[h=3]Former Trump campaign chairman to register as foreign agent[/h]
[h=6]By JEFF HORWITZ, CHAD DAY and JULIE PACE[/h]
[h=6]1 hour ago[/h]
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort will register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for lobbying work he did on behalf of political interests in Ukraine, led at the time by a pro-Russian political party, his spokesman said Wednesday.
Manafort is the second Trump campaign adviser to have to register as a foreign agent since the election. The confirmation that he intends to register comes as the Trump administration has been facing heavy scrutiny over the foreign ties of former campaign advisers and other Trump associates.
By registering retroactively, Manafort will be acknowledging that he failed to properly disclose his work to the Justice Department as required by federal law.
The Justice Department rarely prosecutes such violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, but Manafort will now have to publicly and specifically detail his foreign agent work. That includes which American government agencies and officials he sought to influence, how he was paid and the details of contracts he signed as part of the work. Before, Manafort had been able to keep much of that information out of public view.
Manafort began discussions with the government about his lobbying activities after Trump hired him in March 2016, Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said, although it was unclear whether those conversations occurred before or after Trump forced Manafort to resign in August.
Manafort has recently been given guidance by federal authorities related to whether he should register as a foreign agent, Maloni said. Asked by The Associated Press whether Manafort intends to register as a foreign agent, Maloni said: "Yes, he is registering."
Manafort's resignation from the campaign came immediately after the AP had reported that Manafort's consulting firm between 2012 and 2014 orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine's ruling political party without disclosing that it was working as a foreign agent.
Manafort's decision to register as a foreign agent comes about one month after former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn registered with the Justice Department for work he did that could have benefited the Turkish government. The filing came after Trump fired Flynn in February, saying that Flynn had misled administration top officials about his contacts with Russia.
Also this week, the White House has faced questions about the influence of Carter Page, who advised the campaign on foreign policy. The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that the government obtained a secret warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last summer to monitor Page's communications.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump was aware that Manafort needed to register as a foreign agent.
Earlier Wednesday, one of the Washington lobbying firms that worked on the influence campaign under the direction of Manafort and his former deputy, Rick Gates, itself registered after the fact with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. It acknowledged its work could have principally benefited Ukraine's government. The other firm involved, Mercury LLC, later said it also would register soon as a foreign agent for its work.
Federal prosecutors have been looking into Manafort's work for years as part of an effort to recover Ukrainian assets stolen after the 2014 ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. No charges have been filed as part of the investigation.
Separately, Manafort is also under scrutiny as part of congressional and FBI investigations into possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia's government under President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Manafort has said: "I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation," and his spokesman, Maloni, has said there was nothing improper about his political consulting in Ukraine, including how he was paid.
Gates, who has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions, helped plan Trump's inauguration and until last month was involved in a nonprofit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda. Gates did not respond to text messages left by the AP on Wednesday. His voicemail box was full.
The Podesta Group disclosed details of the lobbying it did from 2012 through 2014 on behalf of a Brussels-based nonprofit, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. The lobbying firm, run by the brother of Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta, reported in its filing that it was paid more than $1.2 million for its efforts. It cited unspecified "information brought to light in recent months" and conversations with Justice Department employees as the reason for its decision.
Mercury LLC told the AP just hours later that it also intends to file with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
In an August interview, Mercury partner Vin Weber told the AP that his firm had never taken guidance from or coordinated with Manafort or Gates about the work. Emails obtained by the AP contradicted that and showed that Gates directly oversaw and guided the lobbying work Mercury conducted.
Asked why Mercury did not consider registering with the Justice Department earlier, Mercury partner Michael McKeon declined to say what had changed.
"I'm not going to get into that," he told the AP. "We relied on our counsel."
The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires people working on behalf of foreign political leaders to disclose their efforts to the Justice Department. Willfully failing to register is a felony, though the department rarely files criminal charges in such cases. It routinely works with lobbying firms to help them get back in compliance by registering and disclosing their work.
The Podesta Group and Mercury had previously disclosed their lobbying work to Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, but neither firm had registered with the Justice Department. A foreign agent registration requires lobbying firms to disclose more details about their work than is required under the congressional registration, including the details of the lobbying contract, individual contacts with American officials and any attempts to influence U.S. public opinion.
In a statement to the AP, Kimberley Fritts, CEO of the Podesta Group, said that the Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration unit worked with the firm to make sure it was complying with federal law.
"We have, and will continue to have, no hesitation doing so to underscore our commitment to transparency," Fritts said.
Fritts said that the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine had certified to the Podesta Group that it was not a vehicle of a foreign government or political party, which is why the lobbying firm only previously registered with Congress. Fritts did not say what information had been brought to light to change that determination.
The Podesta Group has previously acknowledged to AP that Manafort's firm, DMP International, had provided guidance about the lobbying effort. It said officials there did not understand that Manafort and Gates were simultaneously being paid by the Party of Regions.
As the AP reported in August, the lobbying effort included not only traditional outreach to politicians in Washington but attempts to influence American public opinion and gather political intelligence on competing lobbying efforts in the U.S. The details of the lobbying effort were detailed in emails obtained by the AP last year.
The new paperwork identified Obama administration officials, legislators, reporters and editorial writers whose offices the lobbyists contacted. They included contacts with congressional leaders including emails and calls to staffers for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., both strong supporters at the time of sanctions against Yanukovych's government.
By October 2013, as relations deteriorated between the Obama administration and Yanukovych, the lobbying effort appeared to intensify. Three times that month, for example, Podesta lobbyists contacted staffers for Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who had sponsored sanctions legislation.
One of them was Dan Harsha, now associate director of communications at Harvard University's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Harsha said he did not recall specific lobbying conversations but said congressional staffers were aware that the European Center was a pro-Yanukovych entity.
"How many obscure European think tanks were able to hire sophisticated A-list lobbyists?" he said. "It was widely assumed the think tank was a conduit for Yanukovych and it was treated as such on the Hill."
The European Centre did not immediately respond to phone messages and emails from the AP.
___
Associated Press writer Stephen Braun contributed to this report.
[h=6]By JEFF HORWITZ, CHAD DAY and JULIE PACE[/h]
[h=6]1 hour ago[/h]
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort will register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for lobbying work he did on behalf of political interests in Ukraine, led at the time by a pro-Russian political party, his spokesman said Wednesday.
Manafort is the second Trump campaign adviser to have to register as a foreign agent since the election. The confirmation that he intends to register comes as the Trump administration has been facing heavy scrutiny over the foreign ties of former campaign advisers and other Trump associates.
By registering retroactively, Manafort will be acknowledging that he failed to properly disclose his work to the Justice Department as required by federal law.
The Justice Department rarely prosecutes such violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, but Manafort will now have to publicly and specifically detail his foreign agent work. That includes which American government agencies and officials he sought to influence, how he was paid and the details of contracts he signed as part of the work. Before, Manafort had been able to keep much of that information out of public view.
Manafort began discussions with the government about his lobbying activities after Trump hired him in March 2016, Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said, although it was unclear whether those conversations occurred before or after Trump forced Manafort to resign in August.
Manafort has recently been given guidance by federal authorities related to whether he should register as a foreign agent, Maloni said. Asked by The Associated Press whether Manafort intends to register as a foreign agent, Maloni said: "Yes, he is registering."
Manafort's resignation from the campaign came immediately after the AP had reported that Manafort's consulting firm between 2012 and 2014 orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine's ruling political party without disclosing that it was working as a foreign agent.
Manafort's decision to register as a foreign agent comes about one month after former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn registered with the Justice Department for work he did that could have benefited the Turkish government. The filing came after Trump fired Flynn in February, saying that Flynn had misled administration top officials about his contacts with Russia.
Also this week, the White House has faced questions about the influence of Carter Page, who advised the campaign on foreign policy. The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that the government obtained a secret warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last summer to monitor Page's communications.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump was aware that Manafort needed to register as a foreign agent.
Earlier Wednesday, one of the Washington lobbying firms that worked on the influence campaign under the direction of Manafort and his former deputy, Rick Gates, itself registered after the fact with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. It acknowledged its work could have principally benefited Ukraine's government. The other firm involved, Mercury LLC, later said it also would register soon as a foreign agent for its work.
Federal prosecutors have been looking into Manafort's work for years as part of an effort to recover Ukrainian assets stolen after the 2014 ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia. No charges have been filed as part of the investigation.
Separately, Manafort is also under scrutiny as part of congressional and FBI investigations into possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia's government under President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Manafort has said: "I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation," and his spokesman, Maloni, has said there was nothing improper about his political consulting in Ukraine, including how he was paid.
Gates, who has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions, helped plan Trump's inauguration and until last month was involved in a nonprofit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda. Gates did not respond to text messages left by the AP on Wednesday. His voicemail box was full.
The Podesta Group disclosed details of the lobbying it did from 2012 through 2014 on behalf of a Brussels-based nonprofit, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. The lobbying firm, run by the brother of Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta, reported in its filing that it was paid more than $1.2 million for its efforts. It cited unspecified "information brought to light in recent months" and conversations with Justice Department employees as the reason for its decision.
Mercury LLC told the AP just hours later that it also intends to file with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
In an August interview, Mercury partner Vin Weber told the AP that his firm had never taken guidance from or coordinated with Manafort or Gates about the work. Emails obtained by the AP contradicted that and showed that Gates directly oversaw and guided the lobbying work Mercury conducted.
Asked why Mercury did not consider registering with the Justice Department earlier, Mercury partner Michael McKeon declined to say what had changed.
"I'm not going to get into that," he told the AP. "We relied on our counsel."
The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires people working on behalf of foreign political leaders to disclose their efforts to the Justice Department. Willfully failing to register is a felony, though the department rarely files criminal charges in such cases. It routinely works with lobbying firms to help them get back in compliance by registering and disclosing their work.
The Podesta Group and Mercury had previously disclosed their lobbying work to Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, but neither firm had registered with the Justice Department. A foreign agent registration requires lobbying firms to disclose more details about their work than is required under the congressional registration, including the details of the lobbying contract, individual contacts with American officials and any attempts to influence U.S. public opinion.
In a statement to the AP, Kimberley Fritts, CEO of the Podesta Group, said that the Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration unit worked with the firm to make sure it was complying with federal law.
"We have, and will continue to have, no hesitation doing so to underscore our commitment to transparency," Fritts said.
Fritts said that the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine had certified to the Podesta Group that it was not a vehicle of a foreign government or political party, which is why the lobbying firm only previously registered with Congress. Fritts did not say what information had been brought to light to change that determination.
The Podesta Group has previously acknowledged to AP that Manafort's firm, DMP International, had provided guidance about the lobbying effort. It said officials there did not understand that Manafort and Gates were simultaneously being paid by the Party of Regions.
As the AP reported in August, the lobbying effort included not only traditional outreach to politicians in Washington but attempts to influence American public opinion and gather political intelligence on competing lobbying efforts in the U.S. The details of the lobbying effort were detailed in emails obtained by the AP last year.
The new paperwork identified Obama administration officials, legislators, reporters and editorial writers whose offices the lobbyists contacted. They included contacts with congressional leaders including emails and calls to staffers for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., both strong supporters at the time of sanctions against Yanukovych's government.
By October 2013, as relations deteriorated between the Obama administration and Yanukovych, the lobbying effort appeared to intensify. Three times that month, for example, Podesta lobbyists contacted staffers for Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who had sponsored sanctions legislation.
One of them was Dan Harsha, now associate director of communications at Harvard University's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Harsha said he did not recall specific lobbying conversations but said congressional staffers were aware that the European Center was a pro-Yanukovych entity.
"How many obscure European think tanks were able to hire sophisticated A-list lobbyists?" he said. "It was widely assumed the think tank was a conduit for Yanukovych and it was treated as such on the Hill."
The European Centre did not immediately respond to phone messages and emails from the AP.
___
Associated Press writer Stephen Braun contributed to this report.
45mEric Lipton
@EricLiptonNYT
[h=1]Retroactively registering as a foreign agent is equivalent to an admission you violated a federal criminal law. [/h]
Lobbying firm registers as foreign agent for Ukraine workapnews.com
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article144272014.html#storylink=cpy
Paul Manafort, a former chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, indicated Wednesday that, on the advice of U.S. authorities, that he would register as a foreign agent “for some of his past political work,” presumably in Ukraine.
Such a move would add a new embarrassment to an administration dealing with investigations into possible collaboration with Russia during last year’s campaign. It also underscores the legal pressure on Manafort, who faces FBI, Justice Department and Treasury Department investigations, sources have told McClatchy.
It also means that Manafort is likely to acknowledge that he worked for years on behalf of a foreign government without revealing it.
ADVERTISING
Manafort’s disclosure came on the same day as a Washington lobbying firm registered as a foreign agent for its representation of a Belgium-based think tank with ties to Manafort and the Kiev government. The lobbying occurred in Washington from 2012 to 2014.
Manafort’s spokesman, Jason Maloni, said the work at issue happened before he joined Trump’s campaign and was not conducted on behalf of Russia. The globetrotting political consultant headed the campaign for about two months before departing in August when questions arose about his foreign business dealings.
While Manafort has challenged the ledger’s authenticity, the Associated Press said Wednesday it has obtained documents showing Manafort’s Washington consulting firm received $1.2 million in payments matching listings in the ledger.
In a brief statement, Maloni also said that, “since before the 2016 election, Mr. Manafort has been in discussions with federal authorities about the advisability of registering” under the federal law requiring those who act on behalf of a foreign government or a foreign political party to register with the Justice Department.
“Mr. Manafort received formal guidance recently from the authorities, and he is taking appropriate steps in response to the guidance,” Maloni said.
The 79-year-old Foreign Agents Registration Act requires any U.S.-based person or business to register within 10 days of any activity covered by the statute.
Failure for years to have complied with the Foreign Agents Registration Act is considered a “continuing offense.” The law carries maximum penalties of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. It’s rare that a violation leads to imprisonment.
The AP reported recently that in 2006, Manafort signed a contract calling for payments of $10 million per year from a Russian billionaire in return for political consulting and for promoting the Kremlin’s interests. The billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, responded to that report by vehemently denying acting on behalf of the Kremlin in ads published in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He threatened to sue the AP.
McClatchy reported on March 29 that the FBI, Justice Department and Treasury Department are investigating whether any of Manafort’s consulting income in Ukraine was laundered from corrupt sources, whether he properly disclosed all his foreign bank accounts each year to the U.S. government, whether he paid taxes on all foreign income and whether he registered as a foreign agent, according to two individuals familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously because the criminal inquiries are ongoing.
Investigators examining Manafort’s compliance with the foreign agents registration law have focused on a think tank in Brussels, The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which paid at least $2.2 million to two U.S. lobbying firms to burnish the image of Yanukovych’s government in Washington, the sources said. The firms in question are the Podesta Group and Mercury Group LLC.
Former Minnesota Republican Rep. Vin Weber, who was directly involved in the Mercury Group’s lobbying, said in a phone interview last year that Manafort had “approached” him about taking on the think tank as a client. At the time, the Kiev government was pushing for Ukraine’s entry to the European Union before Yanukovych tilted his policies toward Moscow.
Manafort and Rick Gates, a top Manafort aide in the Ukraine who later joined him in the Trump campaign, maintained initially that they had nothing to do with the think tank. While lobbying for the think tank, Weber said, “we had some contact with Gates, too.”
Greg Gordon: 202-383-6152, @greggordon2
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article144272014.html#storylink=cpy
I thought by now the whole world knew Russia and Trump were not colluding, while the democrats and the media were colluding, and still are
I suppose people still selling their fake narrative gives the lying media and their democratic partners hope
sorry for the interruption to the regularly scheduled programming, carry on
here, I'll help, "the Trump presidency is already a colossal failure, he hasn't even built a wall, we still have a deficit, and he's responsible for United Airlines dragging a passenger off the plane"
Resist Resist Resist
BLM
kill conservatives
destroy your neighbors property
whoop whoop whoop
I suppose people still selling their fake narrative gives the lying media and their democratic partners hope
sorry for the interruption to the regularly scheduled programming, carry on
here, I'll help, "the Trump presidency is already a colossal failure, he hasn't even built a wall, we still have a deficit, and he's responsible for United Airlines dragging a passenger off the plane"
Resist Resist Resist
BLM
kill conservatives
destroy your neighbors property
whoop whoop whoop
OPINION
[h=1]KremlinGate and the Limits of Classified Evidence[/h][h=2]The FBI’s been investigating possible links between the Kremlin and President Trump for nearly a year—here’s why it’s moving so slowly[/h]By John R. Schindler • 04/12/17 9:30am
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Report: FBI granted FISA warrant to monitor Trump adviser Carter Page
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President Trump’s Russia problem is off the front pages for the first time in months. In retaliation for the Assad regime’s continued use of chemical weapons against civilians, Trump attacked a Syrian airbase using 59 cruise missiles launched from U.S. Navy ships.
To the great distress of many of the president’s most ardent fans, the Trump White House has honored Obama’s Syrian “red line,” which his predecessor so embarrassingly walked away from almost four years ago, thereby handing the Syrian problem—and much of the Middle East—over to Vladimir Putin. It’s no wonder that the Kremlin is suddenly critical of the new administration, using strong words to express its displeasure with Trump’s muscular act against the Assad regime, which is Moscow’s loyal client.
But none of this means the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of KremlinGate is going away. In fact, we now know that it’s been underway for almost a year. According to a new reportin The New York Times, John Brennan, the CIA director during President Obama’s second term, knew last summer that Kremlin interference in our election was a serious and fast-growing problem. He was so worried that, in late August, Brennan personally briefed eight senior members of Congress on new evidence of Russia’s meddling—in some cases, the CIA director interrupted their summer vacations to share the bad news.
The Times doesn’t indicate what that urgent new intelligence was, but members of the Intelligence Community with access to that evidence have told me there are several top-secret reports—mainly, but not exclusively, signals intelligence from NSA—demonstrating links between Team Trump and top Kremlin officials, hinting at collusion with Moscow during last year’s election. Although none of these reports individually is conclusive—there is no “smoking gun” as Beltway wonks like to say—taken together they lead to the disturbing finding that Trump’s campaign was in cahoots with Moscow to hurt Hillary Clinton. That the IC knew much of this last summer invites disturbing questions about the Obama administration’s puzzling inaction last fall, in the weeks leading to the election.
FBI director James Comey has tamped down expectations of any quick resolution of his Bureau’s investigation of KremlinGate. He is surely correct that this weighty matter is best addressed thoroughly and judiciously, not rashly. We need the facts—not assertions or unprovable claims from dodgy dossiers. The existence of top-secret evidence pointing to collusion between Team Trump and Team Putin means that investigators and prosecutors have red meat to work with, but that does not necessarily mean that indictments are coming soon.
Comey faces a particular problem, little understood by the public or even by most journalists covering KremlinGate. That’s the fact that classified evidence is inadmissible in court, and top-secret information will never be shown to a jury. FBI agents therefore face the uncomfortable difficulty of knowing (from highly classified reports) what was going on—and finding unclassified corroboration if they want to prosecute anybody.
Hence the pressing need to get co-conspirators to “flip” on each other and, even better, coercing confessions from those facing possible prison time. This is the usual FBI modus operandi, and it’s most effective against smaller fish who aren’t eager to take the rap for bigger ones. We can safely assume that the Bureau will lean on former members of Team Trump to get confessions; here the recent ham-handed effort by Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security guru, a man with plenty of odd ties to the Kremlin himself, to get immunity in exchange for telling what he knows seems relevant.
Without such cooperation, including confessions from at least some members of Team Trump, the transition of KremlinGate from the investigation phase to prosecution is likely to stall. We don’t know exactly what the FBI knows, but some examples from past counterintelligence cases can illuminate the conundrum the Bureau faces right now.
Take the remarkable story of VENONA, the above-top-secret NSA program which at the dawn of the Cold War gave investigators a look into encrypted Soviet intelligence communications. Armed with VENONA, the FBI painstakingly identified numerous American agents of the Soviet secret police and military intelligence—that is, KGB and GRU. But such top-secret evidence was known to very few officials—President Truman was “read into” VENONA only in his last months in office—and served as lead information only.
In the notorious Rosenberg case, top-secret intelligence from NSA led to confessions from members of the KGB spy ring run by Julius Rosenberg. Yet he and his wife Ethel were convicted and executed not on the basis of VENONA, which proved the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies yet couldn’t be shown in court, rather thanks to lots of circumstantial evidence plus the confession of Ethel’s brother, who sent his sister and brother-in-law to the electric chair to save his own skin. The Justice Department relied on such unsavory tactics to win cases when the real evidence they possessed was classified.
U.S. President Donald Trump. Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images
That MO didn’t work as well on Alger Hiss, the State Department official with a side gig as a GRU spymaster whose involvement in espionage for the Soviet Union was proven by VENONAintercepts. A cagey lawyer, Hiss stood his ground and created doubts about the witnesses against him, and ultimately was convicted of perjury, not espionage. He served less than four years in prison and remained a left-wing icon until the mid-1990s, when VENONA messages illuminating his secret GRU career were declassified by NSA.
In some cases, important Soviet spies were never charged with, much less convicted of, any crimes. Take the case of Ted Hall, a physics prodigy who graduated from Harvard at 18 and went to work on the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb, in early 1944. A few months later, Hall approached the KGB, offering the Soviets atomic secrets—a treachery which placed Hall in no less than eight VENONA messages. The classified case against him was airtight.
Therefore, in 1951, armed with top-secret details of his clandestine Kremlin career, the FBI interviewed Hall, trying to get him to confess, but he stood his ground. His denials were firm. Bureau efforts to break Hall’s friend and fellow KGB agent Saville Sax likewise failed. Without a confession from either man, the FBI had no case they could take to court, and both Hall and Sax walked away, free men.
Other suspects broke quickly under FBI pressure. In the spring of 1950, the Bureau confronted Jones Orin York, who appeared in VENONA as a Soviet spy who had passed classified military secrets to Moscow. York admitted what he had done and named his KGB handler on the West Coast in the early 1940s, one “Bill Villesband.” Quick work by the Bureau revealed that his actual name was William Weisband—and he was working in the heart of American intelligence, inside the codebreaking effort against Moscow.
Bill Weisband in fact had been a Soviet spy since at least the mid-1930s, and he betrayed countless secrets to the Kremlin, including top-secret programs which broke into high-level Soviet military communications. He was a highly productive agent and agent-handler for the KGB. Thanks to Weisband, Moscow knew about VENONA (where the traitor appeared in at least two messages) several years before the White House did.
The FBI leaned on Weisband, to no avail. He firmly denied accusations of espionage and the case against him stalled. He was convicted of failure to appear before a Federal grand jury and did a year in prison, then returned to obscurity. Despite arguably being the most damaging traitor in American history, Weisband was never charged with espionage. NSA was just as happy to have the embarrassing Weisband debacle be forgotten, as it was until the late 1990s, when VENONA revelations got the case a modicum of attention.
The FBI today may be armed with reams of top-secret intelligence about KremlinGate. If Edward Snowden didn’t compromise it when he fled to Moscow, perhaps NSA has excellent information about this saga—something like VENONA 2.0. Yet even with such top-secret gems, the Bureau must convert SIGINT into indictments that will stick, which is never an easy task. Nobody should expect a quick resolution of this complex and most important case.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
[h=1]KremlinGate and the Limits of Classified Evidence[/h][h=2]The FBI’s been investigating possible links between the Kremlin and President Trump for nearly a year—here’s why it’s moving so slowly[/h]By John R. Schindler • 04/12/17 9:30am
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President Trump’s Russia problem is off the front pages for the first time in months. In retaliation for the Assad regime’s continued use of chemical weapons against civilians, Trump attacked a Syrian airbase using 59 cruise missiles launched from U.S. Navy ships.
To the great distress of many of the president’s most ardent fans, the Trump White House has honored Obama’s Syrian “red line,” which his predecessor so embarrassingly walked away from almost four years ago, thereby handing the Syrian problem—and much of the Middle East—over to Vladimir Putin. It’s no wonder that the Kremlin is suddenly critical of the new administration, using strong words to express its displeasure with Trump’s muscular act against the Assad regime, which is Moscow’s loyal client.
But none of this means the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of KremlinGate is going away. In fact, we now know that it’s been underway for almost a year. According to a new reportin The New York Times, John Brennan, the CIA director during President Obama’s second term, knew last summer that Kremlin interference in our election was a serious and fast-growing problem. He was so worried that, in late August, Brennan personally briefed eight senior members of Congress on new evidence of Russia’s meddling—in some cases, the CIA director interrupted their summer vacations to share the bad news.
The Times doesn’t indicate what that urgent new intelligence was, but members of the Intelligence Community with access to that evidence have told me there are several top-secret reports—mainly, but not exclusively, signals intelligence from NSA—demonstrating links between Team Trump and top Kremlin officials, hinting at collusion with Moscow during last year’s election. Although none of these reports individually is conclusive—there is no “smoking gun” as Beltway wonks like to say—taken together they lead to the disturbing finding that Trump’s campaign was in cahoots with Moscow to hurt Hillary Clinton. That the IC knew much of this last summer invites disturbing questions about the Obama administration’s puzzling inaction last fall, in the weeks leading to the election.
NATIONAL POLITICS
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FBI director James Comey has tamped down expectations of any quick resolution of his Bureau’s investigation of KremlinGate. He is surely correct that this weighty matter is best addressed thoroughly and judiciously, not rashly. We need the facts—not assertions or unprovable claims from dodgy dossiers. The existence of top-secret evidence pointing to collusion between Team Trump and Team Putin means that investigators and prosecutors have red meat to work with, but that does not necessarily mean that indictments are coming soon.
Comey faces a particular problem, little understood by the public or even by most journalists covering KremlinGate. That’s the fact that classified evidence is inadmissible in court, and top-secret information will never be shown to a jury. FBI agents therefore face the uncomfortable difficulty of knowing (from highly classified reports) what was going on—and finding unclassified corroboration if they want to prosecute anybody.
Hence the pressing need to get co-conspirators to “flip” on each other and, even better, coercing confessions from those facing possible prison time. This is the usual FBI modus operandi, and it’s most effective against smaller fish who aren’t eager to take the rap for bigger ones. We can safely assume that the Bureau will lean on former members of Team Trump to get confessions; here the recent ham-handed effort by Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security guru, a man with plenty of odd ties to the Kremlin himself, to get immunity in exchange for telling what he knows seems relevant.
Without such cooperation, including confessions from at least some members of Team Trump, the transition of KremlinGate from the investigation phase to prosecution is likely to stall. We don’t know exactly what the FBI knows, but some examples from past counterintelligence cases can illuminate the conundrum the Bureau faces right now.
Take the remarkable story of VENONA, the above-top-secret NSA program which at the dawn of the Cold War gave investigators a look into encrypted Soviet intelligence communications. Armed with VENONA, the FBI painstakingly identified numerous American agents of the Soviet secret police and military intelligence—that is, KGB and GRU. But such top-secret evidence was known to very few officials—President Truman was “read into” VENONA only in his last months in office—and served as lead information only.
In the notorious Rosenberg case, top-secret intelligence from NSA led to confessions from members of the KGB spy ring run by Julius Rosenberg. Yet he and his wife Ethel were convicted and executed not on the basis of VENONA, which proved the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies yet couldn’t be shown in court, rather thanks to lots of circumstantial evidence plus the confession of Ethel’s brother, who sent his sister and brother-in-law to the electric chair to save his own skin. The Justice Department relied on such unsavory tactics to win cases when the real evidence they possessed was classified.
That MO didn’t work as well on Alger Hiss, the State Department official with a side gig as a GRU spymaster whose involvement in espionage for the Soviet Union was proven by VENONAintercepts. A cagey lawyer, Hiss stood his ground and created doubts about the witnesses against him, and ultimately was convicted of perjury, not espionage. He served less than four years in prison and remained a left-wing icon until the mid-1990s, when VENONA messages illuminating his secret GRU career were declassified by NSA.
In some cases, important Soviet spies were never charged with, much less convicted of, any crimes. Take the case of Ted Hall, a physics prodigy who graduated from Harvard at 18 and went to work on the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb, in early 1944. A few months later, Hall approached the KGB, offering the Soviets atomic secrets—a treachery which placed Hall in no less than eight VENONA messages. The classified case against him was airtight.
Therefore, in 1951, armed with top-secret details of his clandestine Kremlin career, the FBI interviewed Hall, trying to get him to confess, but he stood his ground. His denials were firm. Bureau efforts to break Hall’s friend and fellow KGB agent Saville Sax likewise failed. Without a confession from either man, the FBI had no case they could take to court, and both Hall and Sax walked away, free men.
Other suspects broke quickly under FBI pressure. In the spring of 1950, the Bureau confronted Jones Orin York, who appeared in VENONA as a Soviet spy who had passed classified military secrets to Moscow. York admitted what he had done and named his KGB handler on the West Coast in the early 1940s, one “Bill Villesband.” Quick work by the Bureau revealed that his actual name was William Weisband—and he was working in the heart of American intelligence, inside the codebreaking effort against Moscow.
Bill Weisband in fact had been a Soviet spy since at least the mid-1930s, and he betrayed countless secrets to the Kremlin, including top-secret programs which broke into high-level Soviet military communications. He was a highly productive agent and agent-handler for the KGB. Thanks to Weisband, Moscow knew about VENONA (where the traitor appeared in at least two messages) several years before the White House did.
The FBI leaned on Weisband, to no avail. He firmly denied accusations of espionage and the case against him stalled. He was convicted of failure to appear before a Federal grand jury and did a year in prison, then returned to obscurity. Despite arguably being the most damaging traitor in American history, Weisband was never charged with espionage. NSA was just as happy to have the embarrassing Weisband debacle be forgotten, as it was until the late 1990s, when VENONA revelations got the case a modicum of attention.
The FBI today may be armed with reams of top-secret intelligence about KremlinGate. If Edward Snowden didn’t compromise it when he fled to Moscow, perhaps NSA has excellent information about this saga—something like VENONA 2.0. Yet even with such top-secret gems, the Bureau must convert SIGINT into indictments that will stick, which is never an easy task. Nobody should expect a quick resolution of this complex and most important case.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
[h=1]Congressman Investigating Trump Goes to Russia’s Money Laundromat, Cyprus[/h][h=4]TIM MAK[/h]
[h=4]04.14.17 3:05 PM ET[/h]
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?ur...goes-to-russia-s-money-laundromat-cyprus.html
http://www.reddit.com/submit?title=...ndromat-cyprus.html?via=desktop&source=Reddit
The House Intelligence Committee sent one of its members to Cyprus this week as part of its ongoing investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, adding a new twist to the ongoing inquiry.
“Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. “It was extraordinarily helpful in understanding how the Russians launder money and why.”
The Democratic congressman did not go into detail about what he found during his four-day trip to the Mediterranean country. But publicly available reporting hints at how Cyprus may be tied to the committee’s investigation.
The Trump administration’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was involved in a business deal with a Russian businessman with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin while he was the vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.
And last month the Associated Press reported that Treasury Department agents obtained bank transaction information involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, specifically transactions going through Cyprus, which AP described as “known as a haven for money laundering by Russian billionaires.”
Cyprus has not been a primary topic of discussion within the scope of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian influence in the U.S. presidential elections, but Quigley said that the country played a significant role.
“The fact that Turkey, the U.S and Russia and other countries are really interested in Cyprus, because of its strategic location… the fact that Russians launder their money there to avoid sanctions, and the fact that key U.S. and Russia players were there—all make it really important for the Russia investigation,” Quigley explained.
[h=4]04.14.17 3:05 PM ET[/h]
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?ur...goes-to-russia-s-money-laundromat-cyprus.html
http://www.reddit.com/submit?title=...ndromat-cyprus.html?via=desktop&source=Reddit
The House Intelligence Committee sent one of its members to Cyprus this week as part of its ongoing investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, adding a new twist to the ongoing inquiry.
“Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions,” Rep. Mike Quigley told The Daily Beast. “It was extraordinarily helpful in understanding how the Russians launder money and why.”
The Democratic congressman did not go into detail about what he found during his four-day trip to the Mediterranean country. But publicly available reporting hints at how Cyprus may be tied to the committee’s investigation.
The Trump administration’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was involved in a business deal with a Russian businessman with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin while he was the vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.
And last month the Associated Press reported that Treasury Department agents obtained bank transaction information involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, specifically transactions going through Cyprus, which AP described as “known as a haven for money laundering by Russian billionaires.”
Cyprus has not been a primary topic of discussion within the scope of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian influence in the U.S. presidential elections, but Quigley said that the country played a significant role.
“The fact that Turkey, the U.S and Russia and other countries are really interested in Cyprus, because of its strategic location… the fact that Russians launder their money there to avoid sanctions, and the fact that key U.S. and Russia players were there—all make it really important for the Russia investigation,” Quigley explained.
Evan McMullin Retweeted
4hJacek Saryusz-Wolski
@JSaryuszWolski
[h=1]"Russia-linked fake news floods French social media" [/h]
Russia-linked fake news floods French social mediaeuobserver.com
4hJacek Saryusz-Wolski
@JSaryuszWolski
[h=1]"Russia-linked fake news floods French social media" [/h]
Russia-linked fake news floods French social mediaeuobserver.com
Business Insider
@businessinsider
Russia is engaged in a full-scale shadow war in Europe — via @ProPublica (link: [url]http://read.bi/2oWnSa0) read.bi/2oWnSa0[/URL]
[h=1]Sources: Russia tried to use Trump advisers to infiltrate campaign - We've been saying this for a year [/h]
Sources: Russia tried to use Trump advisers to infiltrate campaigncnn.com
Sources: Russia tried to use Trump advisers to infiltrate campaigncnn.com
Apr 22ABC News
@ABC
[h=1]Russian aircraft fly close to Alaska for fourth time in 4 days. [/h]https://t.co/9akCwiSgtM
@ABC
[h=1]Russian aircraft fly close to Alaska for fourth time in 4 days. [/h]https://t.co/9akCwiSgtM
[h=1]Big news. It may be impossible for Republicans to lead an independent and thorough investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal . [/h]Michael Isikoff
@IsikoffSenate Russia probe flounders amid partisan bickering: Burr won't sign letters requesting docs from Trump campaign
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senate-russia-probe-flounders-amid-partisan-bickering-130323166.html
@IsikoffSenate Russia probe flounders amid partisan bickering: Burr won't sign letters requesting docs from Trump campaign
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senate-russia-probe-flounders-amid-partisan-bickering-130323166.html
1hWall Street Journal
@WSJ
[h=1]Macron campaign wards off hacking attempts linked to Russia [/h]
Macron Campaign Wards Off Hacking Attempts Linked to Russiawsj.com
@WSJ
[h=1]Macron campaign wards off hacking attempts linked to Russia [/h]
Macron Campaign Wards Off Hacking Attempts Linked to Russiawsj.com
