Category Archives: Trump Administration

Venezuela Gave Passports to Terrorists, Syria and Iraq?

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Venezuela may have given passports to people with ties to terrorism

Toledo, Spain (CNN): The stunning postcard-perfect vista surrounding Misael Lopez in this town about one hour from Madrid belies his constant anxiety, even fear.

That’s because the former legal adviser to the Venezuelan Embassy in Iraq is revealing secrets he says his government doesn’t want disclosed.
“I’m concerned about my safety and my family’s safety everywhere I go,” Lopez said as he walked the cobble-stoned streets of Toledo.
Lopez, 41, says he reported what he says was a scheme to sell passports and visas for thousands of dollars out of the embassy and repeatedly turned down offers to get a cut of the money. But it was the response from his government — which has denied his allegations — that surprised him the most.
CNN and CNN en Español teamed up in a year-long joint investigation that uncovered serious irregularities in the issuing of Venezuelan passports and visas, including allegations that passports were given to people with ties to terrorism. The investigation involved reviewing thousands of documents, and conducting interviews in the U.S., Spain, Venezuela and the United Kingdom.
One confidential intelligence document obtained by CNN links Venezuela’s new Vice President Tareck El Aissami to 173 Venezuelan passports and ID’s that were issued to individuals from the Middle East, including people connected to the terrorist group Hezbollah.
The accusation that the country was issuing passports to people who are not Venezuelan first surfaced in the early 2000s when Hugo Chavez was the country’s president, interviews and records show.
A Venezuelan passport permits entry into more than 130 countries without a visa, including 26 countries in the European Union, according to a ranking by Henley and Partners. A visa is required to enter the United States.
Over the course of the CNN investigation, Lopez provided documents that show he repeatedly told Venezuelan officials about what he discovered. But he said instead of investigating his allegations, the government targeted him for disclosing confidential information. U.S. officials were also made aware of his findings.
“You cannot be a cop, and a thief at the same time,” Lopez said. “I decide to be a cop and do the right thing.”
Doing the right thing has cost him.

Unwelcome surprise

It didn’t start out that way.
Lopez, a lawyer who worked as a police officer in Venezuela, said he thought becoming a diplomat was a great career opportunity, which would also allow him to serve his country. With that in mind, he moved to Baghdad to start his new life at the Venezuelan Embassy.
But, he recalled, he got an unwelcome surprise on his first day in July 2013.
His new boss, Venezuelan Ambassador Jonathan Velasco, gave him a special envelope, he said.
“He gave me an envelope full of visas and passports,” Lopez recalled. “He told me, ‘Get this, this is one million U.S. dollars.’ I thought it was like a joke. Then he told me here people pay a lot of money to get a visa or a passport to leave this country.”
About one month later, Lopez said he realized it was no joke.
An Iraqi employee of the embassy, who was hired to be an interpreter, told him she had made thousands of dollars selling Venezuelan passports and visas, he said. And he could make a lot of money, too.
But Lopez said he told her it was wrong and he refused.
The employee pressed the issue, telling him there were thousands of dollars to be made, he said, even discussing an offer to sell visas to 13 Syrians for $10,000 each.
And, Lopez, said, she told him he could get a cut of the money, too.
Again, he said he refused.
“I suspect it might be terrorists; that’s why I reject, of course, immediately,” Lopez said.
And he said it just got worse.

Lists of names

Lopez said he was stunned when he found a document inside the embassy. It was a list of 21 Arabic names with corresponding Venezuelan passport numbers and Venezuelan identification numbers. A Venezuelan immigration official told CNN that a cross-check of the passport numbers indicated that the passports are valid and match the names on the list Lopez found — meaning the people on the list could be able to travel using those passports.
But incredibly, a publicly available database in Venezuela examined by CNN shows 20 of the 21 identification numbers are registered to people with Hispanic names — not the Arabic names listed on the passports.
Lopez kept investigating what was going on inside the embassy. He said he even found the case of a convicted drug dealer with an Iraqi identification certificate that appears to show he was born in Iraq. But the man had a Venezuelan passport that said he was born in Venezuela.
He kept evidence and notes of what he found.
Concerned that the passport and visa scheme was continuing without his knowledge, Lopez investigated the embassy employee who he said had offered to sell passports. He took photos of her desk where he says he found the embassy’s official stamp, used to authenticate visas, as well as sheets of papers printed with the Venezuelan government seal.
He eventually fired the employee. Lopez did not have any other documents that would confirm the allegations against her.
The employee did not respond to repeated requests from CNN for comment.
In April 2014, only nine months after he started the job, he emailed a report to Ambassador Velasco about the alleged selling of passports and visas. By then, he said he was convinced that Velasco knew about what was going on inside the embassy.
“He’s been there since 2008,” Lopez said. “How could he (have) been there so long, couldn’t notice that?”
He said Velasco did nothing and even threatened to fire him.
By 2015, frustrated that no one would investigate, he took what he found to Delcy Rodriguez, Venezuela’s foreign minister. His emailed report said there was “fraudulent issuing of visas, birth certificates and Venezuelan documents.”
He said nothing happened.

Going to the FBI

Eventually, with nowhere else to turn, Lopez contacted an FBI official at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. The two met at a restaurant across the street from the embassy, and the official sent Lopez’s information to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., a law enforcement source said. The FBI would not comment about what happened with the information.
For Lopez, it was his final attempt to get something done.
But it was too late.
By the end of 2015, the Venezuelan government accused Lopez of “abandoning his post” and removed him. A police official showed up at his home in Venezuela with a document that said he was under investigation for revealing “confidential documents or secrets.”

Looking for answers

In an email, Velasco strongly denied Lopez’s allegations.
“This embassy is ready open to be audit [sic] and investigated for any international organization and intelligent [sic] Services as well, I don’t have nothing to hide or fear. I be sure [sic] that under my duties this embassy don’t never [sic] and ever sell Venezuelan nationalities, this will be a joke for all the international security organization [sic] and we already cooperate with the (Iraqi) government and international intelligent [sic] service,” the email read in English.
In an attempt to get answers, a team from CNN en Español traveled to Caracas last June. In a letter, the government restricted CNN’s coverage to stories related to tourism, weather, alternative energy sources and relations among the different government institutions in Venezuela.
Rodriguez, the foreign minister, ignored reporter Rafael Romo when he tried to question her at a press event.
A government official told the CNN en Español team that any questions about the passport allegations would be grounds for expulsion from the country.
On a second visit to Caracas last August, a CNN en Español producer and videographer were forced to leave the country after Venezuelan authorities impounded CNN camera equipment at the airport.
Last September, Rodriguez represented Venezuela at the United Nations General Assembly. Inside the UN, she again ignored CNN’s attempt to ask her questions.
Finally, CNN was able to speak with her as she was walking with a small group on the sidewalk across from the UN. As she walked away from the crews, she said, “You’re going to hurt yourself for following the lies of a person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” She said allegations of selling passports and visas were “totally” false.
But it’s not the first time allegations about Venezuelan passports have been made public.

Links to terror

U.S. lawmakers heard reports about Venezuelan passport fraud during congressional hearings as far back as 2006. In fact, a congressional report warned, “Venezuela is providing support, including identity documents that could prove useful to radical Islamic groups.”
And a state department report at the time also concluded that “Venezuelan travel and identification documents are extremely easy to obtain by persons not entitled to them.”
Roger Noriega, the former US ambassador to the Organization of American States and former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in prepared remarks before a congressional in 2012 that “Venezuela has provided thousands of phony IDs, passports and visas to persons of Middle Eastern origin.”
Noreiga, who is now managing director of Vision Americas and works for a conservative think tank, told CNN that evidence began to emerge in 2003 in Venezuela that passports were being issued to non-Venezuelans.
“I absolutely believe, and I state it so publicly, that if we do not get our arms around this problem, people are going to die, either our allies or our own personnel or facilities are going to be attacked by networks abetted by the Venezuelans,” Noriega said.
The U.S. State Department declined CNN’s request late last year for an interview, instead emailing a link to its 2015 country terrorism overview. That report concluded, “There were credible reports that Venezuela maintained a permissive environment that allowed for support of activities that benefited known terrorist groups.”
A 2013 confidential intelligence report from a group of Latin American countries obtained by CNN says that from 2008 to 2012, 173 individuals from the Middle East were issued Venezuelan passports and IDs. Among them were people connected to the terrorist group Hezbollah.
The official who ordered the issuing of the passports, the report said, is Tareck El Aissami, who was appointed vice president of Venezuela in January. He is the former minister in charge of immigration as well as a governor.
El Aissami “took charge of issuing, granting visas and nationalizing citizens from different countries, especially Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Iranians and Iraqis,” the report said.
He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Ghazi Nasr Al-Din

Ghazi Nasr Al-Din
Another high-profile Venezuelan linked to terrorism is Ghazi Nasr Al-Din, a former Venezuelan diplomat who worked in the country’s embassy in Syria. He is “wanted for questioning” by the FBI for “his fundraising efforts” with Hezbollah contributors, according to a notice on the FBI website. The bureau confirmed that the information was still active, but would not comment further.
U.S. officials say he has “facilitated the travel” of Hezbollah members to and from Venezuela, according to a 2008 press release from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Leaks in the process

What allegedly happened in Iraq is no surprise to General Marco Ferreira, who was in charge of Venezuela’s immigration office in 2002.
Today, Ferreira is living in Miami after being granted political asylum after he supported a 2002 failed coup against Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez. He told CNN that he personally witnessed corrupt senior officials ordering passports for people who were not citizens when he was running the department. He added anyone could get a passport at a local office because each worked independently.
He said it was “very easy” to assume someone else’s identity.
“One of the problems was the corrupted people that was working in that place,” Ferreira said. “The second one was the fragility of the system because everything was very old and they have a lot of leaks in the process.”
He said it was “very, very easy to go and be Venezuelan, or pretend being born in Venezuela.”
Asked about what Misael Lopez described as the alleged passport and visa-selling operation at the Venezuelan Embassy in Iraq, he said he was not surprised.
As for Misael Lopez, he’s living modestly in Spain, where he also has citizenship; he knows he can’t go back to Venezuela.
With his safety always an issue, he still says he had to tell his story. And going public, he hopes, will help protect him and his family.
“I did the right thing and I’m proud it,” he said. “No regrets at all.”

Gulen Paid for Congressional Members’ Travel to Turkey

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The Trump administration successfully saw Betsy DeVos confirmed as Secretary of Education. Perhaps she will take on these charter school immediately?

Atlantic/2014: FBI raid last month on the headquarters of over 19 Gülen-operated Horizon Science Academies in Midwest. According to search warrants obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, federal authorities were interested in gathering general financial documents and records of communication. The warrant specifically mentions something called the E-rate program—a federal program that, according to the Sun-Times, “pays for schools to expand telecommunications and Internet access.” A handful of the Gülen-affiliated contractors assisting the schools were receiving money from this federal fund. It’s difficult speculate what this could all mean, as all documents pertaining to the investigation, save the warrants themselves, have been sealed from the public. A must read of the full article here.  

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***

Hillary Clinton has been the biggest recipient of Gulenist donations of any presidential candidate this cycle, federal election records show.

Besides his massive Clinton Foundation donation, Recep Ozkan, who is listed on various campaign finance disclosures as an executive at JIG Corp., Everglobe Partners, and Baharu Inc., gave $25,000 to the pro-Clinton Ready PAC in 2014. He contributed an additional $5,400 to her campaign this year.

As president of the Turkish Cultural Center, Ozkan hosted Clinton at Ramadan celebration dinners in 2006 and 2007 when she was in the Senate. More details here from the Daily Caller.

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H1B visas abuse is a large part of the immigration abuse and Gulen has exploited the system.

Turkey’s authoritarian’s ruler is Recep Erdogan; he is at loggerheads with his former ally, Fethullah Gulen, the self-exiled leader of an Islamic cult that is devoted to undoing the reforms of modern Turkey’s George Washington, Kamal Ataturk. Gulen’s followers in the U.S. have created a series of charter schools which use public school moneys, via staff extortions, to support the cult’s activities. The Gulen schools, which have also used political contributions to shore up their position, are charters, and, as such, are sheltered by conservatives promoting charters generally. Erdogan has said that he wants Gulen extradited from Pennsylvania to Turkey because of his alleged ties to the failed coup in Turkey.

Why is this of any interest to immigration policy types?

In spite of the presence of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of unemployed U.S.-trained teachers, Gulen’s schools continue to use local tax funds to secure H-1B visas for, and to provide wages for, teachers from Turkey, including in a few cases English teachers, as we have reported previously.

CIS: Why are the Gulen schools so interested in recruiting Turkish teachers (and often paying them more than U.S. teachers in the same schools)? To some extent it is a Tammany Hall sort of nepotism – let’s use public funds to help our landsmen – but there is another apparent motive. According to a long, detailed, and stinging report by LA Weekly, there is a highly organized, systematic shake-down of Turkish teachers to benefit Gulen cult organizations. The name of one of Gulen’s collectors in one of his school systems, the amounts raised, and their transportation, in cash, to cult meetings are all spelled out in detail. More details here.

Image result for gulen home in pa NBC, Gulen’s home in Saylorsburg, PA.

Deeper dive:

Scores of state lawmakers took trips subsidized by controversial Turkish opposition movement

Gulen groups are connected to U.S. charter school network overseen by legislators

In part from Public Integrity: Just why exactly would 151 state legislators from places like Idaho and Texas accept subsidized junkets from a Turkish opposition group now blamed by that country’s government for an attempted coup last summer?

It’s puzzling that state legislators who rarely get involved in foreign policy matters have been courted with international trips.

It’s especially surprising for the invitations to come from a powerful religious movement that until recently ran media outlets and a bank before falling out with the government in Turkey, a pivotal U.S. ally that serves as the gateway to the Middle East. Though followers of the movement deny having supported the failed coup, Turkey has asked the United States to extradite its leader, Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive Islamic cleric who lives in a compound not in Ankara or Istanbul but in the woods of Pennsylvania.

The Center for Public Integrity documented the extent of the trips and found that some state lawmakers who attended them later introduced resolutions supporting Gulen’s controversial Hizmet movement. And some have even supported charter schools that are part of a network from Washington, D.C., to California of roughly 160 taxpayer-funded schools run by friends of the movement.

While some familiar with the lawmakers’ trips frame them as innocuous learning experiences, the trips are meant to transform American community leaders into Gulen sympathizers, according to Joshua Hendrick, a sociologist at Loyola University and a leading expert on the movement.

“It most certainly has the impact of cultivating influence,” Hendrick said. “It is a political effort but it is framed as a grassroots mobilization of dialogue.”

‘Sympathetic to the cause’

The long parade of state legislators who have accepted the heavily subsidized trips from the Gulen movement includes some influential figures. The man known as Illinois’ most powerful state politician, Democratic Speaker of the House Mike Madigan, traveled four times to Turkey on trips sponsored by nonprofit groups associated with Gulen’s Hizmet — or “service” — movement.

In 2011, at least a tenth of Idaho’s state legislators toured the land of the Ottomans on the movement’s dime.

At least four Texas lawmakers who have served on legislative education committees went on the sponsored trips. The Lone Star state is home to the most Gulen-linked charter schools.

California has about a dozen of the schools, as do Florida and Ohio. Arizona, Illinois and Missouri are among the states that have them, as well.

The Center for Public Integrity used lawmakers’ annual disclosures and news reports to identify 151 state legislators from 29 states who toured Turkey between 2006 and 2015 thanks to more than two dozen nonprofits associated with the Gulen movement.

Among those who went on the trips were lawmakers who had rarely traveled overseas. Many had little knowledge of Gulen or Turkish politics. Few of their states have trade connections to Turkey.

But state legislators represent the political farm team of leaders who may someday play in the big leagues of Congress or beyond. Thom Tillis, for one, was first elected to the North Carolina statehouse in 2006 and went on a trip to Turkey with a Gulen movement group in 2011. Fast forward: The Republican is now a U.S. senator serving on the powerful Armed Services Committee, which oversees members of the U.S. military stationed in Turkey.

State lawmakers also shape education policy and hold the purse strings on state budgets, which fund charter schools.

“It’s effective public relations,” said William Martin, a Rice University sociologist who went on two sponsored trips. “That can affect their schools, it can affect the things they would like to do.”

The schools have denied connections to Gulen, but experts and even some friends of the movement call the links obvious. The charter schools are often founded and run by individuals with long ties to the Gulen movement, and they frequently hire Turkish teachers, sponsor their visas and move them between schools.  Many were set up with the help of nonprofits tied to the movement.

Gulen supporters say the trips for lawmakers promoted intercultural dialogue, a key component of Gulen’s teaching. The former imam preaches a unique brand of Islamic mysticism paired with Turkish nationalism and respect for modern science.

“We wanted to act as a kind of a bridge”between Americans and Turks, said Atilla Kahveci, vice president of the California-based Pacifica Institute, a Gulen-movement group that has organized lawmaker trips. “We didn’t have any kind of, from our point of view, ulterior agenda, no matter how it seems from outside.”

But other experts think the trips have political motivations.

“It’s like any other lobbying or political operation,” said James Jeffrey, who served as ambassador to Turkey under President George W. Bush and is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. “They’re doing this to advance their cause.”

American sympathizers have stuck up for Gulen and his followers. Since 2011, state lawmakers in 23 states have introduced at least 54 resolutions honoring Turkey or Turkish Americans, some of which specifically praised Gulen or Gulen-movement organizations, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from Quorum, a legislative tracking service.

For example, the Illinois House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2011 recognizing Gulen for his “inspirational contributions to the promotion of global peace and understanding.” A Gulen-movement group sponsored at least 32 trips to Turkey for Illinois state lawmakers between 2008 and 2012, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

In Kansas, former state Rep. Tom Moxley, a Republican who went on a subsidized trip to Turkey in 2011, sponsored a resolution the following year that praised Turkey’s diversity and called for the creation of a Kansan-Turkish Friendship Network.

“I’m more sympathetic to the cause, the belief system of this group of Muslims, versus the ones that are in power in Turkey today,” he said. “We’re watching a dictator take over at a time when the American government can least afford to lose them as a friend.”

A movement centered in the Poconos

Fethullah Gulen, Turkey’s most wanted man, lives tucked in the green mountains of the Poconos, a Pennsylvania tourism spot better known for its honeymoon suites with heart-shaped tubs than as an incubator for international insurrection.

Gulen, now in his 70s, began preaching in Turkey by the early 1960s and quickly drew followers to his messages of devotion to Islam paired with success in the modern world.

He moved to the United States in 1999, ostensibly for medical treatment, though he left just before the secularist regime ruling at the time accused him of threatening to overthrow the government. Gulen later obtained a U.S. green card, on the grounds that he had special abilities in the field of education.

Gulen’s movement in Turkey continued to grow, aligning itself with the conservative AKP party that now rules the country.

His followers established dormitories and schools in Turkey and elsewhere, as well as a network of nonprofit groups and foundations, including those in the United States that sponsor lawmakers’ trips, such as the Pacifica Institute and the American Turkish Friendship Association.

The nonprofits frequently share open allegiance to Gulen’s Hizmet movement, staff or other ties, according to Hendrick, the Loyola sociologist who mapped the connections between the groups in his research. Hendrick calls their informal connections to each other and Gulen part of the movement’s “strategic ambiguity,” which makes it more difficult for outsiders to assess the movement’s size and power.

But tensions in Turkey flared in 2013, and the AKP blamed its former political allies for the attempted coup in July 2016.

Though Gulen and his followers have denied responsibility for the recent coup attempt, the Turkish government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has cracked down on the Gulen movement, arresting 40,000 people and firing more than 100,000 soldiers, teachers and civil servants. Erdogan has also moved to silence dissenters and has jailed more than 100 journalists.

Today, Turkish leaders call Gulen a terrorist.

Turkey has also hired Amsterdam and Partners LLP, an international law firm that specializes in “political advocacy and cross-border disputes,” to pursue investigations into U.S. schools connected to the movement. The Turkish embassy did not return requests for comment.

Gulen was not available for an interview, according to the Alliance for Shared Values, a Gulen-movement umbrella group based in New York that handles his media requests.

“We hope that Americans see that he is a peaceful man who has been wrongly accused by an autocratic Turkish president,” said Mustafa Akpinar, CEO of the Rumi Forum, a Gulen-movement nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “We are confident in the rule of law in the United States and expect due process for Turkey’s misguided extradition request.”

All this has put the United States in a tricky position. U.S. officials have offered to help Turkey investigate the attempted coup, while simultaneously warning its ally to live up to “democratic principles” in dealing with suspects.

Though the U.S. has not formally said who was to blame for the coup, two U.S. ambassadors to the country, including current ambassador John Bass, have made the connection to Gulen. Bass in a television interview last August referenced “the apparent involvement of a large number” of Gulen’s followers in the attempted takeover.

Experts say even if this is true, it remains possible that Gulen himself and his American followers were not directly involved in the failed takeover.

In September, after Turkey asked the U.S. to extradite Gulen back to Turkey, the Obama administration promised to consider it but did not move quickly.

Experts are uncertain where the new administration stands. Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Trump’s national security adviser, has called Gulen “shady” and his schools a “scam.”

State Department spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala said the agency had no update on the issue.

Meanwhile, the Turkey trips for state legislators have dried up amid the current political upheaval.

Fact-finding mission or junket?

Some lawmakers are bewildered that the groups that paid for their trips are now swept up in Turkey’s current political turmoil.

“I can’t imagine what they would have wanted out of the North Dakota state Legislature,” said former North Dakota state Rep. Ben Hanson, a Democrat who went on a trip sponsored by a Gulen group in 2013 with six other lawmakers from his state. North Dakota does not currently allow charter schools and has few ties to the Middle East.

“It seemed like their group was trying to educate people and trying to bridge relations, and that seemed like a positive thing in and of itself,” he added.

The Center for Public Integrity attempted to contact the legislators it identified as having gone on the trips. Of the 34 lawmakers willing to comment, most spoke of their trips positively. Many said their trips were packed with educational information and meetings with Turkish businessmen or officials and were not pleasure tours. While some, like Moxley in Kansas, defended Gulen’s followers, others said they didn’t know what to make of recent events in Turkey.

“That’s above my pay grade,” said Roger Katz, a Republican in the Maine Senate who traveled to Turkey.

Some said they had no idea the sponsors of the trips were even part of the Gulen movement. To be sure, many of the trips occurred before the movement became an enemy of the Turkish state.

“The people I was associated with were devout Muslims and, I thought, the nicest people,” said Harry Kennedy, a former Democratic state senator in Missouri who went to Turkey in 2008. “But we really didn’t talk much about international politics.”

Lawmakers who have gone on the trips also have praised the experience as a way to dispel myths about Muslims in a post-9/11 world. But not every trip participant walked away with the same conclusions. New Mexico state Sen. George Munoz said he left his trip early.

“I thought it was interesting to see another culture and government, but there were some things that were deeply wrong,” the Democrat said. “There’s a reason our country chose Christianity.”

Gulen-movement groups are not the only ones paying for foreign travel by state lawmakers who have no power over foreign affairs. The government of Taiwan has sponsored trips for state lawmakers, and various Jewish nonprofits have taken state legislators to Israel.

But the Gulen movement’s efforts are extensive. For years, Gulen’s followers have been making friends in the United States by offering receptions, awards dinners and the subsidized trips — and not just for state lawmakers.

A 2015 USA Today investigation found the Gulen movement organized 200 trips for members of Congress and their staff.

One Gulen movement member estimated that more than 7,000 Gulen-movement-sponsored trips for North Americans occurred between 2003 and 2010, at an estimated cost of $17.5 million. The trips included mayors, university professors, journalists and other community leaders from across the United States.

The Center for Public Integrity’s review of lawmakers’ disclosures show that the Gulen-movement groups shelled out between $1,000 and $7,047 per trip.

Some lawmakers’ spouses also came along for the subsidized journeys, which often included visits to major Turkish historical sites such as the Hagia Sophia, a cruise on the Bosphorus Strait, shopping, as well as tours of Gulen-linked institutions such as Zaman, a daily newspaper, or private schools run by the movement.

Though some lawmakers paid for the cost of their flights to the country, expenses such as hotels, meals and tours were frequently covered by Gulen-movement nonprofits, which run on generous donations from Gulen’s followers, experts said. In addition, local Turkish followers of Gulen often donated funds specifically for the trips and then hosted the travelers in their homes for dinners or joined them for tours.

While federal lawmakers’ trips are governed by strict rules and must be disclosed, state regulations and their interpretations vary. Many states that regulate lawmaker gifts and travel include exceptions for educational trips, and none ban subsidized travel for legislators outright, according to Ethan Wilson, an ethics expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

For example, Colorado bans gifts for lawmakers above $50, but the state’s ethics commission ruled that the Turkey trips fall under the definition of “fact-finding missions,” which are allowed.

And though some Kansas legislators reported their trips in financial disclosures, at least two did not. They told the Center for Public Integrity that the state ethics commission told them it wasn’t required, though the director of the commission said hotel stays worth more than $500 should be disclosed.

North Dakota does not have any rules barring such trips, nor does it even require them to be disclosed.

Still, lawmakers should scrutinize perks offered to them carefully, said Mike Palmer, an ethics consultant who has worked on ethics codes for municipalities and government agencies. Certain groups like federal contracting officers have strict bans on gifts for good reason, he said.

“There’s a balance there between receiving education and being lobbied,” Palmer said. “What one would ask is: ‘Why are they providing this? Why is this person taking me to lunch? What’s in it for them?’” Must read the full summary here from Public Integrity. (List of lawmakers that were paid to travel is included.)

 

 

Trump Targeting BLM and Drug Cartels with Executive Action

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These 3 signatures today on Executive Orders will aid the newly sworn in U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As a matter of personal opinion, President Trump did not go far enough, he should have declared all known drug cartels and their operatives terror organizations and should have done the same with Black Lives Matter along with known gang operations and members. Yet, Trump promised to restore law and order and this is a step in the right direction.

Related reading: Chicago Murder Capitol due to Gangs and Illegals

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Trump signs executive orders on crime, law enforcement

CBS: President Trump signed three executive actions Thursday aimed at bolstering law enforcement and targeting violent crime and criminal drug cartels.

The first executive order, according to what Mr. Trump outlined during the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, is meant to direct the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “undertake all necessary and lawful action to break the back of the criminal cartels that have spread across our nation and are destroying the blood of our youth and many other people.”

The president signed the action Thursday after swearing in Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Among other powers, the action gives broad authority to increase intelligence and lawn enforcement information sharing with foreign powers in order to crack down on “transnational criminal organizations” and their subsidiaries. It also instructs an interagency panel to compile a report on crime syndicates within four months.

“These groups are drivers of crime, corruption, violence, and misery,” the order reads. “In particular, the trafficking by cartels of controlled substances has triggered a resurgence in deadly drug abuse and a corresponding rise in violent crime related to drugs.”

Mr. Trump hinted at exercising his executive power to combat drug cartels earlier this week while talking with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

“We have to do something about the cartels,” the president said in the interview, a portion of which aired Monday. He said he’d spoken with his Mexican counterpart, President Enrique Peña Nieto, about working together on the issue.

“We’ve got to stop the drugs from coming into our country,” Mr. Trump told O’Reilly. “And if he can’t handle it — maybe they can and maybe they can’t or maybe he needs help — he seemed very willing to get help from us, because he has got a problem and it’s a real problem for us.”

The president signed two other actions Thursday, including one that creates a task force within the Justice Department dedicated to “reducing violent crime in America.”

The “Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety” will have administrative and financial support from the Attorney General’s office, according to the text of the order.

The last action directs the DOJ to implement a plan to “stop crime and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers.”

The order itself instructs the department to “pursue appropriate legislation…that will define new Federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing Federal crimes, in order to prevent violence against Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers.” That recommended legislation could include “defining new crimes of violence and establishing new mandatory minimum sentences for existing crimes of violence.”

The order also directs a thorough evaluation of all grant funding programs currently administered by the Justice Department.

“It’s a shame what’s been happening to our great — truly great — law enforcement officers,” the president said at the signing. “That’s going to stop as of today.”

Red Cross Stops Operations, 1000’s More Troops Need, A’Stan

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Primer: Red Cross Suspends Operations In Afghanistan After Six Employees Killed

Afghanistan hosts the Red Cross's fourth-largest humanitarian program in the world. (file photo)

Afghanistan hosts the Red Cross’s fourth-largest humanitarian program in the world. (file photo)

The International Committee of the Red Cross suspended operations in Afghanistan after gunmen killed six employees helping to deliver emergency relief to a remote northern region hit by heavy snowstorms.

The governor of Jowzjan Province said the aid convoy was attacked by suspected Islamic State gunmen. The head of the Red Cross called the incident the “worst attack against us” in 20 years.

A search operation was under way to find two charity workers who were still missing late on February 8.

“Our operations are on hold, indeed, because we need to understand what exactly happened before we can hopefully resume our operations,” the charity’s director of operations, Dominik Stillhart, said. More here.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9, 2017 — A few thousand more troops for the train, advise and assist mission in Afghanistan would help to break what is now a stalemate with the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and other adversaries there, the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support mission and of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said here today.

Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. testified this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the situation in Afghanistan.

U.S. and NATO troops perform two complementary missions in Afghanistan, Nicholson said: the U.S. counterterrorism mission, called Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, and the NATO train, advise and assist mission, called Operation Resolute Support.

“I have adequate resourcing in my counterterrorism mission,” the general said. But the train, advise and assist mission has a shortfall of a few thousand troops, he added, noting that the extra troops could come from the United States and its allies, many of whom are fighting in Afghanistan.

Bolstering Offensive Capability

Nicholson said offensive capability will break the stalemate in Afghanistan, and the Afghan security forces’ key offensive capabilities are their special forces and air force.

“As a result of our training, equipping and partnering, the 17,000-strong Afghan special forces are the best in the region,” the general told the Senate panel. “They now operate independently on roughly 80 percent of their missions.”

The Afghan air force also is gaining capability, he added, noting that its first ground-attack aircraft entered the fight in April and the force is now integrating intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets into new targeting processes.

According to a Defense Department statement issued Dec. 19, the fiscal year 2017 budget amendment requests $264 million to procure 53 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and to begin to refurbish and modify some of them. The request also would fund more aircraft already in the Afghan inventory, including 30 more armed MD-530 helicopters for $227 million, six more A-29 fixed-wing close-attack aircraft for $174.5 million, and five AC-208 fixed-wing aircraft for $80 million.

The request includes $69 million to train aircrew and maintenance personnel, and DoD officials said it will seek funding for more UH-60s and AC-208s in future fiscal years.

“Congressional approval of funding for the Afghan air force is key to improving the offensive capability of the Afghan national defense and security forces, [and] there is an urgency to this request in order to get these aircraft and aircrews into the fight as soon as possible,” Nicholson said.

The investment in the Afghan air force will help them take over responsibility for their own close air support, “and even more important, will lead to an offensive capability that allows them to overmatch the Taliban or any other group on the battlefield, anywhere around the country,” the general said.

No Safe Haven

Nicholson said the main objective in Afghanistan is to keep the nation from being used as a safe haven from which terrorists could attack the United States and its allies.

“Of the 98 U.S.-designated terrorist groups globally, 20 operate in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, along with three violent extremist organizations,” Nicholson told the senators.

This is the highest concentration of terrorist groups anywhere in the world, and it underscores the counterterrorism platform’s importance in the Central Asia-South Asia region, because it protects the American homeland, he added.

“We remain very focused on the defeat of al-Qaida and its associates, as well as the defeat of Islamic State Khorasan Province, which is the ISIL affiliate in Afghanistan,” he said.

Many nations are committed to Afghanistan’s success, Nicholson said.

At NATO’s July summit in Warsaw, Poland, the alliance reaffirmed its commitment to sustain the Afghan national defense and security forces through 2020. At an October conference in Brussels, 75 countries and organizations confirmed their intention to provide $15.2 billion to Afghanistan development needs. And India dedicated another $1 billion on top of the $2 billion it already had given to Afghan development needs.

“These expressions of international commitment reflect the importance the world places on stability in Afghanistan and confidence in the Afghan people and Afghan government,” Nicholson said, noting that the NATO mission has an exceptional partnership with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, and the security forces and people of Afghanistan.

No. 1 Goal

The general said the No. 1 goal of the Afghanistan fight is to protect the homeland from any attack emanating from the region.

An Afghan soldier searches people receiving supplies in Afghanistan’s Parwan province during a humanitarian aid mission, Jan. 28, 2017. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Eliodoro Molina

An Afghan soldier searches people receiving supplies in Afghanistan’s Parwan province during a humanitarian aid mission, Jan. 28, 2017. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Eliodoro Molina

 

“We have achieved that in the last 15 years, [but] we need to stay on top of that, because of this confluence of 20 terrorist groups in the region,” he said. “I believe this is an enduring commitment to keep pressure on these groups and help the Afghans move toward a successful end state.”

Success in Afghanistan might be the maintenance of the enduring counterterrorism effort to keep pressure on terrorist groups, Nicholson said.

“It means that we would destroy the Islamic State and al-Qaida inside Afghanistan, something we’re actively pursuing every day. It means that we would help the Afghan security forces and government to extend their control to a larger and larger percentage of the population,” he said. It means the NATO mission would help Afghanistan become a more stable and prosperous entity in a critical part of the world, he added.

“I recognize the distance of Afghanistan and the length of this [war] has been challenging for the American people to support,” Nicholson said. “However, I personally believe that this effort we’re undertaking there is protecting the homeland and preventing these terrorists from bringing their fight to our doorstep.”

 

You Playing the Slot Machine Next to that Russian?

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Russian organized crime is not a new phenomenon by any stretch and does operate in the United States. In 2011:

Russian organized crime syndicates and criminally linked oligarchs may attempt to collude with state or state-allied actors to undermine competition in strategic markets like natural gas, oil, aluminum, and precious metals, the National Security Council attests. At the same time, transnational criminal networks in Russia are establishing new ties to global drug trafficking networks to raise quick capital. Nuclear material trafficking is an especially prominent concern in the former Soviet Union, the report stated, adding that the US would continue to cooperate with Moscow and the nations of the region to combat illicit drugs and organized crime.

Image result for semion mogilevich fbi

The report singled out the Russian mob run by Semion Mogilevich. He is wanted by the US for fraud, racketeering, and money laundering and was recently added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

Mogilevich and several members of his organization were charged in 2003 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in a 45-count racketeering indictment with involvement in a sophisticated securities fraud and money-laundering scheme, in which they allegedly used a Pennsylvania company, YBM Magnex, to defraud investors of more than $150 million. Even after that indictment—and being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list—Mogilevich has continued to expand his operations. Mogilevich was arrested by Russian police on tax charges in January 2008 and was released pending trial in July 2009. Other members of his organization remain at large.

Mogilevich’s criminal empire currently operates in Europe (including Italy, Chech Republic, Switzerland and Russia) the United States, the Ukraine, Israel and the United Kingdom. He also allegedly has ties with organized crime in South America, Pakistan and Japan. Mogilevich is considered one of the smartest and most powerful gangsters in the world. More here from Forbes.

**** Meanwhile, about those casinos and the fun slot machines, at least for those who cheat…

Image result for slot machines in casinos

Wired: In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating.

Casino security pulled up the surveillance tapes and eventually spotted the culprit, a black-haired man in his thirties who wore a Polo zip-up and carried a square brown purse. Unlike most slots cheats, he didn’t appear to tinker with any of the machines he targeted, all of which were older models manufactured by Aristocrat Leisure of Australia. Instead he’d simply play, pushing the buttons on a game like Star Drifter or Pelican Pete while furtively holding his iPhone close to the screen.

He’d walk away after a few minutes, then return a bit later to give the game a second chance. That’s when he’d get lucky. The man would parlay a $20 to $60 investment into as much as $1,300 before cashing out and moving on to another machine, where he’d start the cycle anew. Over the course of two days, his winnings tallied just over $21,000. The only odd thing about his behavior during his streaks was the way he’d hover his finger above the Spin button for long stretches before finally jabbing it in haste; typical slots players don’t pause between spins like that.

On June 9, Lumiere Place shared its findings with the Missouri Gaming Commission, which in turn issued a statewide alert. Several casinos soon discovered that they had been cheated the same way, though often by different men than the one who’d bilked Lumiere Place. In each instance, the perpetrator held a cell phone close to an Aristocrat Mark VI model slot machine shortly before a run of good fortune.

By examining rental-car records, Missouri authorities identified the Lumiere Place scammer as Murat Bliev, a 37-year-old Russian national. Bliev had flown back to Moscow on June 6, but the St. Petersburg–based organization he worked for, which employs dozens of operatives to manipulate slot machines around the world, quickly sent him back to the United States to join another cheating crew. The decision to redeploy Bliev to the US would  prove to be a rare misstep for a venture that’s quietly making millions by cracking some of the gaming industry’s most treasured algorithms.

From Russia With Cheats

Russia has been a hotbed of slots-related malfeasance since 2009, when the country outlawed virtually all gambling. (Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, reportedly believed the move would reduce the power of Georgian organized crime.) The ban forced thousands of casinos to sell their slot machines at steep discounts to whatever customers they could find. Some of those cut-rate slots wound up in the hands of counterfeiters eager to learn how to load new games onto old circuit boards. Others apparently went to Murat Bliev’s bosses in St. Petersburg, who were keen to probe the machines’ source code for vulnerabilities.

By early 2011, casinos throughout central and eastern Europe were logging incidents in which slots made by the Austrian company Novomatic paid out improbably large sums. Novomatic’s engineers could find no evidence that the machines in question had been tampered with, leading them to theorize that the cheaters had figured out how to predict the slots’ behavior. “Through targeted and prolonged observation of the individual game sequences as well as possibly recording individual games, it might be possible to allegedly identify a kind of ‘pattern’ in the game results,” the company admitted in a February 2011 notice to its customers.

Recognizing those patterns would require remarkable effort. Slot machine outcomes are controlled by programs called pseudorandom number generators that produce baffling results by design. Government regulators, such as the Missouri Gaming Commission, vet the integrity of each algorithm before casinos can deploy it.

But as the “pseudo” in the name suggests, the numbers aren’t truly random. Because human beings create them using coded instructions, PRNGs can’t help but be a bit deterministic. (A true random number generator must be rooted in a phenomenon that is not manmade, such as radioactive decay.) PRNGs take an initial number, known as a seed, and then mash it together with various hidden and shifting inputs—the time from a machine’s internal clock, for example—in order to produce a result that appears impossible to forecast. But if hackers can identify the various ingredients in that mathematical stew, they can potentially predict a PRNG’s output. That process of reverse engineering becomes much easier, of course, when a hacker has physical access to a slot machine’s innards.

Knowing the secret arithmetic that a slot machine uses to create pseudorandom results isn’t enough to help hackers, though. That’s because the inputs for a PRNG vary depending on the temporal state of each machine. The seeds are different at different times, for example, as is the data culled from the internal clocks. So even if they understand how a machine’s PRNG functions, hackers would also have to analyze the machine’s gameplay to discern its pattern. That requires both time and substantial computing power, and pounding away on one’s laptop in front of a Pelican Pete is a good way to attract the attention of casino security.

The Lumiere Place scam showed how Murat Bliev and his cohorts got around that challenge. After hearing what had happened in Missouri, a casino security expert named Darrin Hoke, who was then director of surveillance at L’Auberge du Lac Casino Resort in Lake Charles, Louisiana, took it upon himself to investigate the scope of the hacking operation. By interviewing colleagues who had reported suspicious slot machine activity and by examining their surveillance photos, he was able to identify 25 alleged operatives who’d worked in casinos from California to Romania to Macau. Hoke also used hotel registration records to discover that two of Bliev’s accomplices from St. Louis had remained in the US and traveled west to the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, California. On July 14, 2014, agents from the California Department of Justice detained one of those operatives at Pechanga and confiscated four of his cell phones, as well as $6,000. (The man, a Russian national, was not indicted; his current whereabouts are unknown.)

The cell phones from Pechanga, combined with intelligence from investigations in Missouri and Europe, revealed key details. According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas–based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

“The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000  in a single week.

Repeat Business

Since there are no slot machines to swindle in his native country, Murat Bliev didn’t linger long in Russia after his return from St. Louis. He made two more trips to the US in 2014, the second of which began on December 3. He went straight from Chicago O’Hare Airport to St. Charles, Missouri, where he met up with three other men who’d been trained to scam Aristocrat’s Mark VI model slot machines: Ivan Gudalov, Igor Larenov, and Yevgeniy Nazarov. The quartet planned to spend the next several days hitting various casinos in Missouri and western Illinois.

Bliev should never have come back. On December 10, not long after security personnel spotted Bliev inside the Hollywood Casino in St. Louis, the four scammers were arrested. Because Bliev and his cohorts had pulled their scam across state lines, federal authorities charged them with conspiracy to commit fraud. The indictments represented the first significant setbacks for the St. Petersburg organization; never before had any of its operatives faced prosecution.

Bliev, Gudalov, and Larenov, all of whom are Russian citizens, eventually accepted plea bargains and were each sentenced to two years in federal prison, to be followed by deportation. Nazarov, a Kazakh who was granted religious asylum in the US in 2013 and is a Florida resident, still awaits sentencing, which indicates that he is cooperating with the authorities: In a statement to WIRED, Aristocrat representatives noted that one of the four defendants has yet to be sentenced because he “continues to assist the FBI with their investigations.”

Whatever information Nazarov provides may be too outdated to be of much value. In the two years since the Missouri arrests, the St. Petersburg organization’s field operatives have become much cagier. Some of their new tricks were revealed last year, when Singaporean authorities caught and prosecuted a crew: One member, a Czech named Radoslav Skubnik, spilled details about the organization’s financial structure (90 percent of all revenue goes back to St. Petersburg) as well as operational tactics. “What they’ll do now is they’ll put the cell phone in their shirt’s chest pocket, behind a little piece  of mesh,” says Allison. “So they don’t have to hold it in their hand while they record.” And Darrin Hoke, the security expert, says he has received reports that scammers may be streaming video back to Russia via Skype, so they no longer need to step away from a slot machine to upload their footage.

The Missouri and Singapore cases appear to be the only instances in which scammers have been prosecuted, though a few have also been caught and banned by individual casinos. At the same time, the St. Petersburg organization has sent its operatives farther and farther afield. In recent months, for example, at least three casinos in Peru have reported being cheated by Russian gamblers who played aging Novomatic Coolfire slot machines.

The economic realities of the gaming industry seem to guarantee that the St. Petersburg organization will continue to flourish. The machines have no easy technical fix. As Hoke notes, Aristocrat, Novomatic, and any other manufacturers whose PRNGs have been cracked “would have to pull all  the machines out of service and put something else in, and they’re not going to do that.” (In Aristocrat’s statement to WIRED, the company stressed that it has been unable “to identify defects in the targeted games” and that its machines “are built to and approved against rigid regulatory technical standards.”) At the same time, most casinos can’t afford to invest in the newest slot machines, whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets; as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers, the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept the occasional loss to scammers.

So the onus will be on casino security personnel to keep an eye peeled for the scam’s small tells. A finger that lingers too long above a spin button may be a guard’s only clue that hackers in St. Petersburg are about to make another score.