Tag: paul manafort
How Russian Agents Have Perverted Our Politics: A View From 1000 Feet

How Russian Agents Have Perverted Our Politics: A View From 1000 Feet

You can get this kind of column in your email inbox nearly every day by buying a subscription to my Substack right here.

We forgot to hold a funeral for the dead drop. “Dead drop,” you say? What the hell is a dead drop? It’s the now long-abandoned practice in spy craft whereby a spy – just for the hell of it, let’s make it a Russian spy – collects a package of secret information from the agent-in-place he (or she) is running in a foreign country. The way it works is this: the agent providing the secrets goes to a pre-arranged location – let’s say it’s a bench at an overlook of the Potomac River on the Virginia side along the George Washington Parkway – and he (or she) leaves the package in a pre-arranged place – let’s say it’s in a lidded paper coffee cup left casually at the side of the overlook’s restrooms.

Then the spy – the Russian agent ­working for the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, which replaced the KGB after the Berlin wall fell – anyway, the spy walks casually – it’s all done casually -- past the overlook restroom and retrieves the empty coffee cup and takes it back to his office at the Russian embassy or his home, where he proceeds to examine its contents. The package used to be microfilm, or a microdot placed on, say, a receipt from the coffee shop, or it might, in more modern times, be a memory chip or even a thumb drive.

The “dead” in dead drop refers to the fact that the agent-in-place and his spy handler never see each other because the whole thing is done according to a plan set up previously. Dead drops have been portrayed in countless spy novels and movies – the classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré comes to mind. It’s exciting. You get to see them passing the signal establishing the dead drop. One form it might take is a chalk mark on the back of a park bench, which signals that the dead drop is on at the pre-arranged location. Then you see the drop and the pickup. All of this to conceal the fact that Russia has an agent-in-place within some agency in our government, like in recent cases the Navy and even the FBI -- the law enforcement agency tasked with catching spies.

Well, as we should all know by now, the days of intelligence agents passing secrets in the night are long gone. Now the spies are right out in the open. And that’s the other thing we haven’t done. We haven’t stood back and looked at recent political events from an overall perspective. We’ve gotten lost in the rapidly and endlessly unfolding scandals of you-know-who, buried in the details of this secret meeting or that illegal campaign contribution or that questionable character being invited into the Oval Office, no less, for meetings that have gone all the way from trying to get the FBI Director to look the other way and go easy on one of what would become several White House felons, to out-and-out plots to use the military to seize election machinery and re-run an election, which was not in effect a coup, but a coup in progress.

Almost all the unusual events in our recent political life have involved Russians, and as we will see, they go back much further than we usually recall. Trump met with an outright Russian spy in the person of Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in a private room after a big foreign policy speech he gave in April 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel. And then there was December 2016, when the same Russian spy, Kislyak, held a secret meeting with the son-in-law of the president-elect, Jared Kushner, and the man to be appointed national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in the transition office of Donald Trump in Trump Tower.

We should stop here to note that the word “spy” used in relation to the Russian Federation has a different meaning from its common use in this country. You don’t have to be a trained KGB or SVR agent that went to spy school to gather intelligence for your superiors in the Russian government. You can be the ambassador to a foreign country, or the owner of a Russian conglomerate doing business overseas, or even a Russian politician on a trip to visit a country considered a foreign adversary like, say, the U.S.A.

Five months after the secret meeting in Trump Tower, and the day after Trump fired his FBI director -- who had just announced that the FBI had been investigating Trump and his campaign for ties to Russia since July of 2016 -- President Trump would waltz Kislyak and his boss the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, past all the White House handlers and the Russian media – but not the American press pool covering the White House, who were banned from the event – right into the Oval Office where, it would later be reported, he passed some kind of top secret information to them about Israel and assured the two that he wasn’t bothered at all about Russian involvement in his election campaign because the United States does the same thing to other counties around the world.

Contacts between Russian spies and their targets in the U.S. would happen at places like an NRA convention, as when Maria Butina – remember her? – and her SVR handler, Aleksandr Torshin, a Russian senator who would soon become the Speaker of the Senate of the Russian Federation, a position you don’t get without the personal approval of Vladimir Putin, were given all-access passes to the NRA convention in St. Louis in 2012 and the next one in Houston in 2013, not to mention being welcomed at NRA headquarters in Virginia both years.

These two obvious Russian spies stayed involved with the National Rifle Association, the largest contributor to the campaign of Donald Trump. Torshin and Butina arranged for officials of the NRA to travel to Russia in 2015 for the convention of a completely fictional organization established by Butina called “Right to Bear Arms.” There is no right to bear arms in Russia as there is here. The organization, a mirror image of the NRA, was apparently established with Putin’s blessing simply to give open cover to the two spies, Butina and Torshin, to lure important Americans to Moscow.

Among those in Russia for the gun convention were outgoing NRA president David Keene and incoming NRA president Pete Brownell, Outdoor Channel CEO Jim Liberatore, and major Republican donors Hillary and Arnold Goldschlager. Who did they meet with while in Moscow? Well, how about Deputy Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and our friend Foreign Minister Sergey Lavov – both destined to be sanctioned multiple times for stuff like annexing Crimea, interfering with the U.S. election of 2016, and of course invading Ukraine in 2022.

Torshin and Butina also held meetings that year with no less a figure than Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer and Hank Greenberg, the chairman of American International Group. They would also attend fundraisers for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, be VIPs at the NRA convention in Nashville, and attend something called “Freedom Fest” in Las Vegas where now-presidential candidate Donald Trump was the featured speaker.

So, why bother with dead drops when you can just dispatch folks like Russian Senate Speaker Torshin and honeypot babe Maria Butina, who formed an intimate relationship with the chairman and CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick M. Byrne, who would go on to become a major Trump Stop the Steal conspiracy theorist and attend an Oval Office meeting with Michael Flynn and others when overturning the election results of 2020 was discussed with Trump. I mean, Butina and Torshin attended the National Prayer Breakfast at which Trump spoke, inaugural balls in 2017 that Trump attended, and parties at the Swiss Ambassador’s residence where they made contact with J.D. Gordon, a retired Naval officer who served as director of national security for the 2016 Trump campaign.

On and on and on I could go, but this should give you a flavor of what the Russians have been up to for the past decade or so in this country. Much more can be found in the final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller who, while unable to indict then-President Trump on multiple counts of obstruction of justice, was nevertheless able to lay out in excruciating detail how, under the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, SVR agents and hackers working for the Russian government infiltrated the American political system, exerted influence over the Trump campaign in 2016, helped to distribute hacked Democratic Party emails to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton – I could go on, but why bother?

Trump himself hired a man with ties to Russian intelligence, Paul Manafort, to chair his campaign. Manafort would share secret polling data on battleground states with Konstantin Kilimnik, a trained Russian spy who worked for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Putin who would be involved in Trump’s attempts to blackmail the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, into helping him defeat Biden in the election of 2020.

Remember a character by the name of Lev Parnas? How about Igor Fruman? What the hell were those two doing dining with Rudy Giuliani and President Donald Trump at his hotel in Washington in 2018, discussing how to get rid of the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch? They were both involved with Deripaska, to whom Manafort owed something like $12 million. They were eventually arrested at Dulles Airport by the FBI with one-way tickets to Austria through Germany and indicted and convicted of funneling foreign money to a Texas Republican Congressman, Rep. Pete Sessions, who helped them get Yovanovitch fired by writing a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who promptly did just that, recalling the ambassador to Ukraine without notice or giving a reason and allowing her only two days to leave her post in Kyiv.

Just to give you a flavor of how this stuff worked, a lawyer for Parnas, Joseph Bondy, wrote a letter to a federal judge attempting to get the U.S. Attorney in New York, Geoffrey Berman, to recuse himself from the Parnas case because of conflicts of interest. Bondy told the judge he had seen proof laying out how the U.S. attorney had gathered evidence on Parnas and from whom: “ The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump.”

All those high-ranking figures with close connections to Trump were implicated in trying to prevent the disclosure of secret connections to little old Lev Parnas. And why? How about because all of them were so neck deep in Trump’s Ukraine scandal that if Parnas’ connections were made public, they would lead directly to Russian intelligence assets like Deripaska and Kilimnik and oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and others, right up to and including the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

All of this was intended to destabilize the country of Ukraine, which under the leadership of Zelensky, was making noises about becoming closer to the European Union and maybe even joining NATO. And who was really, really pissed off about Ukraine? Pissed off enough that a few years later he would invade Zelensky’s country and try to depose him? Vladimir Putin.

Here is where our view from 1,000 feet comes in. Putin had been up to his games with the U.S. since Trump, who had announced he would run for president someday, took his Miss Universe pageant to Russia in 2013. Putin had backed right-wing candidates for office in countries like France and Germany and Poland and Hungary. He had his grubby power-grabbing fingers in the political life of countries on several continents, including Africa, South America, North America, and in the Near and Far East – remember Afghanistan before we decided to ignore the whole “graveyard of empires” thing and fuck things up over there. He had announced again and again that the fall of the Soviet Union was the most terrible thing that ever happened to his homeland, and although he had not yet announced it out loud, he was driven to do something about reconstituting Russia as the great power he considered it had always been and should be again.

So, he meddled. He meddled with businesses owned by his oligarchs. He meddled by making political deals to supply country after country with his oil and especially his gas reserves. He meddled by securing the Winter Olympics for Russia in Sochi and then engaging in a government-funded and government-driven plot to use performance enhancing drugs to have his people win and show Russia was a great power in sports once again.

But his biggest, most heavily-funded and closest-watched meddling was against Russia’s eternal big power rival, the United States. The whole “Ukraine scandal” that got Trump impeached was actually a power play by Putin to destabilize that country. Remember, as far back as 2014, he had seized Crimea and had his military, in uniforms without identifying insignia, fighting full time in Eastern Ukraine alongside Russian-speaking rebel Ukrainians. Remember that his boy Manafort was the one who had the Ukraine plank removed from the Republican platform in 2016. Who do you think was behind that? Manafort had already been working with Konstantin Kilimnik for years by then, and Kilimnik was Deripaska’s man in Ukraine. (Of course, this was before the Republican Party in 2020 just threw up its hands and said their platform was anything that Trump and his Russian handlers wanted to do.)

And now here we are about to enter the second year of Russia’s war to take over Ukraine, and what do we see when we take a look at Putin and his meddling and his “military might” presently being exercised in Ukraine? We see a man and an army that couldn’t even drive its tanks to within shooting distance of the capital of Ukraine, before they were driven back by Ukrainian soldiers on foot expertly executing ambushes and other forms of guerrilla warfare against the far more heavily armed Russian army. We see a man who couldn’t manipulate American politics for a second time and keep his man in the White House.

What we see is a paper-mache tiger with an intelligence service and a military so hollowed-out and corrupt that they were able to feed him a fiction that he, and Russia, and its army were still great when they weren’t. They could move Maria Butina around and place her in rooms with important American political and business figures – and in bed with one of them – but they couldn’t move even one tank onto a broad boulevard in the much smaller and weaker country of Ukraine.

We have seen all of Putin’s efforts at exerting his influence abroad in our own country. Hell, the man who would become Trump’s national security adviser sat next to him at the dinner Putin ginned-up for him to give a speech at way back in 2015. Republicans were able to make the whole Ukraine scandal go away with votes in the Senate at the first impeachment trial, and they were able to discredit the Mueller report with Barr as Attorney General back in 2019, but the whole story of Putin’s influence campaign in 2015 and 2016 is in there for all to read.

If you want evidence they’re still at it, you need look no further than the campaign of that lying sack of shit, George Santos, or Anthony Devolder, or whatever he’s calling himself this week. They sank $50,000 in the campaign of a single congressional candidate on Long Island using coffers controlled by one of Putin’s best friends, Viktor Vekselberg. Why would they do this? Why would they give illegal money to the reelection campaign of another single congressman from Texas, Pete Sessions, using that buffoon, Lev Parnas?

Ever heard of Mark Meadows? He was once a little ‘ole congressman from North CarolinaRep, and what do you know? He got himself an office in the West Wing right down the hall from the President of the United States as his Chief of Staff. You don’t think Vladimir Putin plays the long game? I give you George Santos, a pro-Russia Republican in the exact mold of Donald Trump. They’ll do it again, and then they’ll do it again and one day while we haven’t got our eyes on the ball and we’re being distracted by some new shiny thing over there, they might do it again with a figure slightly less felonious than Santos – but only slightly. Because we’re talking about the Republican Party here, folks – the party that is in the process of elevating Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene into the upper reaches of its leadership ranks.

Have you heard Marjorie on Ukraine and Russia lately? If she has her way, we won’t send another cent to Zelensky, and Putin will be presiding over a victory parade in Kyiv — that is, if there are enough of his troops left to goose-step down the boulevard for him.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Santos Saga Features Russian Oligarch, His Bagman, And Paul Manafort

Santos Saga Features Russian Oligarch, His Bagman, And Paul Manafort

I love writing these columns. Do you love reading them? You can out by becoming a paid subscriber or giving someone a gift subscription to my Substack for New Years!

Folks, it’s never a good sign when two county prosecutors and the federal government are looking into your undies drawer. The Queens County District Attorney's office announced today that they are looking into any potential crimes committed by serial liar and erstwhile representative-elect from New York’s Third Congressional district, covering northern Nassau County and parts of the Borough of Queens. The offices of the Nassau County District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York have also announced investigations into whether Santos has committed any crimes.

It also became known yesterday that Santos lied about his mother’s death. He had already lied about his mother’s birth and possibly her name, but this time he claimed that his mother was working in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and survived the terrorist attack that day but died a few days later. No one has been able to find any records of his mother’s passing in 2001, but Santos himself helpfully tweeted on December 23rd of last year that the date marked the five year anniversary of his mother’s death, which would put her passing in 2016, a year there were no terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center or anywhere else in the United States for that matter, unless you include November 8, when Donald Trump won an election he claimed was “rigged” for the presidency.

And it emerged this week that Santos was the recipient of some $56,100 in various campaign contributions from Andrew Intrater and his wife. Intrater is or has been an investment adviser to his cousin, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vekselberg was sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2018 for his ties to Putin and the Russian computer hacking group indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for interfering in the 2016 election. Vekselberg was stopped by FBI agents at Teterboro Airport in 2018 and questioned about his ties to the Russian government. His cell phone was also seized.

Vekselberg also attended Trump’s 2016 inauguration and was present at the infamous dinner in Moscow in 2015 when Michael Flynn sat next to Putin and was the featured speaker. Flynn was then employed by the Trump campaign as its chief foreign affairs advisor and would go on to become Trump’s first national security adviser. His term in office lasted just over two weeks before he was fired for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about lifting sanctions imposed by the Obama Administration on Russian officials and certain oligarchs for their involvement in trying to influence the 2016 election.

Vekselberg was the single largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus, a bank which was involved in funneling money to Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, when he was working for the right-wing government of Ukraine. Manafort was indicted, tried, and convicted of financial crimes involving his time as a political adviser to pro-Russian candidate for the Ukrainian presidency, Viktor Yanukovych, who won the office but was later ousted by Ukrainian demonstrators in a “soft” revolution seeking closer ties to NATO and the European Union. Yanukovych fled Ukraine, leaving behind a gaudy palace he had built for himself, along with a private zoo of exotic animals.

Here is where it gets more and more interesting. In February of this year, in the weeks before Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, Santos was busy tweeting pro-Russian garbage and attacking President Biden: “Joe Biden is willing to start a war in Eastern Europe and send American soldiers to a deadly combat zone to protect Ukraine’s border, but fails miserably to protect the American southern border,” was one tweet on February 2, just three weeks before the Russian invasion. Ten days later, on February 12, Santos tweeted: “We are going to enter a war in the middle of the Eastern Europe winter against Russia, to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine. Meanwhile this is the sight at the US southern border, where our sovereignty is no longer a priority.” Both tweets were accompanied with photos of immigrants crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

At the time Santos made these tweets, his campaign had already received $32,800 from Intrater, the cousin and money manager for Vekselberg, friend of Putin and owner of most of Russia’s aluminum industry. Later this year, in the midst of his campaign for Congress, Santos told the Washington Post that Ukrainians had “welcomed the Russians into their provinces.” He went on to tell the paper, “It’s not like Ukraine is a great democracy. It’s a totalitarian regime. They’re not a great bastion of freedom.”

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Santos went on Fox News and claimed that his grandfather was Ukrainian. On the date of the invasion, Santos tweeted, “Pray for Ukraine!”

As I reported yesterday, The Forward located genealogy records proving that Santos’ grandparents were born in Brazil before World War II, shooting down his claims that they were Holocaust survivors who escaped Europe through Brussels.

The Daily Beast reported this week that the lying sack of shit only began using the name Santos after his association with a Ponzi scheme in Florida that collapsed, costing investors in the scheme more than $17 million. Before that, “Santos” was calling himself George Devolder. When he first ran for Congress in 2020, he began calling himself George Devolder-Santos, and then this year ran as plain old George Santos. It is unclear what names his purported Ukrainian grandparents used.

It is clear, however, that Santos received one hell of a lot of money from Andrew Intrater and his wife. The Daily Beast reported that Intrater poured $20,000 into something called GADS PAC, “a leadership political action committee bearing the candidates initials, plus $12,100 to Devolder Santos Nassau Victory, a joint fundraising committee formed with the Nassau County Republican Party.” The Nassau County Republican Party announced this week that it would not back Santos if he runs for reelection in 2024.

Everyone has been wondering where this character Santos, who only recently was being evicted from rundown apartments in Queens and stiffing friends who loaned him money, got the cash to run for Congress this year. He “loaned” $700,000 to his own campaign using money no one can find the source of, other than the company he set up and dissolved within a single year called the Devolder Organization.

Santos, who used the name Devolder when he was fleecing Floridians out of their hard-earned savings, is now claiming that’s his middle name. But who knows? He also claimed that his company “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida. That was before he claimed in a radio interview that they weren’t exactly employees but were potential employees “in the process of being hired.”

But that was before he was taking money from friends of Putin and accusing Ukraine of being a “totalitarian regime,” which was before he was taking the side of Ukraine in its war with Russia…but who knows? Maybe tomorrow he’ll claim his Brazilian heritage and jump on a jet and move into his non-existent apartment in Rio worth “between $500,001 and $1 million.” That is, if he hasn’t faced yet another eviction by then.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Trump Pal Got Emirati Bonanza While Lobbying White House

Trump Pal Got Emirati Bonanza While Lobbying White House

Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a billionaire fundraiser and longtime friend of former President Trump, sought hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the United Arab Emirates for an investment fund that would reinforce the former president’s agenda and benefit from his administration’s policies, federal prosecutors said in a Tuesday court filing.

The filing was a superseding indictment that levied additional charges on Barrack for lying to federal investigators, lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of the UAE, and conspiring with Emiratis to influence the Trump campaign.

Federal prosecutors also said that Barrack’s investment management firm, Colony Capital — which, per NBC News, wasn’t named in the filing — received a sudden injection of $374 million in capital commitments from two UAE wealth funds after not receiving any funds from the country in seven years prior, from 2009 to 2016.

In a 55-page superseding indictment, which replaced the original 46-page court filing, the Justice Department closely details how although the pro-Trump fund’s “primary purpose” was to earn profits, it quickly adopted “a secondary mandate to garner political credibility for its contributions to the policies” of the Trump administration, federal prosecutors said in the filing, quoting what a top Trump aide wrote in a “U.A.E Fund” plan in the weeks after the 2020 election, according to the New York Times.

The Times also reported that the plan claimed the fund would make money by “sourcing, financing, operationally improving and harvesting assets” in industries that would “benefit the most” from the Trump administration. Federal prosecutors cited the fund as evidence that Barrack wanted to profit from his illegal lobbying of Trump and his circle on behalf of Emiratis.

The Justice Department also accused Barrack of making “multiple false statements” when he lied to the FBI in a 2019 interview with the bureau. The amended indictment charged Barrack for allegedly lying he had one phone when he, in fact, had a secret line solely dedicated to his communication with the Emiratis. Barrack was also accused of lying when he denied engineering phone calls between then-President-Elect Trump and two Emiratis officials in 2016.

Last year, the Justice Department accused Barrack and two co-conspirators, Mathew Grimes and Rashid Al-Malik, of “acting and conspiring to act as agents of the UAE” from April 2016 to April 2018.

“The defendants repeatedly capitalized on Barrack’s friendships and access to a candidate who was eventually elected President, high-ranking campaign and government officials, and the American media to advance the policy goals of a foreign government without disclosing their true allegiances,” said the Department of Justice in a statement.

The indictment also cited April 2017 email and text message communications investigators obtained from the suspects, which stated Barrack could meet with the Emirati ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Abu Dhabi crown prince at the time.

Although there is no evidence that the meeting ever took place, the indictment stated that Barrack’s company, now known as DigitalBridge Group, received multi-million dollar capital investments in the following months. Internal company records attributed the massive investment to “Barrack magic,” the New York Times said.

According to a 2019 congressional oversight committee report, Barrack sent the Emiratis a copy of a Trump campaign speech about Energy he had drafted — and permitted Emiratis to recommend amends to — that praised Shiekh by name, the New York Times reported.

“They loved it so much! This is great,” responded co-conspirator Malik, who is still at large outside the United States. The speech also contained mild language favorable to the Emiratis: a pledge to "work with our Gulf allies.”

The Emirati meddling increased in scale after that, according to the indictment. In the weeks leading up to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Barrack worked with Paul Manafort, former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, to water down the GOP platform at the Emiratis' behest.

“Can be much more expansive than what we did in the speech,” Manafort wrote Barrack in an email, “based on what you hear from your friends,” referring to the Emiratis.

In the indictment, federal prosecutors also alleged that Barrack and several Emirati officials worked together to arrange a phone call Trump had with Sheikh Mohammed during the transition in November 2016. “It’s done, great call,” co-conspirator Malik wrote in thanks to Barrack’s aide.

Barrack pleaded not guilty to the original counts filed last year and is awaiting trial, and his representative declined to comment on the superseding indictment. A spokesperson for Trump also ignored requests for comment.

Paul Manafort

Treasury Cites Manafort’s Election Espionage In New Russia Sanctions

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

After four long years of the former U.S. guy being a lapdog to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin's bill is finally coming due for its years-long cyber espionage campaign against the United States.

The Biden administration said Thursday it was imposing a new round of sanctions to constrict the Russian economy along with sanctioning six Russian companies that aid Russian Intelligence services, according to TheWashington Post. In addition, the administration is expelling ten Russian intelligence officers posing as diplomats in the U.S.

Alongside the punitive actions, the Biden administration formalized a series of previously reported accusations about Moscow:

  • It officially blamed the Russian intelligence services for the extensive SolarWinds cyber hack that compromised thousands of government agencies and private sector entities alike. "The Russian Intelligence Services — specifically the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) — have executed some of the most dangerous and disruptive cyber attacks in recent history, including the SolarWinds cyber attack," according to sanctions outlined on the Treasury Department website.
  • It charged that the FSB (the Russian intelligence service) was directly involved in the August 2020 chemical poisoning of political Putin foe Aleksey Navalny; and further said the GRU (the Russian military intelligence service) "materially contributed to the possession, transportation, and use of Novichok" in the March 2018 poisoning of former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K.
  • Finally, for the very first time, the U.S. government connected the dots between sensitive polling from the Trump campaign being passed from Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik to Russian intelligence agencies. You'll recall, this was the polling Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort delivered to Kilimnik in an infamous cigar bar meeting. But now, the U.S. government is confirming that Kilimnik then delivered that information to Kremlin spy agencies. "During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy," reads a statement on the Treasury site. "Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election."

What the Biden administration did not confirm was the allegation that Russia had placed bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan in 2019, an intelligence estimate in which U.S. agencies had expressed low to moderate confidence. But the administration also didn't entirely dismiss the allegation; it simply didn't tie the forthcoming sanctions to it.

"But we do believe that this information puts the burden on the Russian government to explain its action and takes steps to address this disturbing pattern of behavior," the senior administration official said. "We expressed those concerns directly to the government of Russia."

According to the Post, "the package includes sanctions on all debt Russia issues after June 14, barring U.S. financial institutions from buying government bonds directly from the Russian Central Bank, Russian National Wealth Fund and the Ministry of Finance." The intended effect is to hinder Moscow's ability to raise money in global capital markets.

President Biden is walking a line with Moscow, trying to maintain open communication channels with the Kremlin while also drawing the line at its aggressive attacks on U.S. democracy and national interests.

"Our view is that no single action that we will take or could take in and of itself could directly alter Russia's malign behavior," Principal Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Finer said. "But this is going to be a process that is going to take place over time, and it will involve a mix of significant pressure and finding ways to work together."

Packaging the punitive measures together is designed to allow the administration to move from a reactionary posture to a more proactive one.

"It's good to clearly message our priorities to Russia," Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told the Post. "By packaging a response to several things at once, the administration can get off the back foot and move on its agenda. What we don't want is to always be in response mode to Russia."