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Russia & China attacks the usa to elect trump
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real-human



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PostPosted: Wed Sep 07, 2022 1:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

isobars wrote:
Back to your original thread topic ... if that's what it takes to get a productive, conscious POTUS, so be it. Anything short of nuclear war would be better for the country and the world than the socialist, woke fools running this administration.


traitor...

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PostPosted: Sun Sep 18, 2022 9:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

this is a good read, but long.

https://news.yahoo.com/russian-trolls-helped-keep-womens-155748201.html



How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women's March Out of Lockstep


Quote:
Linda Sarsour awoke Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet and felt sick.

The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.

More than 4 million people around the United States had taken part, experts later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the nation’s history.

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But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback, but this was of a different magnitude.

That morning, there were things going on that Sarsour could not imagine.

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

One message performed better with audiences than any other.

It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.

Over the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Sarsour.

One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.

Many people know the story about how the Women’s March movement fractured, leaving lasting scars on the American left.

A fragile coalition to begin with, it headed into crisis over its co-chairs’ association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, who is widely condemned for his antisemitic statements. When this surfaced, progressive groups distanced themselves from Sarsour and her fellow march co-chairs, Carmen Perez, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland.

But there is also a story that has not been told, one that only emerged years later in academic research, of how Russia inserted itself into this moment.

What effect these intrusions had on American democracy is a question that will be with us for years. Already, social media was amplifying Americans’ political impulses, leaving behind a trail of damaged communities. Already, trust in institutions was declining, and rage was flaring up in public life. These things would have been true without Russian interference.

But to trace the Russian intrusions over the months that followed that first Women’s March is to witness a persistent effort to make all of them worse.

‘Refrigerators and Nails’

In early 2017, the trolling operation was in its imperial phase, swelling with confidence.

Accounts at the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg and controlled by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had boasted of propelling Trump to victory. That year, the group’s budget nearly doubled, according to internal communications made public by American prosecutors.

Under these auspicious conditions, their goals shifted from electoral politics to something more general — the goal of deepening rifts in American society, said Alex Iftimie, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a 2018 case against an administrator at Project Lakhta, which oversaw the Internet Research Agency and other Russian trolling operations.

Artyom Baranov, who worked at one of Project Lakhta’s affiliates from 2018 to 2020, concluded that his co-workers were, for the most part, people who needed the money.

The job was not to put forward arguments but to prompt a visceral, emotional reaction, ideally one of “indignation,” said Baranov, a psychoanalyst by training, who was assigned to write posts on Russian politics. “The task is to make a kind of explosion, to cause controversy,” he said.

In January 2017, as the Women’s March drew nearer, they tested different approaches on different audiences, as they had during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. They posed as resentful trans women, poor women and anti-abortion women. They dismissed the marchers as pawns of Jewish billionaire George Soros.

In the meantime, another, far more effective line of messaging was developing.

‘It Was Like an Avalanche’

The daughter of a Palestinian American shopkeeper in New York City, Sarsour had risen to prominence as a voice for the rights of Muslims after 9/11. In 2015, when she was 35, a New York Times profile anointed her as something rare, a potential Arab American candidate for elected office.

In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., featured her at a campaign event. That troubled pro-Israel politicians in New York, who pointed to her support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which seeks to secure Palestinian rights by isolating Israel. Critics of the movement contend that it threatens Israel’s existence.

Rory Lancman, then a city councilman from the borough of Queens, recalls his growing alarm as she began to appear regularly at events for left-wing causes unrelated to Israel.

The news that Sarsour was among the leaders of the Women’s March, said Lancman, a Democrat, struck him as “heartbreaking — that’s the word — that antisemitism is tolerated and rationalized in progressive spaces.”

But forty-eight hours after the march, a shift of tone occurred online, with a surge of posts describing Sarsour as a radical jihadi who had infiltrated American feminism.

Not all of this backlash was organic. That week, Russian amplifier accounts began circulating posts that focused on Sarsour, many of them inflammatory and based on falsehoods, claiming she was a radical Islamist, “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign.”

Some of these posts found a large audience. At 7 p.m. Jan. 21, an Internet Research Agency account posing as @TEN_GOP, a fictional right-wing American from the South, tweeted that Sarsour favored imposing Shariah in the United States, playing into a popular anti-Muslim conspiracy theory.

This message took hold, racking up 1,686 replies, 8,046 retweets and 6,256 likes. The following day, nearly simultaneously, a small army of 1,157 right-wing accounts picked up the narrative, publishing 1,659 posts on the subject, according to a reconstruction by Graphika, a social media monitoring company.

At the Arab American Association of New York, the nonprofit immigrant advocacy organizationSarsour ran in Brooklyn, hate mail began to pour in.

Sarsour, worried that she had become “a liability,” stepped down from her position there that February.

Every time she thought the attacks were quieting, they surged back. “It was like an avalanche,” she said.

When she was invited to appear as a graduation speaker at the City University of New York’s graduate school of public health, the furor began weeks in advance. It caught the attention of far-right polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos, who traveled to New York for a protest.

Her graduation speech passed without incident. Then the trolls waited, it seems, for her to say or do something divisive. And that happened in early July, when, emboldened after her CUNY appearance, she urged a Muslim audience outside Chicago to push back against unjust government policies, calling it “the best form of jihad.”

In Islam, the word “jihad” can denote any virtuous struggle, but in the American political context it is inextricable from the concept of holy war. A more pragmatic politician might have avoided using it, but Sarsour was feeling like her old self.

The following week, Russian accounts dramatically increased their volume of messaging about Sarsour, producing 184 posts on a single day, according to Advance Democracy Inc.

“I mean, just imagine,” Sarsour said, “every day that you woke up, you were a monster.”

Chasing Ghosts

The divisions within the Women’s March existed already.

Internal disputes about identity and antisemitism had strained the group from its early days, when one of its organizers, Vanessa Wruble, who is Jewish, was pushed out after what she described as tense conversations with Perez and Mallory about the role of Jews in structural racism. Perez and Mallory have disputed that account.

In 2018, a new internal crisis was triggered by Mallory’s attendance at Saviours’ Day, an annual gathering of the Nation of Islam led by Farrakhan.

Pressured to disavow Farrakhan, she refused, though she said she did not share his antisemitic views. After her son’s father was killed, she explained, “it was the women of the Nation of Islam who supported me.”

After that, the fabric of the coalition tore, slowly and painfully. Sarsour and Perez stuck by Mallory, and before long, progressive groups began distancing themselves from all three. Under intense pressure to step down as the leaders, Sarsour, Perez, and a third co-chair, Bland, did so in 2019, a move they say was long planned.

Russian accounts boosted their output around Farrakhan and the Women’s March leaders that spring, posting 10 or 20 times a day, but there is no evidence that they were a primary driver of the conversation.

Around this time, we largely lose our view into Russian messaging. In the summer of 2018, Twitter suspended 3,841 accounts traced to the Internet Research Agency, preserving 10 million of their tweets so they could be studied by researchers. A few months later, the platform suspended and preserved the work of 414 accounts produced by the GRU, the military intelligence agency.

Russia’s exploitation of Sarsour as a wedge figure should be understood as part of the history of the Women’s March, said Shireen Mitchell, a technology analyst who has studied Russian interference in Black online discourse.

Russian campaigns, she said, were adept at seeding ideas that flowed into mainstream discourse, after which, as she put it, they could “just sit and wait.”

Others saw Russia’s role as marginal, tinkering around the edges of a necessary American discussion.

“It’s a shame that Linda Sarsour damaged that movement by trying to inject into it noxious ideas that had no reason to be part of the Women’s March,” said Lancman, the former city councilman. “Unfortunately,” he added, Russians “seem very adept at exploiting these fissures.”

An Aftershock

Sarsour, 42, was back in her old office in Bay Ridge this past spring, five years after the first Women’s March, when she learned, from a reporter, that the Russian government had targeted her.

She is seldom invited to national platforms these days, and when she is, protests often follow. Whatever buzz there was around her as a future political candidate has quieted.

“I’m never going to get a real job” at a major nonprofit or a corporation, she said. “That’s the kind of impact that these things have on our lives.”

Data on Russian messaging around the Women’s March first appeared late last year in an academic journal, where Samantha R. Bradshaw, a disinformation expert at American University, reviewed state interference in feminist movements.

She and her co-author, Amélie Henle, found a pattern of messaging by influential amplifier accounts that sought to demobilize civil society activism, by pumping up intersectional critiques of feminism and attacking organizers.

Sarsour tried to get her head around it: All that time, the Russian government had been thinking about her. She had long had a sense of where her critics came from: the American right wing and supporters of Israel. A foreign government — that was something that had never occurred to her.

“To think that Russia is going to use me, it’s much more dangerous and sinister,” she said. “What does Russia get out of leveraging my identity, you know, to undermine movements that were anti-Trump in America — I guess —” she paused. “It’s just, wow.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

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PostPosted: Mon Nov 07, 2022 10:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

as trumpy jr said he loves it....

https://news.yahoo.com/russias-prigozhin-admits-interfering-u-115844580.html?.tsrc=1026

Russia's Prigozhin admits interfering in U.S. elections


Quote:
LONDON (Reuters) -Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Monday he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue doing so in future, the first such admission from a figure implicated by Washington in efforts to influence American politics.

In comments posted by the press service of his Concord catering firm on Russia's Facebook equivalent VKontakte, Prigozhin said: "We have interfered (in U.S. elections), we are interfering and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do."

The remark by the close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin was posted on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections in response to a request for comment from a Russian news site.

"During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once," Prigozhin said. He did not elaborate on the cryptic comment.

Prigozhin, who is often referred to as "Putin's chef" because his catering company operates Kremlin contracts, has been formally accused of sponsoring Russia-based "troll farms" that seek to influence U.S. politics.

In July, the U.S. State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on Prigozhin in connection with "engagement in U.S. election interference". He has been hit by U.S., British and European Union sanctions.

Prigozhin, who served nine years in prison in Soviet times for robbery and other crimes before going into business during the 1990s, had long kept a low public profile. But this year he has become more outspoken, including by criticising the performance of Russia's generals in Ukraine.

In October, after Ukraine's successful counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region, Prigozhin issued a statement calling for Russia's military commanders to be stripped of their medals and "sent with assault weapons barefoot to the front".

Related video: Wagner private militia opens St. Petersburg center
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WAGNER MERCENARY FIRM

In September, he admitted to founding the Kremlin-aligned Wagner Group mercenary firm, which is active in Syria, Africa and Ukraine. Prigozhin had previously sued journalists for reporting that he was linked to Wagner.

Last Friday Wagner opened a defence technology centre in St Petersburg, a further step by Prigozhin to highlight his military credentials.

Moscow has made no secret of the fact that it would like to see the United States end its military support for Ukraine and pressure Kyiv into striking a peace deal with Russia that would entail territorial concessions.

But although Russian state media have poured scorn on President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party over everything from their economic record to their Ukraine policy, foreign policy experts close to the Kremlin do not expect Tuesday's midterm elections to tilt things in Russia's favour.

Even though a few Republicans oppose continuing military aid to Ukraine, the view from Moscow is that the aid will continue to flow regardless of whether Biden loses control of Congress.

"The old Congress will sit until January and it will approve quite a serious package (of military aid to Ukraine) before it winds up," Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the Russia in Global Affairs journal, told the online rbc.ru news portal.

"Then there is likely to be more tricky and prolonged negotiations (over the aid). Perhaps such aid will be a bit less frequent. But essentially the consensus view is that Russia should be weakened as much as possible by supporting Ukraine."

Commenting on attempts by Russian trolls and bots to influence the election, Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King's College in London, said he thought the goal was to try to shape the agenda on Ukraine that Republicans will pursue after the vote.

"(The aim is) to get the (Republican) base clamouring for a drawdown in U.S. support for Ukraine," Greene wrote on Twitter.

But he said he thought that was "a tall order" given the party's lack of a consolidated position on the Ukraine war.

"Half want to bash Biden for supporting Ukraine, the other half for not supporting Ukraine enough," said Greene.

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 08, 2022 6:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/russia-scandal-trump-still-concocting-conspiracy-theories-rcna56212?cid=eml_maddow_20221108&user_email=e73377d3e40790eecbf6a99203e1476ea2a23c644c2045abd739b8f9e629a73b&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TRMS%2011/8/22&utm_term=Rachel%20Maddow%20Show


In Russia scandal, Trump is still concocting conspiracy theories


Quote:


Two years after the Senate Intelligence Committee’s devastating findings in the Russia probe, Trump has a weird new conspiracy theory about what happened.

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

In case there was any doubt. I know that Bard has closed his eyes, and laronde is deep into alcohol paranoia, I'm counting on the sane people.

Quote:
A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

Elections “reflect the values and the priorities and the beliefs of American citizens,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Parikh said in her closing argument this week. “Jesse Benton by his actions did damage to those principles.”

The evidence at trial showed that Benton bought a $25,000 ticket to a September 2016 Republican National Committee (RNC) event on behalf of Roman Vasilenko, a Russian naval officer turned multilevel marketer. (Vasilenko is under investigation in Russia for allegedly running a pyramid scheme, according to the Kommersant newspaper; he could not be reached for comment.) The donation got Vasilenko a picture with Trump and entrance to a “business roundtable” with the future president.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 23, 2022 12:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-era-pardon-recipients-are-increasingly-back-in-legal-jeopardy/ar-AA15yQIG?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=0b7526a525654984d831f2f9397a85d7

Trump-era pardon recipients are increasingly back in legal jeopardy


Quote:
In February, former newspaper executive Kenneth Kurson pleaded guilty to cyberstalking his ex-wife. Months later, rapper Kodak Black was arrested on felony drug charges in Florida before pleading not guilty. And in October, jurors found political operative Jesse Benton guilty of illegally funneling Russian money into a group aligned with former President Donald Trump.

The trio's circumstances may seem unrelated, but they share one notable link: All were previously granted clemency by Trump while he was in office.

And the list doesn't end there.

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 31, 2023 12:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/just-in-trump-reiterates-why-he-trusts-in-vladimir-putin-over-u-s-intelligence-lowlifes-in-jawdropping-comments/ar-AA16THPS?cvid=483825c608184f15e2296afe06691756&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover

JUST IN: Trump Reiterates Why He Trusts in Vladimir Putin Over U.S. ‘Intelligence Lowlifes’ in Jawdropping Comments

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2023 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

wow oh wow top FBI agent arrested for getting payments from Russian source with ties with Trump... and shocker trump people knew this and let the Russian connected people off....

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/how-the-case-of-arrested-fbi-agent-charles-mcgonigal-is-tied-to-a-russia-linked-influence-effort/?fbclid=IwAR0MG_NFa9o4L2qTzEPhN1FQ6i4FYyN1ICwKrxEr21vx_NCCJ7stdDwGiCA

How the Case of Arrested FBI Agent Charles McGonigal Is Tied to a Russia-Linked Influence Effort


Quote:
It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s regime. McGonigal’s indictments raise a boatload of questions and has spurred the bureau to scrutinize his actions when he was in charge of monitoring and thwarting the intelligence efforts of foreign powers (including Russia) aimed at the United States. In spy-movie parlance, the FBI will want to know when did he go bad (presuming he did go bad).

The McGonigal case also has cast attention on one of the more bizarre foreign influence operations to occur in Washington, DC, in recent years—a little-known and underreported Russia-linked effort to influence American politics about Albania.

MOTHER JONES TOP STORIES

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The tale of this influence operation is a complicated one that Mother Jones revealed in 2018. The main disclosure was that a mysterious shell company registered in Scotland called Biniatta Trade—which was created by two Belize companies that were partly controlled by two British companies that were each controlled by a different Russian national—paid $150,000 in early 2017 to a Washington lobbyist named Nick Muzin to promote in the United States the Democratic Party of Albania, the conservative party opposed to Rama’s government.

Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s winning presidential campaign, used his influence to gather support within the Republican Party and the US conservative movement for Lulzim Basha, the DPA leader, who was campaigning for prime minister. Muzin set up a visit to Washington for Basha that included meetings with GOP House members. Basha attended the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner, which featured Trump as the speaker. Muzin contacted Steve Bannon, then a top White House adviser, and other White House officials on Basha’s behalf. He arranged for Basha to be interviewed by Breitbart News.

The aim was to round up backing in the United States for Basha, who was running in Albania as a populist nationalist and Trump fan and pushing the slogan “Make Albania Great Again.” As an ardent foe of Rama, a pro-West critic of Putin who had warned about Russia’s attempt to gain influence in the Balkans, Basha, presumably, was the Kremlin’s preferred candidate.

At one point, Muzin brought Basha to a GOP fundraiser in Wisconsin where Trump was the main speaker. At this event—where a $20,000 donation earned an attendee a VIP seat and a photograph with Trump—Basha had his photo snapped with Trump. In Albania, the DPA widely disseminated the picture, and Basha claimed he’d had an “extraordinary meeting” with Trump.


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The Trump connection that Muzin helped Basha forge did not win the day for the Albanian. In the Albanian election that year, Rama’s Socialist Party picked up seats and won a full majority of the parliament.

In some ways, Muzin’s work for Basha and the DPA was not unusual. Foreign politicians and political parties often retain American lobbyists in the pursuit of support and influence in the United States. What was odd was that Biniatta Trade picked up much of the tab for Muzin’s toils.

There were no public signs this company was engaged in any commerce. It had a phony looking, generic website that was linked to similar websites for other companies that had no public footprints. (The Biniatta Trade website is no longer functioning.) The company shared a British phone number with an “international online dating service” that offered “beautiful Ukrainian women for dating and marriage.”

The only information on Biniatta Trade we could find was a paper trail of other shell companies that eventually traced back to two Russians who had controlled defunct enterprises and who could not be reached. A Russia-linked shell company is not the usual source of funding for American lobbying efforts, and this uncommon arrangement suggested that some Russian entity was trying to influence US politics to benefit Basha and the DPA.


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A spokesman for Muzin told Mother Jones at that time that Muzin believed Biniatta Trade was a private company owned by supporters of the Democratic Party of Albania. Muzin declined to explain how he had first come into contact with Biniatta Trade.

Last fall, a US intelligence finding noted that Russia had spent about $300 million since 2014 to influence politics in other countries to its favor. An administration source told the AFP that this included spending “around $500,000 to back Albania’s center-right Democratic Party in 2017 elections.”

How does all this connect to McGonigal? The Justice Department indictment alleges that in or by August 2017 McGonigal struck up a business relationship with “Person A,” a naturalized US citizen who had been born in Albania and who had worked for an Albanian intelligence service decades earlier. Albanian news reports have identified this person as Agron Neza, a New Jersey businessman. In a letter to Albanian outlets, Neza admitted giving McGonigal money and called Rama an “acquaintance,” but he said he handed the funds to McGonigal for personal reasons.

According to the indictment, McGonigal and Neza made several trips together to Albania, where McGonigal met with Rama, the prime minister, and “Person B,” who, according to the New York Times, was Dorian Ducka, a former Albanian official and an informal adviser to Rama.


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Neza allegedly paid McGonigal $225,000 in the fall of 2017, in three installments, including one in which Neza passed the FBI man $80,000 in cash in a car parked outside a New York City restaurant.

After McGonigal had met a second time with Rama, Ducka, according to the indictment, passed information to McGonigal about a “a U.S. citizen who had registered to perform lobbying work in the United States on behalf of an Albanian political party different from the one in which the Prime Minister was a member.” McGonigal conveyed this information to a Justice Department prosecutor for possible criminal investigation. He subsequently received more information about the lobbyist from Neza and Rama and transmitted the material to FBI investigators.

On February 26, 2018, the indictment reads, “the FBI-NY formally opened a criminal investigation focused on the U.S. citizen lobbyist at defendant McGonigal’s request and upon his guidance.” Neza and Ducka later provided assistance to the inquiry. McGonigal, according to the Justice Department “had not at any time disclosed [to the FBI] his financial relationship with Person A [Neza] to the FBI, nor had defendant McGonigal disclosed his ongoing contacts with Person B [Ducka] as required.”

The timing of events described in the indictment indicate Muzin was the lobbyist McGonigal was targeting. As the New York Times has reported, “The events detailed in the indictment and other public records seem to match the description of the lobbyist Nicolas D. Muzin.”


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It’s uncertain how far any FBI investigation of Muzin proceeded. No charges were ever brought against him. Muzin told the Times in a statement that he had “no reason to believe that I was the victim of this false investigation. But if I was, that is unfortunate, and I hope that justice will be served.” Muzin did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Mother Jones.

The Mother Jones report in 2018 sparked front-page stories in Albanian newspapers. The following year, Albanian prosecutors charged Basha with money laundering and falsifying documents in connection to the Biniatta Trade matter. Basha denied accepting Russian money. The case was later suspended under murky circumstances. His party has insisted it paid Muzin only $25,000, offering no explanation of why another entity (that is, Biniatta Trade) would pay a US lobbyist a hefty amount to help the DPA.

In the 2021 Albanian parliamentary elections, Rama led his party to another victory over Basha’s DPA and earned a third term as prime minister. Basha left the DPA a year ago and was replaced by the party’s founder, Sali Berisha, who is barred from entering the United States due to what the State Department says is his “involvement in significant corruption.”

There remain plenty of questions about this episode. Why was the Albanian government so worried about the pro-DPA lobbying effort? What information did it pass to McGonigal? Did it involve the funding that went to Muzin? Did the FBI fully investigate Muzin? Did that inquiry include tracing the origins of the money that underwrote his lobbying? There still has been no explanation of why a mysterious Russia-linked shell company paid for a Republican lobbyist to use his clout with the GOP and conservatives to assist a right-wing Albanian political party.

The intersection of McGonigal’s tale and that of the financing of Muzin’s lobbying by Biniatta Trade makes two mysterious stories even more so. A US lobbyist received money tied to Russia to help a political party in a small Balkan nation. And an allegedly crooked FBI agent was involved in investigating that lobbyist, seemingly at the behest of a rival Albanian party. Albania, like Russia, is famously corrupt, wracked with allegations that many officials, including judges and prosectors, are on the take. The merged sagas of Biniatta Trade and Charles McGonigal show how easily that corruption infiltrated the United States.

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 18, 2023 3:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-operative-sentenced-in-scheme-to-funnel-russian-money-to-trump-campaign/ar-AA17Eoor?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=53d922163c7a4774b7d4860653ebeb80

GOP operative sentenced in scheme to funnel Russian money to Trump campaign


Quote:
ARepublican strategist was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in helping funnel illegal foreign campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump's 2016 campaign, per the Department of Justice.

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PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-media-auditor-and-business-partner-go-silent-as-russia-money-laundering-probe-revealed/ar-AA18K8uE?cvid=6b519f42b33843f5fcc69f9c7e8d80df&ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&ei=7

Trump Media auditor and business partner go silent as Russia money laundering probe revealed


Quote:
An auditor responsible for overseeing Trump Media's books is ducking calls seeking comment on a pair of loans totaling $8 million that have fallen under investigation as possible money laundering.

Donald Trump speaks to the press in the James Brady Press Briefing Room.
Donald Trump speaks to the press in the James Brady Press Briefing Room.
© Raw Story
Top executives at Donald Trump's social media raised concerns about the loans from Paxum Bank and ES Family Trust, which both are linked to an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and it remains unclear whether the SEC-licensed broker-dealer who sourced the loans or auditor BF Borders completed any due diligence under anti-money laundering and “Know Your Customer” requirements, reported The Guardian.

"A person who picked up the phone at BF Borgers this week put a reporter seeking comment on hold until the line disconnected," the newspaper's Hugo Lowell reported. "On a subsequent call, the person said they would pass the request on to managing partner Ben Borgers."

The payments came as Trump Media, which owns the Trump Social platform, was running out of money in December 2021 and February 2022 as its planned merger with the blank check company DWAC was halted by an SEC investigation, and top executives at the fledgling tech company were so concerned about the origins of the loans they considered returning the money.

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