General Fulgencio Batista. On New Year’s Eve, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic. Castro rolled into Havana a few days later, and Lansky soon halted work. Castro declared golf “a game of the idle rich and exploiters of the people” and plowed over almost all the island’s courses. Even so, a series of early 1960s photographs shows Castro and his fellow revolutionary Che Guevara hamming it up with golf clubs. Castro was a baseball player, but Che took up golf as a young man and was rumored to have a 4 handicap. Last year a Cuban composer and an American librettist staged an opera in Havana based in part on those photos.

Guevara (left) and Castro (third from right) get in a round—and a photo op—in the early 1960s.
Photographer: Carlos Nunez/Prensa Latina/AP Photo

These days, Cuban officials actively promote golf development. A 200-page brochure published by the government late last year, Portfolio of Opportunities for Foreign Investment, features three hoped-for golf developments around the island, including two under contract with British and Chinese developers. The government also reportedly has a deal with Spanish airline Air Europa to develop a hotel and golf course at Playa El Salado, about 25 miles west of Havana. The Trump Organization has a particular interest in that development, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Although it’s not clear if Donald Trump is aware of his aides’ activities in Cuba—he didn’t return phone calls for this article—he’s demonstrated a familiarity with the rules for investing there. In his March interview with CNN, he said he wouldn’t enter Cuba “on the basis that you get a 49 percent interest, because right now you get a 49 percent interest.” The exchange was an apparent reference to Cuban law limiting foreign investors’ stakes in Cuban operations to less than 50 percent. Trump didn’t mention the more onerous U.S. regulations limiting investment in Cuba. He said he likely favored Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, “but I’d want much better deals than what we’re making.”

Encouraged by the White House’s loosening of regulations, plenty of other U.S. companies, including Airbnb, Google, PayPal, and Western Union, are gradually entering Cuba, but they must still carefully navigate the embargo. In late June, Starwood began managing a refurbished hotel in Havana’s main business district, the first U.S.-managed hotel in Cuba in 60 years. At a June event in Manhattan, a Starwood executive repeatedly referred to the “business travelers” who would be attracted by the property, apparently mindful of the perils of promoting tourism.

The repercussions of breaking the embargo are real. Violators are still being penalized, even for ventures only remotely connected to Cuba. In February, the Treasury Department alleged that two Cayman Islands subsidiaries of the energy-services company Halliburton had been involved in oil drilling off the shore of Angola, as part of a consortium in which the Cuban government held a 5 percent stake. Halliburton agreed to pay the U.S. $304,706 to settle the matter.

For the Trump Organization, there’s a further concern: the potential conflicts of interest posed by Trump’s far-flung business empire should he be elected president. In addition to his operations in the U.S., Trump operates in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Georgia, Israel, Turkey, and several other countries. Federal conflict-of-interest laws do little to prevent presidents from continuing to exert influence over their businesses—even as they exercise powers that could broadly benefit those interests.

“Make sure that whatever you do is absolutely legal in every way, and at some point, when it’s legal, I’d be interested in it”

Russo, 70, lives in Key West, Fla. He first encountered the Trump Organization in 2002. The former chairman of the town planning board in Bedminster, N.J., Russo helped Trump get authorization for his golf course there. Though he has no formal environmental training, he appears before local regulators around the country seeking approval for Trump projects.

On the phone, he’s friendly, a talker, but the first to admit his memory’s not the best. “I don’t remember last night,” he says. He was unsure how many times he and Glick, Trump’s golf chief, had traveled to Cuba. He says he took Glick on at least one trip to Cuba for some bird-watching.

“He was into it. And that’s the thing. I’m going to Cuba, I’m bringing people to Cuba. And I know people from Trump, I know people outside of Trump. So if somebody from Trump wanted to come with me, I don’t think that means they were representing anything having to do with the Trump Organization. They just enjoyed the environment, like you or I would.” Russo says that on his travels in Cuba, “you can’t help but say, ‘Wow, here’s a hotel that could be renovated,’ or, ‘This is a particular spot that would be perfect for this or perfect for that,’ and I would only hope that someday that the Trump Organization or other investors could develop something nice over there.”

Courtesy of Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Asked if he’s discussed Cuban opportunities with Donald Trump, Russo says: “I don’t remember exactly what our conversations were. But you would have to realize that talking to Donald Trump is, you know, it’s a very complicated experience.” He added later that Trump admonished him on Cuba to “make sure that whatever you do is absolutely legal in every way, and at some point, when it’s legal, I’d be interested in it.”

Glick, 49, is close to the Trump family and has worked for Trump for nine years. He recently traveled with Eric Trump, checking the status of the company’s developments in Bali, Dubai, Manila, and Aberdeen, Scotland, according to pictures posted by the two men on their Twitter accounts. He sits on the board of Eric’s foundation. Although he has no formal campaign role, he’s a fierce advocate for Trump’s White House run, excoriating Hillary Clinton on social media almost daily. He accompanied both adult Trump sons at the Republican National Convention during TV interviews. One person recalled a conversation with Glick after he returned from Cuba during which he described the company’s ambitions for golf on the island. Glick didn’t respond to requests for comment.

For his part, Russo gets that even now, pursuing golf in Cuba is problematic. “I would interpret golf as tourism, and therefore it can’t be done at this time,” he says. He maintains his dozen or so trips have all been environmental—and for birding—with only the most casual inquiries into golf-related properties. “Given the nature of the regulations and OFAC’s licensing trends, I would be quite surprised if it authorized multiple trips to Cuba for nonspecialist, nonexpert, random bird-watching,” says Alavi, the U.S. sanctions adviser.

In February 2013, Zamora, the Cuban-American lawyer, set up a nonprofit in Miami called the Florida-Cuba Environmental Coalition. Its directors include Russo and several advisers for investors in Cuba, including some who have consulted for the Trump Organization. Certain “environmental” projects qualified as one of the reasons U.S. citizens could travel to Cuba legally in 2013. When he’s asked about the nonprofit, Russo’s memory falters again. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a meeting. I didn’t even know my name was on that group,” he says.

Larry Glick, Ed Russo, Ron Lieberman, and companion on the links in Cuba in a photo posted on Facebook.

Another board member of the coalition, Dominic Soave, is a Havana-based business consultant from Canada who’s made introductions for Trump executives in Cuba, according to two people familiar with the matter. He’s also circulated a set of drawings of Havana with a Trump tower. “I really haven’t been advising anyone,” says Soave. He, Zamora, and two other directors say their nonprofit has taught sustainable fishing techniques to Cuban fishermen. The group has also promoted the Ernest Hemingway International Billfishing Tournament in Cuba, helping Americans get licenses to take part.

A second nonprofit, the American-Cuban Golf Association, was set up last year by Russo’s wife, Jennifer Hulse, and lists a residence in Key West as its address. The group lists her and her husband as directors. The organization’s third director is David Schutzenhofer, who runs the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster. Schutzenhofer did not return calls prior to publication.

Asked about the golf nonprofit, Russo first seems confused: “What is that supposed to do?” he asks. “Am I listed on that also?” He eventually explains that the group was intended to provide cross-cultural golf instruction: Cubans teaching golf to Americans and vice versa. “You should know that the organization was my idea and had nothing to do with the Trump Organization,” Hulse wrote in an e-mail. “One of my passions in life is golf, and I would like to find a way to bridge the distance between our countries through love of the game.”

A couple of Hulse’s cultural exchanges may have taken place toward the end of last year. Photographs and a video posted to Hulse’s Facebook page in December show her husband and Greenblatt, the Trump chief legal officer, at the Floridita restaurant in Old Havana, a favorite of Hemingway’s. Another set of pictures, posted a month earlier, shows Russo, Glick, Lieberman, and Soave listening to a live performance of Hotel California in the lobby of the Parque Central hotel in Old Havana.

Still another series finds the men playing at the Varadero course. One shot shows Russo teeing off, with Glick and Lieberman waiting their turn. Below the pictures of the Trump executives golfing, one Facebook friend asked: “How is the golf course?”

Hulse replied: “Not spectacular but it’s the only one in Cuba right now. Plans to build many more in the near future.”

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Clinton Campaign Refused FBI Request for Computer Logs

Details, dates and motivations are everything when it comes decisions to cooperate with the FBI or not. Seems the powerbrokers in the Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn did not trust the FBI either but one department within the agency is different from another.

Image result for clinton campaign headquarters brooklyn Reuters Image result for clinton campaign headquarters brooklyn

FBI warned Clinton campaign last spring of cyberattack

Yahoo: The FBI warned the Clinton campaign that it was a target of a cyberattack last March, just weeks before the Democratic National Committee discovered it had been penetrated by hackers it now believes were working for Russian intelligence, two sources who have been briefed on the matter told Yahoo News.

In a meeting with senior officials at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, FBI agents laid out concerns that cyberhackers had used so-called spear-phishing emails as part of an attempt to penetrate the campaign’s computers, the sources said. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and intrusive, the source said.

A second source who had been briefed on the matter and who confirmed the Brooklyn meeting said agents provided no specific information to the campaign about the identity of the cyberhackers or whether they were associated with a foreign government. The source said the campaign was already aware of attempts to penetrate its computers and had taken steps to thwart them, emphasizing that there is still no evidence that the campaign’s computers had actually been successfully penetrated.

Related reading: Also Hacked, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Related reading: Hey FBI, the Investigation into the DNC Hacking is Over Here

But the potential that the intruders were associated with a foreign government should have come as no surprise to the Clinton campaign, said several sources knowledgeable about the investigation. Chinese intelligence hackers were widely reported to have penetrated both the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008.

The Brooklyn warning also could raise new questions about why the campaign and the DNC didn’t take the matter more seriously. It came just four months after the DNC had also been contacted by FBI agents alerting its information technology specialists about a cyberattack on its computers, the sources told Yahoo News. As with the warning to the Clinton campaign, the FBI initially provided no details to the DNC.

As Yahoo News first reported this week, in early May a DNC consultant who was investigating Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s work for pro-Putin political figures in Ukraine alerted senior committee officials that she had been notified by Yahoo security that her personal email account had been targeted by “state-sponsored actors.” The DNC had already realized that it was the victim of a serious breach, but the red flag from the staffer prompted committee security officials to conclude for the first time that the suspected cyberhackers were likely associated with the Russian government.

By mid-May, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was telling reporters that US. Intelligence officials “already had some indications” of hacks into political campaigns that were likely linked to foreign governments and that “we’ll probably have more.”

In a talk at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday, Clapper said the U.S. government is not “quite ready yet” to “make a public call” on who was behind the cyberassault on the DNC, but he suggested one of “the usual suspects” is likely to blame. “We don’t know enough [yet] to … ascribe a motivation, regardless of who it may have been,” Clapper said.

Related reading: The Covert Russian Influence, Targets Europe/USA

Clapper’s comments come amid a mounting debate within the Obama administration about whether to publicly blame the Russian government for the cyberattack on the DNC. (A senior law enforcement official told Yahoo News that the Russians were “most probably” involved in the cyberattack, but cautioned that the investigation is ongoing.) On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, wrote President Obama calling for a stern response, asserting that if the accounts of Russian involvement are true, “It would represent an unprecedented attempt to meddle in American domestic politics.”

But Clapper is reportedly among a number of U.S. intelligence officials who have resisted calls to publicly blame the Russians, viewing it as likely the kind of activity that most intelligence agencies engage in. “[I’m] taken aback a bit by … the hyperventilation over this,” Clapper said during his Aspen appearance, adding in a sarcastic tone, “I’m shocked somebody did some hacking. That’s never happened before.”

The confirmation that the campaign was warned by the FBI as early as March of an attempted breach of its computers is a further indication that the scope of the possible Russian attack may have been far wider and extensive than the official DNC accounts.

The FBI’s request to turn over internal computer logs and personal email information came at an awkward moment for the Clinton campaign, said the source, familiar with the campaign’s internal deliberations. At the time, the FBI was still actively and aggressively conducting a criminal investigation into whether Clinton had compromised national security secrets by sending classified emails through a private computer server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. There were already press reports, to date unconfirmed, that the investigation might have expanded to include dealings relating to the Clinton Foundation. Campaign officials had reason to fear that any production of campaign computer logs and personal email accounts could be used to further such a probe. At the Brooklyn meeting, FBI agents emphasized that the request for data was unrelated to the separate probe into Clinton’s email server. But after deliberating about the bureau’s request, and in light of the lack of details provided by the FBI and the absence of a subpoena, the Clinton campaign chose to turn down the bureau’s request, the source said.

Obama: 16 Years of Progressivism, the Cover for Hillary

Things are never as they seem or as the rumors are told. It was never going to be a Biden Warren ticket according to Barack Obama, and the machinery is working that it wont be Trump Pence either. While there was a real hate and fractured relationship between Obama and Hillary, socialism, justice, rights and progressivism transcends relationships, hence the reason Bernie Sanders moved Hillary more to the left.

Below is quite a read and provides deep in sight into the operatives for which the Republicans may not be fully ready to combat. It is war, but a war that has millions of moving parts and thousands of people. This is actually terrifying and should be for the sake of voters and the future of America.

The summary below explains the FBI/DoJ decision on the email-server investigation, doesn’t it?

Stripes/CNN

Party of Two

Politico: How Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (with help from Elizabeth Warren) are trying to save the Democratic establishment.

Joe Biden wouldn’t take the hint, and Barack Obama wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer.

It was the fall of 2015, Donald Trump was rocketing up in the polls, Hillary Clinton was already wilting, and there was Obama’s vice president, occupying national center stage in an awkward public display of grief and political vacillation. Biden’s son Beau had died at age 46 that May, and the vice president was coping, it seemed, by throwing himself into a very open exploration of running against Clinton.

To Obama, this was a big, unwelcome problem. He had picked Biden for the ticket back in ’08 because he didn’t want him to run for president again, and besides, he honestly believed Biden would be crushed by a defeat he viewed as inevitable.

Still, this wasn’t personal for the president; it was business. Protecting his vulnerable accomplishments from the GOP wrecking ball and safeguarding his legacy have always been top priorities for Obama, and he had told friends as early as late 2014 that Clinton, for all her flaws, was “the only one” fit to succeed him. If Biden had come to him six months earlier—who knows? But it was much too late, and time to push Biden toward a graceful exit.

The choice was long understood by the president’s confidants. “My supposition always was that when the smoke cleared, he would be for Hillary,” David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign message guru and former White House adviser, told me. “It was just in the air, assumed.” Another former top Obama aide added, “After the 2014 midterms, when he could sense the end … it was like, ‘Who gives me the best chance to win?’”

One of the most important if hidden story lines of 2016 has been Obama’s effort to shape a race he’s not running in an anti-establishment environment he can no longer control. Over the past two years, he has worked quietly but inexorably on Clinton’s behalf, never mind the not-so-convincing line that he was waiting for the Democratic electorate to work its will. He has offered his former rival strategic advice, shared his top talent with her, bucked her up with cheery phone chats after her losses, even dispatched his top political adviser to calm the Clintons during their not-infrequent freakouts over the performance of their staff, according to one of the two dozen Democrats I interviewed for this story.

The one thing he wouldn’t do was endorse her before she cleared the field. And once, when things were darkest after Clinton’s devastating defeat to Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton’s staff urged him to break his pledge and rescue her—but his team refused, a senior Democrat told me.

Clinton’s view of Obama is more conflicted, people close to both politicians told me. She has repeatedly said, “I’m not running for Obama’s third term,” while taking pains to emphasize their differences on issues such as free trade and Syria. And she started the campaign committed to earning the nomination without his overt help.

But Clinton has been pulled closer to the president out of mutual self-interest and circumstance as the long primary season has worn on: Both Sanders’ unexpected success and Obama’s 80 percent-plus approval ratings with registered Democrats have forced the former secretary of state into a tighter embrace than she anticipated. Indeed, her campaign’s internal polling showed that one of the most effective attack lines against the socialist from Vermont was his 2011 remark that Obama’s moderate governing record was “weak” and a “disappointment” to progressives.

Clinton and Obama have something else in common: They both failed to anticipate seriously the rise of Trump. Early on, they were looking out for challenges from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sanders on the left, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as the most dangerous Republican in the field. But Trump’s ascent has only increased the urgency of the president’s last White House mission. “Mr. Trump will not be president,” Obama declared flatly back in February.

Obama’s ultimate goal in his final year has been strikingly ambitious, according to those I spoke with: not only blocking from office the birther who questioned his legitimacy as president, but preserving the Democratic Party’s hold over the presidency during an era of anti-establishment turbulence. Obama, always one to embrace a grand goal, talks in terms of creating “a 16-year era of progressive rule” to rival the achievements of Roosevelt-Truman and to reorient the country’s politics as a “Reagan of the left,” as one of his longtime White House advisers put it to me.

Which is why Obama first needed to stop Biden, and without seeming like he was trying to. As much as Obama loved him, Biden didn’t fit into the plan—especially when polls showed he would enter the race against Clinton with 20 percent of the Democratic vote.

So for most of last summer, Obama emphasized Biden’s weaknesses, gently jousting with him at their weekly lunches. He dispatched his de facto political director, Dave Simas, to Biden’s office to deliver a steady diet of polls showing a steep uphill climb, while a former Obama communications adviser presented Biden a plan that showed how tough it would be to attack Clinton, a woman Biden had previously praised in over-the-top terms. The most influential naysayer from the presidential orbit was David Plouffe, the disciplined brand manager and architect of Obama’s two White House campaign victories who remains Obama’s political emissary despite his day job on the board at Uber.

Eventually, Obama toughened his tone, telling Biden in a meeting that it was simply too late to run, a former White House aide told me.

But by the end of September, Biden still hadn’t gotten the message (though my sources insist he already was leaning toward no, at the advice of his still-grieving family), and Obama was getting itchy. Plouffe stepped up the pressure on his fellow Delawarean after months of gingerly trying but not succeeding to get Biden to step aside gently.

“Mr. Vice President, you have had a remarkable career, and it would be wrong to see it end in some hotel room in Iowa with you finishing third behind Bernie Sanders,” he said, according to a senior Democratic official briefed on the effort to ease Biden out of the race.

When Biden finally did tell Obama he wasn’t running, on the morning of October 21, the president comforted his veep—then sprinted into action like a man liberated. Within minutes, Obama ordered up a Rose Garden announcement—that same day. Although Obama saw it as a generous way to give his friend a chance to bow out on his own terms, several former White House staffers told me it also reflected Obama’s jitters; he wanted to lock in the decision before Biden had a chance to change his mind.

And with that, Obama and Clinton, rivals-turned-colleagues who had spent eight years perfecting the art of insider deals, assumed they had cleared their biggest hurdle in the Democratic primaries. But this was the 2016 election. Nothing would be easy.

In hindsight, of course, Biden’s departure didn’t end the threat to Clinton’s candidacy; it opened the way for a more disciplined and dangerous outsider to challenge her, a challenge made all the harder to recognize given that it came in the guise of a comically disheveled Vermont independent.

Biden himself signaled the problem at that awkward Rose Garden ceremony, sounding the very populist refrain that would soon bolster Sanders and rattle the best-laid plans of Obama and Clinton. Reflecting a party whose base has been racing left much faster than either the president or his designated successor had realized, Biden used his improvised speech that day—squinting into a low autumn sun as the boss stood nearby, arms folded—for a blunt discussion of all the progressive goals his boss had not achieved, calling for a reorientation of the party toward a simpler message of economic fairness. “We can’t sustain the current levels of economic inequality,” he said. “The political elite … the next president is going to have to take it on.”

A few blocks away, two unassuming barbarians at the gates were sitting in a bar across from the old Washington Post, after being stood up by a pair of reporters who had been diverted to the Biden announcement. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver and strategist Tad Devine gnawed their sandwiches and watched Biden on a flat-screen TV above the liquor bottles, astonished as he hit virtually every element of their own insurgent platform: free public college tuition, a nonpartisan pitch to independents and blue-collar Republicans, a call for purging big money from politics.

“Holy shit,” Devine said. “That’s our message. That’s what we’re running on.”

Everyone seemed to get it. Except Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

***

As intuitive as their alliance now seems, there is simply no modern precedent for the 2016 Obama-Clinton political partnership. In the words of one staffer in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, the pairing represents “the historic merger of two historic candidates.”

Americans really don’t like dynastic politics, or the perception that the presidency can be handed off between cronies like a borrowed lawn mower. Just ask Jeb Bush, who learned the hard way that there wasn’t much of a White House market for a third member of his family. The popular perception that the vice presidency (or a top Cabinet position, for that matter) is a steppingstone to the big job is also myth demolished by fact.

Over the past 50 years, two-term presidents have routinely endorsed their vice presidents, and it’s been a mess. Dwight Eisenhower was deeply skeptical of Richard Nixon’s executive judgment and he demurred from issuing a formal endorsement even after Nixon had cleared the field in early 1960. Ike felt no great obligation to rush his decision, and Nixon, a magnet for slights and political side-eye, was bitter, as was his wont, until interred. “If you give me a week, I might think of something,” was the president’s answer when asked to tick off his vice president’s accomplishments. Eisenhower bit his lip and in March 1960 finally offered a stiff endorsement of his party’s nominee.

George H.W. Bush succeeded in winning the White House where other veeps had flopped, and like Clinton, he did so in part by incorporating key elements of his predecessor’s political team. But his relationship with Ronald Reagan was never especially close—Bush had savaged the boss’ tax-cut plan as “voodoo economics” in 1980—and by 1988, the Gipper was diminished politically after the humiliating Iran-Contra scandal and physically fading. Reagan’s endorsement in May, after Bush dispatched televangelist Pat Robertson in a sluggish primary, came almost as an afterthought during a fundraiser for Hill Republicans.

“I’m going to work as hard as I can to make Vice President George Bush the next president of the United States,” Reagan intoned. The Times noted that Reagan had somehow managed to mispronounce his understudy’s name, “as if it rhymed with ‘rush.’”

Bill Clinton, who vanquished Bush after just one term in 1992, was the only recent president emotionally and politically invested in electing his vice president, but Al Gore, fearing a backlash against Clinton’s sex scandals and keen on asserting his independence, famously snubbed the happy warrior’s offer to barnstorm in battleground states on his behalf. Many of the Democratic staffers who worked that campaign (including Tad Devine) believe Gore might have prevailed in the Electoral College had he embraced the boss—whose popularity ratings were a stratospheric 70 percent, post-impeachment.

Clinton, deeply hurt, has never entirely forgiven Gore, and later told his biographer Taylor Branch that Gore was living in “Neverland” to think he’d be a liability. When the two families appeared onstage together during an awkward endorsement event in August 2000, President Clinton had to pull Hillary into the frame with the Gores, the first lady looking less than thrilled amid the blizzard of confetti. She never forgot that moment, and has told people around her, time and again, that she didn’t intend to repeat Gore’s sin of pride. (The ambivalence is apparently mutual. As of mid-July, Gore was perhaps the only major Democratic figure yet to endorse Clinton.)

By comparison, her relationship with Obama has strengthened over the years, sealed by their shared White House experiences, like the tense deliberations over the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and Obama’s 2012 reelection, when Bill Clinton cast aside his resentments to deliver the capstone nomination speech in Charlotte, North Carolina.

They still make an unlikely pair, so friendly today that it’s hard sometimes to remember their 2008 primary campaign was one of the longest and most competitive in Democratic history, and that both sides accused the other of dirty tricks. The tone was set early when a prominent Clinton supporter in New Hampshire questioned whether Obama had really stopped using drugs at the young age he claimed in his memoir. When Clinton approached the then-Illinois senator on the tarmac of a D.C. airport to say she had nothing to do with the attack, Obama angrily accused her of planting stories about him in the press—including the claim that he was secretly a Muslim—and what previously had been a frosty détente devolved into a shouting match.

Clinton’s millions of primary votes, celebrated in her career-defining “Glass Ceiling” speech when she dropped out of the race in 2008, and her canny team-player approach as secretary of state secured her future leverage with Obama. Still, the early going was rough as Clinton pushed to carve out her own empire within the administration. The West Wing even tried to blackball two of her closest aides—communications adviser Philippe Reines and Capricia Marshall, a Clinton confidante tapped as director of protocol—until the secretary’s top aide, Cheryl Mills, personally wrangled a deal with Obama fixer and future White House chief of staff Denis McDonough.

Those battles seem like ancient history now. But Obama’s people still tend to have a Barack-first sense of loyalty. (One high-ranking current Clinton aide keeps a life-sized cardboard cutout of the 44th president in his office as a talisman.) And the old Hillaryland crewmembers (Mills, Marshall, Huma Abedin) remain ferociously pro-Hillary.

Over the years, the two staffs have inevitably melded into something the Republicans envy, though: a core team of 100 or so professionals who form the functioning heart of the national Democratic Party, working mostly in harness—a product of eight years in power and three campaigns’ worth of collaboration. These days, the big worry isn’t about division but excessive togetherness, a blurring of the lines between the presidency and the campaign (duly noted by the White House counsel’s office, which churns out advisories defining legal protocols for communication and coordination in keeping with the Hatch Act).

But it’s hard to police all the checkpoints, especially when friends on both sides are kibitzing in a bar or at a birthday party. And almost all the key players in Clinton’s Brooklyn high command have served time in both camps. John Podesta, the campaign chairman, was Bill Clinton’s last White House chief of staff, informally advised Hillary Clinton in 2008 and headed back to the White House in 2013 as Obama’s senior in-house strategist—with the caveat that he would hop back over to the Clintons the minute they set up the campaign. Campaign communications director Jen Palmieri, a former Podesta deputy, held the same job in the Obama White House. Clinton’s top strategist Joel Benenson was Obama’s pollster—and Clinton ad-maker Jim Margolis was part of Obama’s Chicago mafia.

Sometimes, it seems like family tree software would be useful: Take Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary, who worked as Attorney General Eric Holder’s flack before joining the campaign, is married to Obama’s former legislative affairs director and interacts frequently with his West Wing counterpart Eric Schultz, a Clinton alum who preceded Fallon on Chuck Schumer’s Senate communications staff.

***

Planning for the campaign began in mid-2014, when Cheryl Mills began reaching out to potential Clinton staffers in the West Wing, while Clinton’s State Department aide-de-camp Jake Sullivan began putting together a compendium of policy options for the wonky would-be candidate.

A parallel effort to gear up for 2016 was emerging in the White House. Three years after eliminating his scandal-prone political office, Obama essentially reconstituted it under a new name and tapped a chipper veteran campaign organizer, Simas, to act as his point of contact with the campaigns.

The most important early meeting, in terms of both symbolism and synergy, was in late 2014, when Plouffe, acting with Obama’s blessing (and a mandate to report back), sat down with Clinton in her Washington mansion to map out his vision of her campaign.

Plouffe, a low-key, data-obsessed strategist who made his name as the architect of Obama’s two campaigns, had been one of the last anti-Clinton holdouts in 2008, and he was also the party’s most-respected electoral engineer. He was dispatched with Obama’s explicit intention to help “stand up” Clinton’s effort, according to a person involved in the planning. But he took to the Clinton cause with the zeal of the converted and would emerge over the following 18 months as a surprisingly hands-on campaign operative, coaching Clinton’s young staff during free time.

“Plouffe is everywhere. You can’t see him, but he’s everywhere,” a Clinton aide told me during the Iowa caucuses this winter.

At that first meeting with Clinton, Plouffe laid out a set of imperatives to deal with the shortcomings of her ’08 effort: She needed to assemble a first-rate analytics, targeting and data team; limit the freakouts and impulsive personnel changes; and hire (as well as empower) a steady, technically proficient campaign manager. He threw his support behind the leading candidate, a thirtysomething party stalwart named Robby Mook, who had run Terry McAuliffe’s successful campaign for Virginia governor. Clinton was already sold on a lower-drama campaign (even if she didn’t always practice what she preached).

But if her campaign organization started out on a more solid footing than in 2008, there remained a political problem on Clinton’s left that neither she nor her White House friends fully grasped. They didn’t anticipate the populist uprising that hit both parties, and missed the Sanders revolution until it was nearly too late, in part because they were so focused on eliminating what they saw as a far more dangerous threat on the left, Elizabeth Warren.

The 67-year-old former Harvard professor had long maintained that she wasn’t running, but no one in Brooklyn or the White House quite believed her. That concern spiked to panic in October, when Clinton lavishly praised Warren at a campaign event—“I love watching Elizabeth give it to those who deserve to get it”—only to get a cold shoulder from the senator, who barely acknowledged her presence.

So as Obama’s team was jockeying behind the scenes to maneuver Biden to the sidelines, Clinton’s aides were desperately doing all they could to keep Warren happy and prevent her from joining forces with Sanders.

Luckily for Clinton, Warren resisted Sanders’ entreaties, for months telling the senator and his staff she hadn’t made up her mind about which candidate she would support. For all her credibility on the left, Warren is more interested in influencing the granular Washington decisions of policymaking and presidential personnel—and in power politics. Warren’s favored modus operandi: leveraging her outsider popularity to gain influence on the issues she cares about, namely income inequality and financial services reform.

“Elizabeth is all about leverage, and she used it,” a top Warren ally told me. “The main thing, you know, is that she always thought Hillary was going to be the nominee, so that was where the leverage was.”

Warren, several people in her orbit say, never really came close to endorsing the man many progressives consider to be her ideological soulmate. She made a point of meeting with Sanders to hear his pitch and continued checking in. But she prioritized opening a channel to Clinton on policy. Warren’s personal relationship with Clinton was originally frosty (she was irked by Clinton’s support for a bankruptcy bill more than a decade earlier). And while the pair have never developed an easy rapport, they did develop a working relationship, thanks in part to their mutual friendship with a shared consultant, longtime Clinton hand Mandy Grunwald. In early 2015, Warren sent a major signal that she would ultimately endorse Clinton, telling a senior campaign aide, “I’m getting a lot of pressure to endorse Bernie, but I’m not going to do it.”

Clinton made it clear through those back channels that she planned to move in Warren’s direction on several key issues. Her first step: consulting Warren on a bill she had sponsored jointly with liberal Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin that would prevent private-sector executives from receiving big bonuses before heading into government service. Clinton endorsed the measure months later than Sanders did, but Warren told a friend that she was satisfied with Clinton’s “progress” on the issue and hoped to keep pulling her in the right direction.

Here was a textbook example of Warren’s chess-game approach: The bill, which never had a chance of passing the GOP-controlled Senate, was partly intended to handcuff Clinton if she was elected, weeding out many top finance executives who demanded big payouts before entering the public sector.

Warren made her agenda plain to Clinton when she earned her own tea-and-tactics invitation to Clinton’s Washington home in December 2014—a stilted meeting that left Clinton annoyed and put upon, according to one top Democrat. Warren was in a feisty frame of mind, and had just announced her opposition to the appointment of Lazard banker Antonio Weiss to a top Treasury post. West Wing staffers were infuriated by her decision, but Clinton, differentiating herself from Obama’s team, was more receptive. And when Warren pointedly pressed Clinton not to appoint Wall Street-friendly officials, Clinton didn’t appreciate the full-court press, but she signaled her general agreement, according to a person in Clinton’s inner circle. It was hardly a coincidence that, that spring, she named a key Warren ally, Gary Gensler, a former federal regulator loved by the left for his clashes with Obama’s Treasury Department, as her campaign’s chief financial officer.

None of this was quite enough to push Warren into an early endorsement. Support for that position came from an unexpected quarter: In an early 2015 conversation, Biden counseled the Massachusetts senator to hold off on endorsing Clinton until after the primary, according to a Democrat briefed on the interaction.

Ultimately, it was Donald Trump who brought the two women politicians closer together. Warren (“Pocahontas” in Trump-speak) detests the GOP candidate on a deeply personal level as a racist and sexist. And even though she harbored doubts about Clinton’s ideology, Warren viewed the former secretary of state as a fighter, and opined to friends that Clinton would make a tougher-minded negotiator on all kinds of deals than the comparatively easygoing Obama.

By late spring, Warren and Clinton were talking on the phone from time to time, lamenting the timidity of Democrats still reluctant to bash Trump and agreeing on the gut-punch approach Warren would soon use in a series of Facebook posts that garnered millions of views. (Clinton and her team were especially tickled by Warren’s description of the GOP nominee as “a small, insecure moneygrubber who doesn’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t have the Trump name splashed all over it,” I was told.)

 

Warren’s effectiveness as a punch-thrower played a critical role in the Clinton campaign’s late-May pivot away from fighting Sanders to taking on Trump directly. Warren wasn’t initially a serious candidate for a vice-presidential slot, people close to Clinton told me. But her late-in-the-game performance has changed that, and she warmed to the idea after initially viewing it as just another leveraging tool, according to senior Democrats.

Mutual self-interest as much as anything dictated it. Clinton admired Obama’s team, but she was still convinced that in 2008 he had benefited from unfair advantages like a cheerleading press and undemocratic small-state caucus system that slighted her strength among big-state Democrats. “It was important for her to do this on her own,” one top 2008 Clinton adviser told me.

But the president’s team had little doubt on substance—even if timing was an issue. Plouffe, in particular, was determined to preserve the tarnished ’08 hope-and-change brand, and he and Obama shared the opinion that Sanders simply didn’t have the bandwidth or willingness to compromise his job required. (When I asked Obama in January whether the 74-year-old senator reminded him of himself in 2008, the president quickly shot me down: “I don’t think that’s true”).

Still, Sanders’ direct call for a revolution had chastened Obama, and he was intent on keeping to the no-endorsement deal. Clinton’s team had no problem with that—until her lackluster Iowa and New Hampshire performances, which induced a collective anxiety attack among some of her team in Brooklyn.

In mid-February, three officials with direct knowledge told me, Podesta approached Plouffe and McDonough to float an idea: If Clinton somehow managed to lose the upcoming Nevada caucuses, which had been unthinkable weeks earlier, would Obama offer his endorsement to stop Sanders’ momentum? It was clearly an act of desperation—“a break-glass and push-the-panic-button moment,” in the words of a Democrat close to the situation—and Obama’s team quickly vetoed it. Plouffe said the endorsement wouldn’t help—in fact, he said, it would be “counterproductive”—prompting a backlash that would swamp both the president and his chosen successor. Podesta, a four-decade veteran of campaigns and White Houses, wasn’t pleased, but he conceded the point; it’s not clear if Clinton or Obama even knew about the idea at the time, several aides told me.

The question turned out to be moot; Clinton won a 5-point victory in Nevada and established a pattern of solid performances in diverse big states (with Sanders winning in mostly white states, caucuses and open primaries where independents could vote).

The White House did have a counter-offer: Obama would consider making an early announcement if Clinton wrapped things up during the March 15 primaries. But that deal died when Sanders won Michigan unexpectedly on March 8, upending the race.

***

As clear-eyed as Obama has been about Clinton, some campaign-season friction has been inevitable. The arrangement is inherently schizophrenic: Clinton’s team wants Obama’s support when they need it most, while demanding the latitude to break with him whenever they need to get out of a political corner. On some issues, it hasn’t mattered much. Sources told me Obama waved off Clinton’s more hawkish stance on intervention in Syria (she has suggested supporting a no-fly zone, something he has rejected), and that he didn’t much mind when she vowed in Iowa last October to “go beyond President Obama” in pursuing immigration reform.

But he’s been deeply frustrated by her machinations on free trade, an issue he views as the final big-ticket legislative priority of his presidency. And he expressed anger over Clinton’s tortured decision to reverse her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. At the time, he told one visitor to the Oval Office that he viewed it not only as bad policy but “bad politics,” because it would reinforce the impression, pushed by Sanders, that Clinton was an opportunistic flip-flopper.

The flashpoint came in June 2015, when Clinton told Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston that she would have voted against “fast-track” authority for the trade deal—the very procedural tool Obama was hoping to use to hammer through the deal against a growing populist backlash. Obama’s complaint was that Clinton, who was speaking off the cuff, hadn’t given him a heads-up before trumpeting such a major break with him on policy. The president was furious and—as polite principals do when they don’t want to berate other principals directly—he transmitted his displeasure to McDonough for broadcast to Hillaryland. The man tasked with blunting that anger was none other than Podesta, McDonough’s longtime jogging partner, the man who had hired him at the liberal Center for American Progress and McDonough’s tutor in the use of executive power in the West Wing.

Still, Obama and his team kept their eyes on the bigger prize—Clinton’s election—and sweated right alongside her team when she swooned in January and February. Obama, who boasted about not watching the debates to stick with TV hoops, never lost confidence in Clinton. But no one better knew her weaknesses, and he watched Sanders’ rise with alarm and a tinge of admiration for the septuagenarian’s out-of-nowhere challenge to the system. The shocker came in late January, one senior Democrat told me, when Simas offered him a readout of internal Democratic polling showing Clinton in serious trouble. “She could actually lose this thing,” Simas said.

There wasn’t a lot the White House could do at that point. But Plouffe, acting in his dual role as an Obama operative and shadow strategist, developed a close mentoring relationship with Mook, whom he viewed as a clear-headed team builder. During the Iowa caucuses, Plouffe, who had helped implement Obama’s innovative voter targeting there, was talking to Mook several times a day, offering tactical advice and encouragement, according to people close to the campaign. And he counseled his protégé to make what would turn out to be one of the campaign’s best hires: Obama veteran Jeff Berman to quarterback Clinton’s delegate operation.

Plouffe wasn’t the only one working the phones. Obama, according to aides, also dialed through to Clinton on several occasions to offer encouragement and a little heartfelt if obvious advice. “Loosen up and be yourself,” he told her during one long post-New Hampshire call, counseling Clinton to ditch the laundry-list speeches and mix in “some poetry with the prose,” in the words of one aide.

***

If Obama’s early commitment to Clinton had any downside, it was the sense of inevitability, of complacency, that it fostered, the notion that anybody could control a process that was rapidly being taken over by outsiders and insurgents. “We caught them flat-footed,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told me.

And it was true: Both Clintons had initially dismissed Sanders’ candidacy as a long shot. “He’s a socialist!” she had said incredulously when someone in late 2015 suggested that Sanders’ message was taking root. And while Clinton herself would point the finger at her pollsters and consultants for failing to anticipate his rise until last December, the fault ultimately lay with a candidate who later told me she preferred to deliver long, policy-packed speeches to pithier calls to battle.

Sanders, who vaulted from less than 3 percent in national polls in early 2015 to a dead-heat by April 2016, turned out to be Clinton’s equal in debates, exposing all the flaws that had dogged Clinton as a candidate eight years earlier—the wooden delivery, the deliberative poll-tested position papers, the focus on incremental progress—when her opponent was electrifying crowds with promises of seismic (if hard-to-implement) change.

But the key thing both Obama and Clinton missed was that responsible liberal governance connected to economic elites—the essence of their partnership—had simply faded from fashion. In their early, scrupulously civil debates, both Sanders and Clinton repeatedly emphasized how similar their stances on major issues were. But as he caught fire—and Clinton shifted on issues like Social Security, trade and Wall Street regulation to meet his challenge—Sanders shifted to a broader, more incendiary anti-establishment argument that focused on what Clinton represented as opposed to the positions she adopted.

And what really sustained him was his positive message of generational change, liberally borrowed from Obama’s 2008 campaign, and broadcast to his faithful through a series of iPhone-friendly videos. Sanders continued to emphasize policy disagreements, especially on foreign affairs, but what drew the 15,000-student crowds were his shout-himself-hoarse denunciations of Clinton’s connections to financial elites; his repeated attack on her six-figure Goldman Sachs speaking fees was the most effective attack line of the campaign, his advisers say.

“They are a historic pair, and they have a lot of power when they work together,” argues a top Sanders ally. “But if they want to motivate the party, if they want to beat Donald Trump, if they want to excite voters, they need to get into Bernie’s space—and fast.”

 

Still, it’s possible to over-learn the lessons of Sanders’ success. As senior Clinton advisers rightly point out—except for the February scare and an unexpected loss a month later in Michigan—Clinton won the overall primary season convincingly, with 55 percent of the vote, a bigger lead in pledged delegates than Obama ever enjoyed in ’08 and 3.5 million more votes than Sanders.

Besides, predictions that Sanders voters wouldn’t unite around Clinton haven’t, so far, proven any more accurate than predictions that Clinton voters wouldn’t vote for Obama. Ahead of the Philadelphia convention, only about 8 percent of Sanders supporters said they’d back Trump in the general election, according to a June Washington Post-ABC News poll—compared with 20 percent of Clinton supporters who planned to vote for Republican John McCain in 2008. By contrast, recent surveys have shown 70 percent of Ted Cruz voters have negative views of Trump.

Exit polls for the early 2016 primaries tell an even starker story about the relative health of the parties heading into the fall. A majority of Republicans said they felt “betrayed” by their party—the rage that fueled Trump’s candidacy—compared with less than a quarter of Democrats who shared that sentiment. “The biggest misnomer of the campaign is that everybody’s pissed off,” Clinton strategist Benenson told me in March. “The truth is that Republicans are way, way more angry than Democrats. And Democrats love Obama.”

***

The party does seem to be uniting, as Sanders’ awkward but emphatic enough endorsement of Clinton in early July proved. But the protracted, weeks-long three-way negotiations among Clinton’s, Obama’s and Sanders’ political teams over the Democratic Party’s platform showed something: that the Clinton-Obama table for two may need a new place setting.

Sanders, who took a long time to accept the reality of his primary defeat personally, squandered some of his leverage. But in the end, the Clinton camp was eager to give him almost everything he asked for in the Democratic platform by agreeing to embrace a new proposal to subsidize public college tuition, a public option for Obamacare and a break-up-the-banks plank.

The final hurdle to kumbaya was a deal that embittered, or at least annoyed, all three parties.

Obama, knowing Clinton and Sanders had bucked him on free trade, lobbied hard to shoot down an anti-Trans-Pacific Partnership provision in the platform during a series of party meetings in Orlando in early July. The uncompromising Vermont revolutionary would have to compromise—and he did—by accepting the pro-TPP plank debated during the Orlando meetings. When the deal was done, Sanders called his team from his house in Vermont and declared, in his matter-of-fact, ordering-at-a-diner voice, “Well, we just created the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.” And then he said goodbye and hung up.

Yet until the very last moment, Clinton’s jittery team couldn’t quite believe Sanders was really on board, seizing on a rumor that he was boarding a plane to Florida to blow up the final agreement.

Never mind that everyone on the Sanders campaign laughed it off. The calls from Brooklyn kept coming—“We’re hearing he’s on the plane right now!” —until one close aide to the senator bellowed into his phone, “Godammit, Bernie’s in Burlington, and he’s staying in Burlington!”

The senator was good to his word. The next time Clinton’s team saw Sanders, he was sharing a stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his party’s presumptive nominee—and declaring himself a loyal Democrat in Clinton’s anti-Trump crusade.

 

 

 

 

How Financially Rabid is the DNC Leadership?

DNC Shared Its Donor Appointment List With White House

New details have emerged about a possible “pay-to-play” scheme that surfaced in the Democratic National Committee documents released by Wikileaks last week.

DailyCaller: The Democratic National Committee’s national finance director sent a White House official who handles personnel matters a list of Democratic donors that the DNC hand-picked for appointments to federal boards and commissions.

The Daily Caller reported earlier this week that Jordan Kaplan, the DNC finance director, sought guidance from his colleagues on what donors to choose for federal appointments. Names were collected, and a spreadsheet entitled “Boards and Commissions” was created.

(RELATED: Leakes DNC Documents Show Plans To Reward Big Donors With Federal Appointments)

Following up on that report, OpenSecrets, the blog of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors political spending, found an email from Kaplan to Amanda Moose, a special assistant to the President for presidential personnel, which appears to show coordination about the appointments between the DNC and the White House.

“For your review,” Kaplan wrote to Moose in an April 26 email which had the “Boards and Commissions — Final” spreadsheet attached.

As TheDC reported, most of those included on the list are major Democratic party donors. Most have donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. None contributed to Bernie Sanders.

“That is unethical, if not illegal,”Ken Boehm, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, told TheDC earlier this week of the apparent DNC quid pro quo.

One entry on one iteration of the DNC donor spreadsheet is telling as it suggests that one party donor expressed his desire to someone at the DNC about an appointment to the U. S. Postal Service’s board of governors.

Next to the name of Democratic donor David Shapira is the acronym “USPS.” The CEO of Giant Eagle, Inc., a supermarket chain, Shapira was nominated by Obama to the USPS board of governors last year. The pick was blocked by Congress, however.

TheDC emailed Kaplan asking whether Shapira specifically asked anyone at the DNC to be nominated again for the USPS position or if DNC officials assumed that he would want that position given his previous nomination.

The finance chief did not respond. DNC communications director Luis Miranda did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Other emails contained in the Wikileaks trove show that Kaplan and Moose likely discussed donor appointments over the phone.

Scott Comer, the DNC’s finance chief of staff, informed Kaplan on April 28 that he had missed a call from Moose. Kaplan asked for the number.

On May 3, Comer emailed Kaplan again saying that Moose wanted to set up a time “for a 20-minute conversation.”

In a comment to OpenSecrets, White House spokesman Eric Schultz denied that donors are given roles in the administration because of their political donations.

“Being a donor does not get you a role in this administration,” Schultz said, adding “nor does it preclude you from getting one.”

“We’ve said this for many years now and there’s nothing in the emails that have been released that contradicts that.”

The Obama administration has been accused of providing plush federal jobs — including appointments to federal boards and ambassadorships — for major Democratic and Obama donors.

As a presidential candidate in 2007, Obama specifically said that political patronage would be eradicated from his administration.

“The cynics and the lobbyists and the special interests have turned government into a game that only they can afford to play,” he said at the time. “They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills. They get the access when you get to write a letter. The time for that politics is over.”

As OpenSecrets notes, none of the donors picked by the DNC have been appointed to federal spots since Kaplan provided the spreadsheet to Moose.

Moose did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment.

Yup, there is more of course.

DWS Donor Convicted of Wire Fraud Relating to Horse Murder Not Allowed to Give to DNC

Hacked emails show George Lindemann Jr.’s past eliminated him as a DNC donor

FreeBeacon: A major donor to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) was forbidden from giving to the Democratic National Committee due to a past conviction on three counts of wire fraud following his electrocution of a horse to collect an insurance payout.

George Lindemann Jr., a Miami-based real estate developer and son of billionaire New York investor George Lindemann, was vetted earlier this year as a possible donor to the committee and to attend an event with President Barack Obama, according to an exchange contained within the latest batch of hacked DNC emails released by Wikileaks.

Clayton Cox, the DNC’s regional finance director in Florida, Georgia, and the Midwest, asked for a background check into Lindemann Jr. on May 9.

The same day, Chadwick Rivard, a senior research and compliance supervisor for the DNC, returned an extended report into Lindemann Jr.’s checkered past.

Lindemann Jr., a former equestrian who had Olympic aspirations, hired a man named Tommy Burns in 1990 to kill his horse, named “Charisma,” by electrocution so he could cash out on an insurance policy worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The insurance company ruled that the horse had died from natural causes. The plan had temporarily worked, as he was issued the $250,000 policy for the horse’s life.

However, federal investigators later uncovered a conspiracy between Burns and another person, named Barney Ward, to kill numerous horses for money. The practice allowed the horse’s owner to then collect the insurance policy, as Lindemann Jr. had done.

Burns provided information to the FBI on Lindemann Jr. It was discovered during this process that a man named James Druck had taught Burns how to electrocute horses to cash in on the insurance payout. Druck was the father of Rielle Hunter, the former mistress of John Edwards, who was born Lisa Druck.

During the trial, Lindemann’s defense argued that the $250,000 insurance payout did not matter to Lindemann Jr. given his family’s net worth. A U.S. attorney later described Lindemann Jr. as a “a very wealthy kid that has a toy that he doesn’t like or gets mad at and throws it on the floor and stomps on it.”

Lindemann Jr. was convicted on three counts of wire fraud in 1995 for his role in Charisma’s death. The judge presiding over Lindemann Jr.’s case ordered him to pay $500,000 in fines and $250,000 in restitution. He was sentenced to 33 months in prison, the maximum sentence.

Alan Reed, another DNC compliance officer, responded to the email chain saying, “I vote fail….again.”

Wasserman Schultz, who recently resigned as chair of the DNC following the release of the Wikileaks emails, accepted tens of thousands in donations from Lindemann Jr. to her leadership PAC and campaign committees in recent years.

Lindemann Jr. gave a $5,000 donation to Democrats Win Seats PAC, the leadership PAC of Wasserman Schultz, in February 2014. More than a year later, in April 2015, he contributed another $5,000 to the PAC.

Additionally, he gave $2,600 to Wasserman Schultz’s primary campaign in 2014 and added another $2,400 to her general election. He also combined to give $3,500 to the Democratic Executive Committee of Florida that year.

Lindemann Jr. donated $2,700 to Wasserman Schultz’s primary in 2015 and contributed $2,700 to her general, the maximum amounts allowed by law per election.

Lindemann Jr. has donated to both political parties throughout the years. He had failed previous background checks from the committee.

Wasserman Schultz’s office did not return a request for comment on the donations by press time.

 

 

 

 

Euro Arms Pipeline to Middle East

Making a Killing: The 1.2 Billion Euro Arms Pipeline to Middle East

An unprecedented flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe is flooding the battlefields of the Middle East.

Lawrence Marzouk, Ivan Angelovski and Miranda Patrucic BIRN Belgrade, London, Sarajevo

BalkanInsight: As Belgrade slept on the night of November 28, 2015, the giant turbofan engines of a Belarusian Ruby Star Ilyushin II-76 cargo plane roared into life, its hull laden with arms destined for faraway conflicts.

Rising from the tarmac of Nikola Tesla airport, the hulking aircraft pierced the Serbian mist to head towards Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

It was one of at least 68 flights that in just 13 months transported weapons and ammunition to Middle Eastern states and Turkey which, in turn, funnelled arms into brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, has found. The flights form just a small part of €1.2 billion in arms deals between the countries since 2012, when parts of the Arab Spring turned into an armed conflict.


Belgrade Airport | BIRN

Meanwhile, over the past two years, as thousands of tonnes of weapons fly south, hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled north from the conflicts that have killed more than 400,000 people. But while Balkan and European countries have shut down the refugee route, the billion-euro pipeline sending arms by plane and ship to the Middle East remains open – and very lucrative.

It is a trade that is almost certainly illegal, according to arms and human rights experts.

“The evidence points towards systematic diversion of weapons to armed groups accused of committing serious human rights violations. If this is the case, the transfers are illegal under the ATT (United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty) and other international law and should cease immediately,” said Patrick Wilcken, an arms-control researcher at Amnesty International who reviewed the evidence collected by reporters.

But with hundreds of millions of euros at stake and weapons factories working overtime, countries have a strong incentive to let the business flourish. Arms export licences, which are supposed to guarantee the final destination of the goods, have been granted despite ample evidence that weapons are being diverted to Syrian and other armed groups accused of widespread human rights abuses and atrocities.

Robert Stephen Ford, US ambassador to Syria between 2011 and 2014, told BIRN and the OCCRP that the trade is coordinated by the US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Turkey and Gulf states through centres in Jordan and Turkey, although in practice weapon supplies often bypass this process.

BIRN and the OCCRP examined arms export data, UN reports, flight records, and weapons contracts during a year-long investigation that reveals how thousands of assault rifles, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, and heavy machine guns are pouring into the troubled region, originating from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Romania,  Serbia and Slovakia.

Read all the documents used in the investigation at BIRN’s online library BIRN Source.

Since the escalation of the Syrian conflict in 2012, these eight countries have approved the shipment of weapons and ammunition worth at least 1.2 billion euros to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Turkey.

The figure is likely much higher. Data on arms export licences for four out of eight countries were not available for 2015 and seven out of eight countries for 2016. The four recipient countries are key arms suppliers to Syria and Yemen with little or no history of buying from Central and Eastern Europe prior to 2012. And the pace of the transfers is not slowing, with some of the biggest deals approved in 2015.

Eastern and Central European weapons and ammunition, identified in more than 50  videos and photos posted on social media, are now in use by Western-backed Free Syrian Army units, but also in the hands of fighters of Islamist groups such as Ansar al-Sham, Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIS, in Syria, factions fighting for Syrian President Bashar-al Assad and Sunni forces in Yemen.

On April 7, 2016, twitter User @bm27_uragan, who monitors the spread of weapons in the Syrian conflict, posted a video apparently of Free Syrian Army rebel using Serbian made Coyote M02 heavy machine gun in Southern Aleppo in Syria. The Coyote M02 has been independently identified as a Coyote M02.

Markings on some of the weapons identifying the origin and date of production reveal significant quantities have come off production lines as recently as 2015.

Out of the 1.2 billion euros in weapons and ammunition approved for export, about 500 million euros have been delivered, according to UN trade information and national arms export reports.

The frequency and number of cargo flights – BIRN and the OCCRP identified at least 68 in just over one year – reveal a steady flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe airports to military bases in Middle East.

The most commonly used aircraft – the Ilyushin II-76 – can carry up to 50 tonnes of cargo or approximately 16,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles or three million bullets. Others, including the Boeing 747, are capable of hauling at least twice that amount.

But arms and ammunitions are not only coming by air. Reporters also have identified at least three shipments made by the US military from Black Sea ports carrying an estimated 4,700 tonnes of weapons and ammunition to the Red Sea and Turkey since December 2015.

One Swedish member of the EU parliament calls the trade shameful.

“Maybe they –[Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia] – do not feel ashamed at all but I think they should,” said Bodil Valero, who also served as the rapporteur for the EU’s last arms report.“Countries selling arms to Saudi Arabia or the Middle East-North Africa region are not carrying out good risk assessments and, as a result, are in breach of EU and national law.”.

OCCRP and BIRN talked to government representatives in Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovakia who all responded similarly saying that they are meeting their international obligations. Some cited that Saudi Arabia is not on any international weapons black lists and other said their countries are not responsible if weapons have been diverted.

A question of legality

The global arms trade is regulated by three layers of interconnected legislation — national, European Union, EU, and international – but there are no formal mechanisms to punish those who break the law.

Beyond the blanket ban on exports to embargoed countries, each licence request is dealt with individually.

In the case of Syria, there are currently no sanctions on supplying weapons to the opposition.

As a result, the lawfulness of the export approval hinges on whether countries have carried out due diligence on a range of issues, including the likelihood of the arms being diverted and the impact the export will have on peace and stability.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia are signatories of the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty, which entered into force in December 2014, and lists measures to prevent the illicit trade and diversion of arms.

Member states of the EU are also governed by the legally-binding 2008 Common Position on arms exports, requiring each country to take into account eight criteria when accessing arms exports licence applications, including whether the country respects international human rights, the preservation of “regional peace, security and stability” and the risk of diversion.

As part of their efforts to join the EU, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro have already accepted the measures and have amended their national law. Serbia is in the process of doing so.

Weapons exports are initially assessed based on an end-user certificate, a key document issued by the government of the importing country which guarantees who will use the weapons and that the arms are not intended for re-export.

Authorities in Central and Eastern Europe told BIRN and the OCCRP that they also inserted a clause which requires the buyer to seek approval if they later want to export the goods.

Beyond these initial checks, countries are required to carry out a range of other risk assessments based on national and EU law and the ATT, although conversations with, and statements from, authorities revealed little evidence of that.

OCCRP and BIRN talked to government representatives in Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovakia who all responded similarly saying that they are meeting their international obligations. Some cited that Saudi Arabia is not on any international weapons black lists and other said their countries are not responsible if weapons have been diverted. The three other countries did not respond to requests for comment.

The Czech Foreign Ministry was the only public body to directly address concerns about human rights abuses and diversions, saying it took into account both when weighing up an export licence and had blocked transfers on that basis.

How legal are these arms sales to the Middle East? Find out more here

Saudi Arabia – The weapons king

The Central and Eastern European weapons supply line can be traced to the winter of 2012, when dozens of cargo planes, loaded with Saudi-purchased Yugoslav-era weapons and ammunition, began leaving Zagreb bound for Jordan. Soon after, the first footage of Croatian weapons in use emerged from the battleground of Syria.

According to a New York Times report from February 2013, a senior Croatian official offered the country’s stockpiles of old weapons for Syria during a visit to Washington in the summer of 2012. Zagreb was later put in touch with the Saudis, who bankrolled the purchases, while the CIA helped with logistics for an airlift that began late that year.

While Croatia’s government has consistently denied any role in shipping weapons to Syria, former US ambassador to Syria Ford confirmed to BIRN and the OCCRP the New York Times account from an anonymous source of how the deal was hatched. He said he was not at liberty to discuss it further.

This was just the beginning of an unprecedented flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe into the Middle East, as the pipeline expanded to include stocks from seven other countries. Local arms dealers sourced arms and ammunition from their home countries and brokered the sale of ammunition from Ukraine and Belarus, and even attempted to secure Soviet-made anti-tank systems bought from the UK, as a Europe-wide arms bazaar ensued.

Prior to the Arab Spring in 2011, the arms trade between Eastern Europe and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, UAE, and Turkey – four key supporters of Syria’s fractured opposition – was negligible to non-existent, according to analysis of export data.

But that changed in 2012. Between that year and 2016, eight Eastern European countries approved at least 806 million euros worth of weapons and ammunition exports to Saudi Arabia, according to national and EU arms export reports as well as government sources.

Jordan secured export licences worth 155 million euros starting in 2012, while the UAE netted 135 million euros and Turkey 87 million euros, bringing the total to 1.2 billion euros.

Qatar, another key supplier of equipment to the Syrian opposition, does not show up in export licences from Central and Eastern Europe.

Jeremy Binnie, Middle East arms expert for Jane’s Defence Weekly, a publication widely regarded as the most trusted source of defence and security information, said the bulk of the weapon exports from Eastern Europe would likely be destined for Syria and, to a lesser extent, Yemen and Libya.

“With a few exceptions, the militaries of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and Turkey use Western infantry weapons and ammunition, rather than Soviet-designed counterparts,” said Binnie. “It consequently seems likely that large shipments of such materiel being acquired by – or sent to – those countries are destined for their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.”

BIRN and the OCCRP obtained confidential documents from Serbia’s Ministry of Defence and minutes from a series of inter-ministerial meetings in 2013. The documents show the ministry raised concerns that deliveries to Saudi Arabia would be diverted to Syria, pointing out that the Saudis do not use Central and Eastern European stock and have a history of supplying the Syrian opposition. The Ministry turned down the Saudi request only to reverse course more than one year later and approve new arms shipments citing national interest. Saudi security forces, while mostly armed by Western producers, are known to use limited amounts of Central and Eastern European equipment. This includes Czech-produced military trucks and some Romanian-made assault rifles. But even arms exports destined for use by Saudi forces are proving controversial, given their involvement in the conflict in Yemen.

The Netherlands became the first EU country to halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia as a result of civilian deaths in Yemen’s civil war, and the European Parliament has called for an EU-wide arms embargo.

Supply Logistics: Cargo flights and airdrops

Weapons from Central and Eastern Europe are delivered to the Middle East by cargo flights and ships. By identifying the planes and ships delivering weapons, reporters were able to track the flow of arms in real time.

Detailed analysis of airport timetables, cargo carrier history, flight tracking data, and air traffic control sources helped pinpoint 68 flights that carried weapons to Middle Eastern conflicts in the past 13 months.  Belgrade, Sofia and Bratislava emerged as the main hubs for the airlift.

Most frequent were flights operated from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The flights were either confirmed as carrying weapons, were headed to military bases in Saudi Arabia or the UAE or were carried out by regular arms shippers.

The Middle East Airlift 

At least 68 cargo flights from Serbia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have carried thousands of tons of munitions in the past 13 months to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, three key suppliers of the Syrian rebels.

These were identified through detailed analysis of airport timetables, cargo carrier history, flight tracking data, leaked arms contracts, end user certificates, and air traffic control sources.

Cargo flights from Central and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, and particularly military bases, were extremely uncommon before late 2012, when the upsurge in weapons and ammunition purchases began, according to EU flight data and interviews with plane-spotters.

The most commonly used aircraft – the Ilyushin II-76 – can carry up to 50 tonnes of cargo or approximately 16,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles or three million bullets. Others, including the Boeing 747, are capable of hauling at least twice that amount.

Of the 68 flights identified, 50 were officially confirmed to have carried arms and ammunition:

  • Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate confirmed that 49 flights departing or passing through Serbia were carrying arms and ammunition from June 1, 2015 to July 4, 2016. The confirmation came following weeks of refusal to comment on grounds of confidentiality and after BIRN and the OCCRP presented its evidence, including photographs showing military boxes being loaded onto planes at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport on four different occasions.
  • An official at the Bulgarian National Customs Agency confirmed one flight, operated by Belarussian cargo carrier Ruby Star Airways, was carrying arms from the remote Bulgarian Gorna Oryahovitsa Airport to Brno–Turany Airport, the Czech Republic, and on to Aqaba, Jordan.
  • An additional 18 flights were identified as very likely to have been carrying arms and ammunition based on one of three variables: the air freight company’s history of weapons supplies; connections to earlier arms flights; or a destination of a military airport:
    • Ten flights were made to Prince Sultan Air Base in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia and Al Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, indicating the likely presence of weapons or ammunition. Additionally, 14 flights to Prince Sultan and Al Dhafra air bases are confirmed as having carried weapons during the same period by Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate.
    • Seven flights were operated from Slovakia and Bulgaria by Jordan International Air Cargo, part of the Royal Jordanian Air Force, which were revealed to have carried weapons and ammunition from Croatia to Jordan in the winter of 2012. Bulgarian retired colonel and counter-terrorism expert Slavcho Velkov, who maintains extensive contacts with the military, told BIRN and the OCCRP that the Sofia-Amman flights “were transporting weapons to Saudi Arabia, mostly for the Syrian conflict.” Additionally, one other flight operated by this airline is confirmed as having carried weapons during the same period by Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate.
    • One flight was operated by a Belarussian cargo carrier TransAVIAexport Airlines, which has a long history of transporting weapons.  In 2014, the airline was hired by Serbian arms dealer Slobodan Tesic to transport Serbian and Belarussian weapons and ammunition to air bases in Libya controlled by various militant groups. The United Nations, UN, Sanctions Committee investigated the case and found potential breaches of UN sanctions, according to a 2015 UN report. Additionally, five flights operated by this airline are confirmed as having carried weapons during the same period by Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate.

Many of these flights made an additional stop in Central and Eastern Europe – meaning they were likely picking up more weapons and ammunition – before flying to their final destination.

EU flight statistics provide further evidence of the scale of the operation. They reveal that planes flying from Bulgaria and Slovakia have delivered 2,268 tons of cargo – equal to 44 flights with the most commonly used aircraft – the Ilyushin II-76 – since the summer of 2014 to the same military bases in Saudi Arabia and UAE pinpointed by BIRN and OCCRP.

Distributing the weapons

Arms bought for Syria by the Saudis, Turks, Jordanians and the UAE are then routed through two secret command facilities – called Military Operation Centers (MOC) – in Jordan and Turkey, according to Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria.

These units – staffed by security and military officials from the Gulf, Turkey, Jordan and the US – coordinate the distribution of weapons to vetted Syrian opposition groups, according to information from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a think tank that has a unit monitoring the conflict.

“Each of the countries involved in helping the armed opposition retained final decision-making authority about which groups in Syria received assistance,” Ford said.

A cache of leaked cargo carrier documents provides further clues to how the Saudi military supplies Syrian rebels.

According to the documents obtained by BIRN and the OCCRP, the Moldovan company AeroTransCargo made six flights in the summer of 2015 carrying at least 250 tonnes of ammunition between military bases in Saudi Arabia and Esenboga International Airport in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, reportedly an arrival point for weapons and ammunition for Syrian rebels.

Pieter Wezeman, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading organisation in tracking arms exports, said he suspects the flights are part of the logistical operation to supply ammunition to Syrian rebels.

From the MOCs, weapons are then transported by road to the Syrian border or airdropped by military planes.

A Free Syrian Army commander from Aleppo, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his safety, told BIRN and OCCRP that weapons from Central and Eastern Europe were distributed from centrally controlled headquarters in Syria. “We don’t care about the county of origin, we just know it is from Eastern Europe,” he said.

The Saudis and Turks also provided weapons directly to Islamist groups not supported by the US and who have sometimes ended up fighting MOC-backed factions, Ford added.

The Saudis are also known to have airdropped arms and equipment, including what appeared to be Serbian-made assault rifles to its allies in Yemen.

Ford said that while he was not personally involved in negotiations with Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania over the supply of weapons to Syria, he believes that the CIA is likely to have played a role.

“For operations of this type it would be difficult for me to imagine that there wasn’t some coordination between the intelligence services, but it may have been confined strictly to intelligence channels,” he said.

The US may not have just played a role in the logistics behind delivering Gulf-sponsored weapons from Eastern Europe to the Syrian rebels. Through its Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM), it has also bought and delivered vast quantities of military materiel from Eastern Europe for the Syrian opposition as part of a US$500 million train and equip programme.

Since December 2015, SOCOM has commissioned three cargo ships to transport 4,700 tons of arms and ammunition from ports of Constanta in Romania and Burgas in Bulgaria to the Middle East likely as part of the covert supply of weapons to Syria.

The shipments included heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons – as well as bullets, mortars, grenades, rockets and explosives, according to US procurement documents.

The origin of arms shipped by SOCOM is unknown and the material listed in transport documents is available from stockpiles across Central and Eastern Europe.

Not long after one of the deliveries, SOCOM supported Kurdish groups published an image on Twitter and Facebook showing a warehouse piled with US-brokered ammunition boxes in northern Syria SOCOM would not confirm or deny that the shipments were bound for Syria.

US procurement records also reveal that SOCOM secured from 2014 to 2016 at least 25 million euros (27 million dollars) worth of Bulgarian and 11 million euros (12 million dollars) in Serbian weapons and ammunition for covert operations and Syrian rebels..

A Booming Business

Arms control researcher Wilcken said Central and Eastern Europe had been well positioned to cash in on the huge surge in demand for weapons following the Arab Spring.

“Geographical proximity and lax export controls have put some Balkan states in pole position to profit from this trade, in some instances with covert US assistance,” he added. “Eastern Europe is rehabilitating Cold War arms industries which are expanding and becoming profitable again.”

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic boasted recently that his country could produce five times the amount of arms it currently makes and still not meet the demand.

“Unfortunately in some parts of the world they are at war more than ever and everything you produce, on any side of the world you can sell it,” he said.

Arms manufacturers from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia are running at full capacity with some adding extra shifts and others not taking new orders.

Saudi Arabia’s top officials – more used to negotiating multi-billion-dollar fighter-jet deals with Western defence giants – have been forced to deal with a handful of small-time arms brokers operating in Eastern Europe who have access to weapons such as AK-47s and rocket launchers

Middlemen such as Serbia’s CPR Impex and Slovakia’s Eldon have played a critical role in supplying weapons and ammunition to the Middle East

The inventory of each delivery is usually unknown due to the secrecy surrounding arms deals but two end-user certificates and one export licence, obtained by BIRN and the OCCRP, reveal the extraordinary scope of the buy-up for Syrian beneficiaries.

For example, the Saudi Ministry of Defence expressed its interest in buying from Serbian arms dealer CPR Impex a number of weapons including hundreds of aging T-55 and T-72 tanks, millions of rounds of ammunition, multi-launch missile systems and rocket launchers. Weapons and ammunition listed were produced in the former Yugoslavia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic.

An export licence issued to a little-known Slovakian company called Eldon in January 2015 granted the firm the right to transport thousands of Eastern European rocket-propelled grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and almost a million bullets worth nearly 32 million euros to Saudi Arabia.

BIRN and OCCRP’s analysis of social media shows weapons that originated from the former states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria are now present on the battlefields of Syria and Yemen.

While experts believe the countries continue to shirk their responsibility, the weapons pipeline adds more and more fuel to a white hot conflict that leads to more and more misery.

“Proliferation of arms to the region has caused untold human suffering; huge numbers of people have been displaced and parties to the conflict have committed serious human rights violations including   abductions, executions, enforced disappearances, torture and rape,” said Amnesty’s Wilcken.

Additional reporting by Atanas Tchobanov, Dusica Tomovic, Jelena Cosic, Jelena Svircic, Lindita Cela, RISE Moldova and Pavla Holcova.

This investigation is produced by BIRN as a part of Paper Trail to Better Governance project.