Christopher Steele's lawyer is Oleg Deripaska's lobbyist and employee
Much of what is known about Paul Manafort’s alleged activities on behalf of Russia is based on court documents revealed in a series of law suits dating back to 2014. One of them was filed in Virginia in August 2015, leading to the “outing” of Paul Manafort and his firing as Trump’s Campaign Manager. The plaintiff in those cases is Oleg Deripaska.
It is Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska that happens to underlie most of the allegations made in the standard “Russiagate” narrative that Manafort was a secret agent advancing Putin’s interests inside the Trump campaign. At the same time, Oleg has been cast by the western media as simply an agent of Putin. Furthermore, it was Christopher Steele’s “Dirty Dossier” that got Russiagate up and rolling.
Now, it comes out, that Steele was working not only for the DNC and with Clinton Campaign funds, but was also shared a DC lawyer and possibly doing business with Deripaska. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2018-02-26%20CEG%20to%20W...(Mr.%20Steele,%20Mr.%20Deripaska,%20and%20Mr.%20Jones).pdf
All this seems implausible and contradictory, doesn’t it? Yes, it does, read on.
Documents emerging from the Senate Judiciary Committee indicate Christopher Steele shares a lawyer with Oleg Deripaska, and the committee wants to know the details of that going back to 2015. Keep in mind, Fusion-GPS started developing its opposition file on Trump at about that time, we have been told funded by money provided by another GOP candidate or by Robert Mercer, the reclusive billionaire hedge-fund operator and backer of Ted Cruz.
We also know that Deripaska was initially refused a U.S. visa he desperately wanted ten years ago. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/31/oleg-deripaska-us-visa-rusal
Then, a year later, after the CIA/FBI cleared him of charges of corruption, the State Dept. issued it, and he got the 24 or 48 hours he then needed during the first visit to be inside the US. The only reason anyone needs to be physically inside the US for a day that I can think of is to establish bank accounts here in his own name. Since then, he comes and goes. According to the WSJ, during the 2009 visits he had meetings with both the FBI and several major NY banks. https://web.archive.org/web/20170624031454/https://www.wsj.com/news/arti...
The Senate Committee first became aware of the relationship between Deripaska and Steele when Mark Warner received a text last March from a lawyer named Adam Waldman saying that his client, Christopher Steele, wanted to talk to him. According to Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/255290/christopher-ste...
In 2009, Waldman filed papers with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) registering himself as an agent for Deripaska in order to provide “legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions” at a retainer of $40,000 a month. In 2010, Waldman additionally registered as an agent for Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, “gathering information and providing advice and analysis as it relates to the U.S. policy towards the visa status of Oleg Deripaska,” including meetings with U.S. policymakers. Based on the information in his FARA filings, Waldman has received at least $2.36 million for his work with Deripaska.
Clearly, Chris Steele and Oleg Deripaska have the same Washington, DC lawyer, the one who arranged for Deripaska's visa, who is the head of the Endeavor Group, a K Street lobby shop located two blocks from the White House. Waldman is also an executive of one of Deripaska's New York companies, Basic Element. An unrelated 2017 law suit against Deripaska lays that out, along with Oleg's U.S. banking and investments, corporate ownerships, including the U.S. subsidiary of Rusal aluminum, and his New York City real estate holdings. Also laid bare are his ten trips to the U.S. since 2009 during which he has met with among others, the heads of Wolfonsohn Investments, a large hedge fund, and Alcoa Aluminum. According to the allegation cited in the court Order, "Deripaska derives billions in revenues from the United States - and its U.S. operations in N.Y." While the plaintiff's suit was ultimately dismissed because Oleg was found to not be domiciled in New York, the essential facts in the complaint are summarized in the Judge's Order: https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/other-courts/2017/2017-ny-slip-op-...
What does all this mean? That's what some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee would like to find out, including records of any direct transactions between Deripaska and Steele or through Waldman going back to 2015.
It looks like Oleg Deripaska made a deal to be able to do business and to safely park large parts of his fortune in the United States. Let’s look at the big picture and then focus back in on Steele and Deripaska. The really big backdrop to Russia!Russia!Russia! is the botched serial regime change operations in the Ukraine and Syria cooked up under Secretary Clinton and her BFFs at the CIA.
If those operations had succeeded, as planned, that might have ended with the removal of Mr. Putin. Unfortunately for the plan, certain Americans got in the way – primarily, the DIA Director, General Michael Flynn who worked with Russian military to abort the planned ISIS takeover of Damascus, and Paul Manafort, who was a thorn in the side of the State Department, CIA and MI-6 who were working to remove Russia from Ukraine, including its key naval base in eastern Ukraine, on the Crimean Peninsula at Sebastipole. Here, we make an assumption, and connect a dot, but it doesn’t change the bigger picture. Maybe, promises were made that the CIA/MI-6 would help Mr. Deripaska with some of his own ambitions, East and West. He seems pretty ambitious and capable. Almost as much so as Vladimir Putin.
What ended up actually happening, apparently, is in exchange for turning on Manafort, Oleg has been granted clubhouse and greens privileges at Club Langley. At the same time, his role can’t be so deep and murky to amount to something that actually ever really threatened Putin, so one might conclude Putin has been playing along with this whole thing and it has paid off. Indeed, he has something like 90 percent approval ratings and will be reelected. Mr. Putin also appears greatly amused by how, indeed, the scheme has backfired and ended up absolutely paralyzing the American political process and much of the U.S. government.
Russiagate! has turned into some kind of a weird game of mutual advantage that the CIA is playing with Putin after it became clear that the Moscow regime change operation (which was supposed to follow those in Ukraine and Syria — which is how this thing started — had failed miserably. The Agency gets its revenge against Manafort and Flynn (who were instrumental in blocking the intermediate ops), and Putin gets the credit for fucking with the heads of the Deep State and another term as uncontested boss of the Kremlin.
The Booby Prize goes to the parrots in the major media who still really believe that Manafort was working with Deripaska inside the Trump Campaign in 2016 to advance Putin’s influence. That joint venture, if there ever was one, certainly wasn’t helped much when Deripaska sued Manafort in open court three times, first in the Cayman Islands in 2014, followed by a 2015 filing in federal court in Virginia. That information led eventually to front-page exposure in the New York Times, leading to Manafort's being dismissed as Campaign Director, and most recently this January using information contained in the indictment handed down by Mueller.
So, the CIA gets it revenge against Manafort and Flynn, while Vladimir gets to keep his place as leader of all Russia. And part of Ukraine, and Syria, and . . .
The lesson here: The Great Game continues. Who says we all can’t still get along with each other?
Deripaska is not who he has been portrayed to be
Oleg Deripaska showed up on Thursday in an American Op-ed in which he tried to get ahead of the changing portrait that is emerging of him that show he has actually been doing business with Christopher Steele, and that relationship predated the Dirty Dossier.
It may well be that Oleg is, himself, as cynical as any of the other players in this sordid tale of mutual half-truths, set-ups, and deceptions that has become “Russiagate”. Deripaska wrote: http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/08/the-ever-changing-russia-narrative-in-...
When I attended the Munich Security Conference in February, the extraordinary, coordinated message of a panel of U.S. senators was summarized by moderator Victoria Nuland, former assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama, as: “Deep State-proud loyalists giv[ing] broad reassurance about continuity.” One of the panelists, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), said: “What the Breitbart crowd would call the ‘Deep State’ is what many of us would call ‘knowledgeable professionals.’” The panel’s uniform message was essentially: Ignore Donald Trump and increase your defense budget to 2 percent, because the generals who are ‘operationalizing policy’ remain in charge.
[ . . .]
What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born.
Unfortunately, I am personally familiar with this group. Before they moved to their current, bigger ambitions of reversing the U.S. presidential election results, they scurrilously attacked me and others from the shadows for two decades. The various story lines and roles they have created for me don’t survive close scrutiny and are internally inconsistent, yet they simply follow the “Wag the Dog” playbook: We don’t need it to prove to be true. We need it to distract them.
[ . . .]
The distractions no longer can mask these “unholy alliances.” The wife of a central architect of the Department of Justice’s “Russia narrative” secretly worked for the dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted — according to his own congressional admissions — to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, to attack Russia and to “embarrass” me and cause trouble for the company I founded.
As entertaining and on some level gratifying it is to read Oleg Deripiska’s snarky take on Victoria Nuland’s, “Deep State-proud loyalists,” and his insider poop on Fusion-GPS, keep in mind that Oleg, himself, is integral to the prosecution case against Paul Manafort and has his own axe to grind. It turns out, in addition, there is reason to believe he has his own relationship with the author of the “Dirty Dossier” that may have predated the direct funding of Fusion-GPS by the DNC.
Deripaska, too, is playing both sides of the “Russiagate” game. Here’s why. As I wrote about him last November when he emerged as the primary source of renewed allegations that Paul Manafort was acting as Putin’s agent inside the Trump camp, it was Deripaska who “outed” Manafort by suing him in a U.S. court to recover tens of millions of dollars that PM allegedly couldn’t account for in his older business dealings with Deripaska in Ukraine. Much of what is publicly known about Manafort’s dealings with the Russians comes from documents that came out of that law suit filed in a civil court in Cyprus. See, https://jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/all-the-standard-errors-that-u...
So what moved Paul Manafort to get into the Trump Campaign? It has been surmised elsewhere that it was Oleg Deripaska, or more exactly the pressure of owing Oleg Deripaska millions of dollars, that motivated Manafort.
What was Oleg Deripaska’s interest in Manafort, aside from recovering a debt? Deripaska has a reported net worth in excess of $5 billion. What’s a trifling $19 million in the Russian oligarch’s money that Manafort is reported to have kept from a 2009 cable TV investment deal in Ukraine that went bad. That’s a good question that Mr. Sypher doesn’t even ask.
According to an AP report in March: https://www.apnews.com/122ae0b5848345faa88108a03de40c5a
[Manifort and Deripaska] had a falling out laid bare in 2014 in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court. The billionaire gave Manafort nearly $19 million to invest in a Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable, according to legal filings by Deripaska’s representatives. It said that after taking the money, Manafort and his associates stopped responding to Deripaska’s queries about how the funds had been used.
That leads to an obvious question that isn’t raised by the likes of NBC and AP. Why, if Deripaska is simply Putin’s Cat’s Paw, as is alleged — and, if, as the Russiagate narrative presumes, Manafort was working to further Putin’s interests inside the Trump campaign (see, e.g., http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/paul-manafort-once-worked-b... and the March, 2017 AP Report: https://apnews.com/122ae0b5848345faa88108a03de40c5a) — would Oleg be playing a central role in taking down Manafort by suing him before Manafort joined the Trump campaign? Seems a very unlikely way of maintaining operational secrecy if the two were really Kremlin operatives.
Deripaska has filed yet another law suit, in which more documents have and will be dumped. See, “Oleg Deripaska sues Paul Manafort, Rick Gates using Mueller”, http://www.businessinsider.com/oleg-deripaska-sues-paul-manafort-rick-ga...
Jan 10, 2018 – Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska used details from Mueller’s indictment in a new lawsuit against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. … Wealthy Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his associate, Rick . . .
The fiction created that Deripaska is simply an agent of Putin is falling apart. Like Carter Page, who is now publicly shown to be an FBI informant, the fact that Oleg Deripaska outed Paul Manafort is one of the “fog facts” — inconvenient facts that are conveniently ignored by most reporters and others with a perceived stake in the game — that underlie the standard Russia!Russia!Russia! narrative.
Comments
Russian Aristocracy
Thanks for the analysis leveymg. The political connections get very complicated. The bare facts from Wiki:
And:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Deripaska
Then we have to add in political and financial battles over corporate empires to muddy the waters of global intrigue even more with deceptions and global legal battles.
Thanks again leveymg. I'm still not sure what to think about this whole convoluted investigation, but there is without a doubt a whole lot of criminal conduct going on from a whole lot of political and financial syndicates.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
Great synopsis of the current sh*t show
All the other people who are being installed in the Mueller investigation is hard to follow. This started with Russia hacking the DNC computers and that Trump and Putin colluded so that Trump would win. Everything else that has been thrown at the wall isn't sticking.
Plus the hacking accusations were started to deflect from what was in the files. They showed that the DNC put their thumb on the election so she would win. Besides, at first they were saying that Guiciffer 2.0 was the one that hacked the DNC and gave them to Wikileaks.
If you have to keep changing the story to make your case, something is wrong.
There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?
Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.
sigh ... this is a free range politics and organic community
and trying to read through this essay, I was reminded that before you get some good organic compost you have to wade through lots of shitty free range political actors.
Can't follow, dear. Too complicated. I bet you have given some people a lot of inside knowledge.
Thanks for all the organic compost.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Hey Mimi!
Check out C99's new tagline.
My way of saying I had read that tagline ...
and as for outlawing dipshitting and wading through free range political actors ... how about this:
'Why Is Trump Silent?' U.S. Lawmakers Ask After Putin Says 'Jews' May Be Behind Election Meddling - U.S. Jewish group says Putin's statement is 'eerily reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
oh, looky at that:
Putin Ordered Shooting Down of Passenger Jet in 2014
The passenger aircraft was reported to be carrying a bomb and targeting the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi - but the incident turned out to be a false alarm
ah, oh, oh, uh, yes, yes, jaaahhh ....
Megyn Kelly: I Think Putin 'Has Something on Donald Trump' - 'I think there’s a very good chance Putin knows some things about Donald Trump that Mr. Trump does not want repeated publicly'
oh, boy, not again, but THAT must have been so good. /s
Sorry.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Here's the takeaway point: Deripaska made a deal to
do business in and park a considerable portion of his aluminum fortune in the U.S.
Here's some new information I updated the article with:
Dunno if this is relevant/accurate but thought I'd toss it in.
No idea about the info/sites here, but in case anyone with the energy wants to check this out?
Best to read this article first (ideally both in full at source, but in the event of devices not allowing for this) to get the idea:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a9204/rebekah-mercer-dona...
In an interview I read some time back, Mercer said that he preferred computers to people, which left me with an entirely different impression...In any event, they shifted from supporting Cruz to Trump - and this is particularly interesting:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a9204/rebekah-mercer-dona...
Then we get to this:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/news/a9979/how...
Since this has always appeared to be a Battle of the Billionaires, and assuming that this is accurate, I kinda wonder who actually 'owns' the CIA and others (Dems loading up on CIA/Military Intelligence candidates all of a sudden) and who might be issuing orders to the military Generals now that Trump's 'given them their heads'. Does all of this 'military might, for the use of': go to the highest bidder and if so, by the individual war-crime or the whole attack/invasion over seemingly forever? Dunno, but with all of the weirdness and strategic misdirection/disinformation further muddying the propaganda stream, my speculators are pointed, albeit conditionally, in all directions. Just don't have the energy for actual research or the ability to verify any of this.
One more potentially indicative thing, (although a lot of Republican billionaires do seem to get all excited and 'Dom'-ish over other people's sex lives, loves and personal reproductive choices, and the CorpoDems want them all to hire them rather than Repubs as their Representatives in government,) regarding a tid-bit from that top article '...Robert and Rebekah have directed money to anti-abortion groups and a Christian college...' - with Pelosi pushing an anti-LGBT and anti-abortion candidate, below.
11 minute video which I found interesting and covers ground - really like this guy, although I never seem to get subscription notices from Youtube on him and only come across his vids down the side sometimes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEiODVUdUVU
If I had the energy, I'd start trying a bit of poking around, regarding the following from that first article, see how shiny, squeaky clean that money might possibly be, even if not expecting much to be visible...
'...the ultra-mysterious Renaissance Technologies hedge fund on Long Island in 1993. In 2009, Robert became the co-CEO of Renaissance, which author Sebastian Mallaby called "perhaps the most successful hedge fund ever" in his 2011 book More Money Than God. ...'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/renaissance-technologies-hedge-fund-on-a-7-...
As One Who Knows Nothing, I looked this up:
http://www.streetofwalls.com/finance-training-courses/quantitative-hedge...
Gee, if only these wealthy clients from '...UBS Group AG, Citigroup Inc. and others...' actually knew how the markets were going to move and this data was used in programming, they could all really make a packet among a limited group of investors, while others went sub-par, couldn't they?
To continue:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/renaissance-technologies-hedge-fund-on-a-7-...
To repeat, although not in set order:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/renaissance-technologies-hedge-fund-on-a-7-...
So Mercer quite recently made his billions in an astounding spurt in both algorithm-operated hedge fund investment and returns, with a restricted group of investors, within a previously failing firm he was/is? Co-Chief Executive of, while the firm's founder steps back, all this in conjunction with an influx of unnamed wealthy clients of '...UBS Group AG, Citigroup Inc. and others...' and then moved into influencing politics, king-making an unlikely President he is said to have essentially got elected and who his daughter and various of his suggested own staffers/employees advise/have advised?
Dunno, but these are not groups in which I hold faith, and some of these coinky-dinks are awfully familiar... kinda smells as though he's been made a billionaire in order to funnel Presidential political funding and advice from Wall St., doesn't it?
And I wonder if they'll be one of the few to come out of the anticipated crash this fall-ish richer than ever...
Obviously just speculating while wondering if anyone out there (on what'll be a long-dead thread by now, lol) Who Knows About This Stuff, has a functional brain and some energy, and maybe who's better at searching, lol, is interested in following this up to see if it leads anywhere interesting? Especially with the regs coming off this Oct. and a resultant crash expected.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
The thread is dead, long live the thread. . .
You may not be surprised to learn this, but the organization that pioneered the specialization of working with financial speculators in creating political crises to manipulate 19th Century bonds markets was actually, hold it, the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police. The elaborate competing games that Mercer, Soros, Deripaska, et al., seem to be up to is a hoary tradition of false flags, dirty-tricks, forgeries, provocations, and assassinations carried out to police the Czarist Court from afar. When you have a chance, you might want to go back to the beginning of this, which I wrote about a dozen or so years ago during a simpler time of crisis (never seems to end, does it?):
The History of Political Dirty Tricks: Pt. 1, The Okhrana and the Paris Bourse
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/11/15/271437/-
The History of Political Dirty-Tricks: (Pt 2) How to Colonize a Larger Country
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/11/29/275653/-
The History of Dirty Tricks (pt. 3): Who Benefited From the Self-Destruction of Europe?, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/12/11/279897/-
No wonder the MSM don't go into the details...
because the details immediately debunk the MSM narrative.
It's clear to those few critical thinkers following this sewer of bullshit that just about everyone involved in this ridiculous false flag is some kind of Deep Stater/intelligence operative. It is, as you say, some weird Game of Thrones nonsense funded from the $100 B black budget that taxpayers willingly fork over.
The UK poisoning thing is just more of the same. The victim was known to Steele, and they shared the same intelligence officer. The victim had been pardoned by Russia years ago. But "Russia,Russia,Russia".
----
Unfortunately, I do believe the propaganda is drowning out the truth. More and more people accept the "fact" of Russian "meddling" (whatever the fuck "crime" that is). Each false flag is trumpeted until debunked. Then, like the Chesire Cat, the accusation fades but the dirt is left to stick to Russia.
The WSWS series on how many spies, special forces, and intelligence folks are running in the Democratic Party primaries is just the brown icing on the cake of the militarized state that America has been turned into by the neocons.
I have not had the heart to find out what is behind the latest incoming barrel-of-shit bomb: "Putin accused the Jews". (Could he have accused the neocons, many of whom have Israeli dual citizenship?)