September 23, 2019

The "James Bond supervillain" behind the Ukraine scandal

You've probably never heard of Ihor Kolomoisky. You could read a hundred articles about the burgeoning "whistleblower" scandal without once seeing his name.

But he's behind it.

Or rather: He's the oligarch behind Volodymyr Zelensky, the comic actor who became the current leader of Ukraine. Zelensky became famous in his country starring in a show called Servant of the People, in which he played an average guy who, almost accidentally, becomes president of Ukraine. That show was broadcast on Kolomoisky's TV network 1+1. By most accounts, it was Kolomoisky who decided to make art imitate life -- to transform the sitcom president into a real president.

Though Zelensky has denied in interviews that he is Kolomoisky's puppet, many have discerned a certain "Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy" quality to their relationship. While running for office, Zelensky made several trips to Tel Aviv. That was a tell: Kolomoisky lived there during his period of exile.

He's not in exile anymore.

Why did Kolomoisky leave Ukraine? To save his skin. The previous president, Petro Poroshenko, had nationalized PrivatBank, which was owned in large part by Kolomoisky. This was no small matter: Nearly half of all Ukrainians with bank accounts dealt with PrivatBank.

There was a very good chance that Kolomoisky himself might have seen the inside of a courtroom, had he stayed in his home country. From the Daily Beast:

Kolomoisky has a host of enemies. He’s been accused of commissioning contract killings. And in 2016, Ukraine’s central bank nationalized Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank because it didn’t have enough cash. Billions of dollars disappeared from its coffers because it lent so much to Kolomoisky associates, according to the FT. The move was widely viewed in the West as a victory for transparency and good governance, in a country whose politics are impoverished on both counts. It was a flashpoint in Kolomoisky’s relationship with Poroshenko, and many speculate the oligarch backs Zelensky in part because hopes to depose the president who oversaw the takeover of his bank.

Also see here:

Kolomoisky first and foremost, had robbed it to the tune of $5.5 billion by getting it to issue loans to shell companies that were never expected to be recovered. The accusations were confirmed by an investigation by Kroll, the American risk-mitigation company, conducted for the National Bank.

Hence his "vacation" in Israel, which does not extradite citizens. Kolomoisky has triple citizenship: Ukrainian, Israeli and Cypriot. (Privatbank was the first Ukrainian bank to open a branch in Cyprus. There's also a branch in Moscow.) Although Ukraine's constitution prohibits dual citizenship, Kolomoisky argues that the constitution says nothing about a triple.

From afar, he constantly tried to get his bank back. Poroshenko stood in his way. Thus, it was necessary to get rid of Poroshenko and replace him with someone pliant. With Zelensky in office, a Ukrainian court decided in Kolomoisky's favor, allowing him to return to Ukraine.

(Hilariously, Zelensky's character on that TV show came to prominence by inveighing against corruption.)

One of the reasons people have likened Kolomoisky to a James Bond supervillain is his taste in pets: He keeps a large shark in a tank in his office. When he's in a mood to intimidate his associates, he feeds the shark while they watch.

Another reason: There are the longstanding rumors that he has had people killed. Those "rumors" are very real to Valeria Gontareva, the former head of Ukraine's National Bank -- the central bank of her country. She exposed the corruption at PrivatBank.

In March 2018, Valeria Gontareva revealed the alleged theft of US$5.5 billion from PrivatBank, once the country’s largest commercial lender. The suspected masterminds are the bank’s two oligarch owners: Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogoliubov, who stand accused of absconding with an amount roughly equal to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Gontareva has been blaming Kolomoisky and his allies for the hostile acts against her and her family, saying he was threatening her. The controversial oligarch has denied her allegations.

One of those threats involved a coffin placed at her door. She quit her job as head of the National Bank.

The prospect of Kolomoisky's return put her in fear of her life, so she moved to London. On August 26, a car struck her while she crossed the road. In September, her home in Kyiv burnt to the ground in an arson fire.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov called the fire "a manifestation of criminal pressure."

President Volodymyr Zelensky, in turn, said he expected the police to investigate the incident as soon as possible.

When asked about these attacks, Kolomoisky offered these cryptic words: "Now, it is most likely she will not be extradited [to Ukraine]. Therefore you think [about theories]..." Kolomoisky's favorite theory is that she burnt down the house herself.

At the point you may be wondering: How does all of this relate to the "whistleblower" scandal?

It's simple. You have to think of that scandal in terms of pressure points. Trump wants two things: He wants dirt on Joe Biden, and he wants to pardon Paul Manafort. (One of the charges against Manafort concerns payoffs from a previous Ukrainian government. If the documentation is declared spurious, Trump may have political room to issue a pardon.)

Right now, most people believe that the key pressure point involves the $250 million in military aid earmarked for Ukraine, which is fighting a war against Russians in the north. There is also the strange matter of an extra $140 million, which serves no apparent purpose beyond appeasing the graft which has become endemic to Ukrainian politics. As most people know by now, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had no answer when asked about this money. It was a classic Ralph Kramden homina homina moment.

But the original pressure point, the important pressure point, is Kolomoisky.

You see, he has been accused of money laundering. And for quite a while now, he has been under investigation by the FBI.

“Mr. Kolomoisky categorically denies that he has laundered any funds into the United States, period,” said Mike Sullivan, an attorney with the Ashcroft Law Firm who represents Kolomoisky. “He’s a businessperson. His bank was seized by the government, claiming the bank was on the verge of collapse. That information turned out to be false.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Ohio is involved in the probe, as Kolomoisky has investments there, according to the Kyiv Post.

The existence of an FBI probe means that he is open to manipulation from the Trump administration.

The FBI is an investigative agency. That's what the "I" stands for. They don't mount prosecutions. In a case like this, the decision to prosecute or not to prosecute would be made by William Barr. By this point, I think we've all gained a pretty good idea of who Barr is and how he operates.

In essence, Trump controls Kolomoisky, and Kolomoisky controls Zelensky.

Never forget that Kolomoisky is the real power in Ukraine. He made Zelensky and he can break him. That's why I'm not expecting much from the release of the transcript of Trump's call to Zelensky: If any quid pro quo was discussed, it probably was not discussed on that occasion.

One arranges such matters with the puppeteer, not with the puppet.

For God's sake, DON'T TRUST ZELENSKY! He knows that he can't defy Kolomoisky. If he does, he'll end up like Valeria Gontareva.

Any evidence offered by Zelensky against Biden or pro-Manafort will be false.

November 3, 2017

FINAL proof that Donna Brazile is lying.

Few have noticed that Donna Brazile's "damning" document -- the agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- is not online. We have to rely purely on her word that the thing exists and that it reads the way she says it reads.

This absence is suspicious. Why no link to a pdf?

The same thought may have occurred to you that occurred to me: If this document is real, then why didn't we see it when the Russians hacked the DNC? This morning, Josh Marshall published a fascinating find...

There is what at least appears to be a draft of the agreement in the Wikileaks Podesta cache of all places and from what I can tell it doesn’t include any of this.

By "this," Marshall refers to the parts of the agreement that are not "kosher." We know about these parts only from Brazile; we have no other evidence that this material exists. Everything in the document we have is, in fact, perfectly "kosher" and innocent.

Marshall goes on to offer these caveats:

Again, that version is just a draft. The final copy could definitely have included other codicils or side agreements. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting the document. I’d ask campaign types to take a look.

You can find the Wikileaks version of the agreement here. It's a Word document. It doesn't look like a draft to me. Absolutely nothing about it indicates a draft. It's very detailed and well-formatted, with a codicil and spaces for signatures.

Moreover: The file is not labeled "DRAFT." It is labeled "FINAL."

It seems obvious that either the Russians or stateside Trump supporters found this FINAL agreement in the DNC cache and decided to use a falsified version to whip up some Hillary-hate just when things were looking bleak for Trump. By washing the falsifications through Brazile, they don't have to show an actual document. She can function as the fall guy if and when the whole thing is shown to be bogus.

I've signed a few agreements in my time. I have never seen a draft agreement labeled "FINAL" -- and neither, I'm pretty sure, have you. Lawyers are very careful about such things.

Let us suppose, hypothetically, that the Wikileaks document really did bear the label "DRAFT." Have you ever seen so drastic a rewrite between the draft and the final version? Offhand, I cannot recall reading about a legal agreement which was drafted to say one thing and then massively re-worded to say something extremely different.

Why did Brazile go along with the plan? I don't know, but I suspect that she had an encounter with some James-Spader-as-Raymond-Reddington type. I don't know the carrot and I don't know the stick, but I do know that nearly everyone can be manipulated and pressured.

March 8, 2017

DOUBLE CROSS: John Schindler, Louise Mensch and other "spooky" writers in the anti-Trump movement

The anti-Trump movement includes prominent "former" spies and/or people with close ties to Spookworld. The best-known names would be Louise Mensch and John Schindler, whose pronouncements, in recent times, have received a great deal of publicity from the left-wing media. For example, Raw Story paid very respectful attention when Schindler proclaimed that the White House is targeting journalists using "Russian intel."

Is that specific allegation true? Don't know. This post is not about the merits of that claim. I am writing now to sound a note of caution.

Former NSA man Schindler claims to represent something called the 20committee. When I first saw that name, it struck a chord -- yet I did not comprehend the historical reference until this morning, when I slapped my forehead and flashed on a truth that should have been obvious from the start.

What an idiot I was! Why didn't I see it?

The "20committee" nomenclature is an homage to a classic WWII espionage operation better known as the XX Committee. "XX" is, of course, the number 20 in Roman numerals -- but in its original incarnation, it also referred to the double cross.

British intelligence agent John Masterman set up a spectacularly effective counter-intelligence ring which took effective control of all German spies within the British isles. Many Nazi spies were doubled; others were deceived. In order to sell false information to the Third Reich, the Brits surrounded each lie with a surprisingly large coating of genuine intelligence. It was the XX committee which convinced the Nazi high command that the Allied invasion would take place at Calais, not Normandy.

If John Schindler wants us to trust him, perhaps his group should not have named itself after history's grandest double cross.

About a month ago, liberal websites discovered Schindler. When he said that the intelligence community sought to remove Donald Trump, when he proclaimed that Trump would "die in jail," he told us precisely what we wanted to hear. Schindler tossed steak to the starving.

Schindler made no secret of the fact that he was a Republican. At first, his conservatism buttressed his credibility, since it automatically exempted him from the commonly-heard charge that only Hillary-loving die-hards believe in the Trump/Putin connection.

But Schindler is no ordinary conservative.

He is -- or was, until recently -- an employee of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and loyal aide. Before he began working in the White House, Kusner owned The Observer, which published many articles in which John Schindler smeared Hillary Clinton. According to Schindler, Hillary is a demon from the deepest pits of hell -- and the email pseudoscandal was history's worst betrayal since Judas took up coin-collecting.

In short and in sum: Mere months ago, John Schindler was trying get Donald Trump elected.

Here are some examples of what John Schindler was getting up to in the days when he was a toiler for Trump's son-in-law:

Hillary’s Secret Kremlin Connection Is Quickly Unraveling

Why didn't that story catch fire? There are two possibilities. Either 1) Evil George Soros controls the entire mass media worldwide, or 2) Schindler didn't have his ducks in a row.

Did NSA Try to Destroy Hillary Clinton?
Allegations are circulating that the National Security Agency may be behind the massive hack of Hillary Clinton and her party

Vladimir, thou art absolved.

FBI Data Dump Shows Clinton Is Criminal and Clueless

She was neither.

EmailGate and the Mystery of the Missing GAMMA
Hillary Clinton’s 'unclassified' email included highly classified NSA information—why didn’t the FBI mention this fact?

Because it's bullshit...? No-one can credibly argue that the FBI helped Hillary.

Why Obama Is to Blame for Russia’s SpyWar on America

Most of us would blame Putin.

During this period, Schindler also published some material on the Trump/Putin linkage, although he was hardly "the firstest with the mostest." Always remember that Schindler is an admirer of the XX Committee. Always remember that the XX Committee deliberately fed genuine intelligence to the Nazis in order to make the false information seem credible.

I could write at equal length about Louise Mensch, the other "spooked up" conservative writer who has gained fame among the anti-Trumpers. For now, let's confine ourselves to two main points:

1. Just as Schindler took a paycheck from Jared Kushner, Mensch took (takes?) a paycheck from Rupert Murdoch. There's a line from Lawrence of Arabia for every occasion, and on this occasion, that line is this: "The servant is the one who takes the money."

2. Donald Trump's instantly-infamous tweet-storm blaming Obama for wiretapping Trump Tower traces back -- ultimately -- to a piece that Louise Mensch wrote for Murdoch's right-wing "libertarian" publication Heat Street. In recent days, Mensch has (truthfully) stressed that her article does not accuse Obama of wiretapping. As this WP profile notes...

In tweets on Monday, Mensch emphasized that her reporting does not back up Trump’s wiretapping claim, even though the White House cited her article to justify the allegation. She stressed that her reporting refers to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant and does not mention anything about wiretapping

.

In her report, published Nov. 7, Mensch said the FBI was granted a FISA court warrant in October “giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.”

She cited “two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community” as evidence for those claims.

Her twitter feed indicates that she is quite tight with John Schindler, whose 20committee is named after history's most successful counter-intelligence operation. Is Schindler one of those two sources? If he were, would she admit it?

For that matter, can we be certain that there is a second source? (James Angleton would sometimes pretend to have multiple sources when he was just repeating Golitsyn's bullshit.) If there are two sources, how can we be certain of their independence? How do we know that her sources are not beholden to the pro-Trump faction of the intelligence community?

Schindler and Mensch push a "intelligence community versus Donald Trump" narrative which I consider simplistic and false. Trump owes even more to Steve Bannon than he does to Vladimir Putin. Most liberals still don't understand that Breitbart (Bannon's operation) has been seriously spooked up for years. Go ahead and double-check that claim. I dare you to prove me wrong.

A short word about the CIA documents on Wikileaks. Ten days after Trump took office, high-placed western moles in the FSB had bags placed over their heads as they were hustled off to their presumed dooms. And now we learn that -- at roughly the same time -- Wikileaks received a massive CIA data-dump, although Assange waited until now to spill the beans.

Who gave that material to Assange? I believe that someone within the Trump administration is leaking secrets.

The material published by Wikileaks includes the claim that the CIA can spoof the work of Russian hackers. The entire Putin/Trump meme began when Crowdstrike performed a forensic analysis which identified the DNC hack as the work of Russian hackers. As soon as the Wikileaks story hit the news, Milo Yiannopoulos instantly issued a piece arguing that the Putin hack was really a CIA hack. I don't think that Milo is right -- but the hell of it is, I can't prove him wrong.

January 14, 2017

Trump's campaign czar named as "Watersportsgate" leaker

The following was originally published on my political blog. I'm not looking for click-throughs or agreement or attribution. I'm looking for people willing to do dispassionate research into a lead which I was given by one of my readers. The more I look into this claim, the likelier it seems.

In fact, I think this could be a bombshell.

As everyone now knows, the 36 page report containing the "golden shower" allegation originated with a private intelligence-gathering firm called Orbis, run by a respected former MI6 agent named Christopher Steele. Orbis caters to high-powered corporate clients. In that world, a private intelligence firm simply cannot stay in business if the product is sloppy or mendacious.

No-one can fairly claim that the dossier was put together for purposes of propaganda, for the simple reason that the text was never meant for public consumption. Buzzfeed put the dossier online only after learning that the American intelligence community was taking these claims very seriously -- seriously enough to brief both Obama and Trump.

Everyone is talking about those 36 pages, but few have actually read them. Those who have bothered to do so know that the true source for the "golden shower" story is not Orbis. Orbis got the story from three separate sources, labeled Source D, Source E and Source F.

Source D appears to be someone who works for Trump. Source F is someone who works for the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow.

The "big fish" in this barrel is Source E: He not only confirmed the watersports "kompromat" claim, he also spilled many another bean. In fact, I would say that those other beans are the truly important ones.

Writers for the Washington Post -- who have apparently seen an unredacted version of the dossier -- identified Source E as a Russian emigre who is very close to Donald Trump. But so far, no-one has given you a name.

Until now.

An anonymous informant tells me that Source E is Boris Epshteyn, the man who is running Trump's inauguration. As you may have heard, his job has not been an easy one.

During the campaign, Epshteyn -- an investment banker born in the former USSR -- was often seen on cable television, defending Trump at every turn.

You are probably wondering: How can I be sure of this identification, since I have only one anonymous informant? In truth, I'm not certain -- not 100%. But the claim certainly seemed very plausible after I checked out Epshteyn's Wikipedia page and looked up a biographical sketch published by the New York Times.

Everything fits. EVERYTHING.

He's a Russian emigre. He knows Moscow very well. (Source E knew Source F, who works at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.) He's extremely close to Trump. He got "in" with the campaign via a relationship with Trump's son.

In October 2013, Epshteyn helped moderate an investment event "Invest in Moscow!" In the Orbis dossier, Source E's special area of knowledge seems to be investment in Russia.

Epshteyn got his start in Republican politics as part of the 2008 John McCain campaign. McCain has played an intriguing role in the saga of the Orbis dossier. From a recent Arizona Republic story:

Published reports conflict about how, when and from whom McCain learned about and obtained the memos.

In a story published late Wednesday on its website, the New York Times reported, without attribution, that McCain caught wind of the anti-Trump memos and got copies last month from David J. Kramer of Arizona State University's McCain Institute for International Leadership.

That would contradict other published accounts, including one Tuesday in the Guardian, which reported McCain "was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state" and "dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source."

CNN reported Tuesday that McCain learned about the dossier from "a former British diplomat who had been posted in Moscow."

The Guardian now identifies the intermediary as Sir Andrew Wood.

Think about it: Why would a high-level British official contact McCain? I believe that the UK wanted background information on the man we know as Source E. Perhaps they knew that McCain was in a position to divulge that kind of information.

Ephsteyn's Twitter feed has been very sparse of late, and contains no reference to the controversy generated by the Orbis dossier.

If Ephsteyn is Source E, then we may fairly presume that the joint intelligence task force investigating these claims went to the FISA court specifically to get permission to eavesdrop electronically on Boris Ephsteyn. Remember: Permission is needed only if the target is an American.

Permission was finally granted in October. I have no idea what the intelligence "haul" might have been.

I invite everyone to check out Ephsteyn's background carefully, and then re-read all the passages about Source E in the Orbis dossier.

A final note: Although I am increasingly persuaded that Ephsteyn is Source E, I am NOT convinced that Source E always spoke truthfully to the Orbis agent.