Deripaska started working as FBI asset in '09 after Mueller fixed his visa.
Much of the case that’s made against Mueller probe defendant Paul Manafort is based in allegations made in the media that Manafort is a paid agent of Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. What few seem to understand is that Deripaska has been acting as an asset of U.S. intelligence for at least the last nine years, beginning in 2009 when Robert Mueller was Director of the FBI.
For a number of years beginning in the late 1990s, after he took over Rusal, the largest Russian aluminum concern, Deripaska had increasing problems entering the U.S., where like many oligarchs he has huge amounts of parked money. In 2006, his U.S. visa was revoked. In 2009, his visa problems were “fixed.” Ironically, it was Robert Mueller who helped cure that problem for Deripaska. Here’s part of the back story to that as told in The Hill earlier this summer:
[T]here’s one episode even Mueller’s former law enforcement comrades — and independent ethicists — acknowledge raises legitimate legal issues and a possible conflict of interest in his overseeing the Russia election probe.
In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
Yes, that’s the same Deripaska who has surfaced in Mueller’s current investigation and who was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration. The Levinson mission is confirmed by more than a dozen participants inside and outside the FBI, including Deripaska, his lawyer, the Levinson family and a retired agent who supervised the case. Mueller was kept apprised of the operation, officials told me.
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/387625-mueller-may-have-a-conflic...
In 2009, another key event occurred in Oleg Deripaska's career. That was Oleg's public humiliation by Vladimir Putin. In early June, this remarkable exchange occurred before the assembled cameras at a Russian cement plant.
https://youtu.be/48Kk7kobMQY
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5446293/Vladimi...
04 Jun 2009
Mr Putin, who is a master at dispensing ritual humiliation, likened Oleg Deripaska to a cockroach and forced him to accompany him on a tour of Pikalevo, a factory town that has witnessed the most serious social unrest Russia has seen since the start of the global economic crisis.
Last week Pikalevo’s residents vented their anger over job losses and unpaid wages at one of the oligarch’s local factories by blocking a major road and causing a 250-mile traffic jam. The unprecedented protest reportedly worried the Kremlin, which has long been afraid that Russia’s imploding economy could cause serious political unrest.
Anxious to ensure that the Pikalevo problem remained an isolated one, Mr Putin sought to cast himself as the town’s saviour – and Mr Deripaska as its villain.
Oleg seemed at that moment ready-made for recruitment and ripe for pay-back. If one were CIA/FBI/MI-6, that would certainly be a moment to make an approach, particularly as Deripaska’s fortune (along with his ego) had just be trimmed back from $40B to a mere $4.9B, according to the article in The Telegraph.
MORE – FBI approached Deripaska before election to gather dirt on Trump
Deripaska Involved in FBI Efforts to Gather Dirt on Trump Campaign Before Election
In his May 14, 2018 column in The Hill, John Solomon reports some more startling details about Oleg Deripaska’s ongoing relationship with the FBI. In addition to his 2009 role in the attempted retrieval of a former Bureau agent held in Iran as a CIA spy, FBI agents again approached Oleg to gather information on figures in the Trump campaign. Solomon writes: http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/387625-mueller-may-have-a-conflic...
Deripaska also appears to be one of the first Russians the FBI asked for help when it began investigating the now-infamous Fusion GPS “Steele Dossier.” Waldman, his American lawyer until the sanctions hit, gave me a detailed account, some of which U.S. officials confirm separately.
Two months before Trump was elected president, Deripaska was in New York as part of Russia’s United Nations delegation when three FBI agents awakened him in his home; at least one agent had worked with Deripaska on the aborted effort to rescue Levinson. During an hour-long visit, the agents posited a theory that Trump’s campaign was secretly colluding with Russia to hijack the U.S. election.
“Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious,” the lawyer said. “So he told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false. ‘You are trying to create something out of nothing,’ he told them.” The agents left though the FBI sought more information in 2017 from the Russian, sources tell me. Waldman declined to say if Deripaska has been in contact with the FBI since Sept, 2016.
Elsewhere in the article we learn that one of the agents who worked with Deripaska in 2009 was none other than Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI Deputy Director. McCabe testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information. The Steele Dossier was leaked by Steele to the press at about the same time that these agents approached Deripaska, just a couple months before the 2016 election.
Contrary to most accounts, Manafort -- the subject of much of the Steele Dossier -- is hardly the agent of the Kremlin through Deripaska he's often portrayed to be. Much of Mueller's indictments of Manafort are in fact based upon information provided by Deripaska in a series of lawsuits he filed against Manafort in open court cases going back to 2014.
Another startling coincidence is that Deripaska’s lawyer cited in the article, Adam Waldman, also turns out to be the Washington legal counsel to none other than MI-6 veteran and Fusion-GPS contractor, Christopher Steele. According to Jane Meyer's portrait in the New Yorker, Oleg is also a client of Steele's London private spook shop, Orbis, through Deripaska's long-time UK lawyer: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man...
Orbis promises confidentiality, and releases no information on its clientele. Some of its purported clients, such as a major Western oil company, are conventional corporations. Others are controversial, including a London law firm representing the interests of Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire victor of Russia’s aluminum wars, a notoriously violent battle.
Indeed, a bit of sleuthing reveals that the litigious Mr. Deripaska has been represented since 1999 by London-based Bryan Cave law firm attorney named Paul Hauser, and that Waldman has withdrawn his appearance as attorney. Notably, a court in London just awarded Deripaska through Hauser clear title to 100% of several billion dollars of contested holdings in Rusal in a law suit dating back to 2007 with two competing Oligarchs. Perhaps, that's what this has been all about, all along.
Comments
No conflict of interest
Mueller is the designated #TrumpKiller so he is not allowed to be tainted by prior association with Russian Oligarchs.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
The swamp is deep and very
The swamp is deep and very very murky my friend. Hard to see clearly what is going on in the dog and pony show.
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
Felix Sater is also an FBI informant tied into this
Sater's protection by the FBI allowed him to worm deeply into the Trump organization and do business in New York as the front man for a group of Ukranian mobsters and Russian Oligarchs for many years. A remarkable article details how Sater and the Ukranian Mob intersect with the FBI, Trump, Manafort and Deripaska.
For twenty years, the FBI enabled Felix Sater, although convicted of securities fraud, going so far as to convince a federal Judge to seal Sater's record of conviction. https://casetext.com/case/in-re-motion-for-civil-contempt-by-john-doe This allowed Sater to continue operating inside the United States as a front for major Ukranian-born organized crime figures and Russian Oligarchs useful to another U.S. agency for which Sater was also an informant in its attempts (which eventually faltered dramatically) to steer events in Russia and the adjoining country to its south.
The story of the Bureau's hold on Sater is told in enormous detail from the early 1990s, with an anti-Trump spin, here: https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/03/27/fbi-cant-tell-trump-russia/
Isn't this essentially
what the Carter Page thing is about also, that he was run as a Russian connection by the FBI? Meanwhile, the FBI allows the Russian, Ukrainian, or whatever Mafia to do what they do, including enriching people working with and for the FBI. It's Bushworld, straight out corruption in the worst possible way, not just money laundering, but business in murder, trafficking, war and oppression.
Obviously, the FBI isn't running these people in order to enhance law enforcement. They are running these people in order to run illegal activities. One of the clearest things that emerges from the research of Antony Sutton is that for the last century, all espionage is industrial espionage.
Yes, essentially the same. Except unlike Page, a double-agent,
Oleg Deripaska may be like another Oligarch turned informant/operative, and turn out to be a triple-agent. The CIA should be well aware after events 17 years ago of the dangers of cultivating agents with the ambition and means to end up working for themselves, first.
Not only may he have financed (and been a major source for) the Steele Dossier -- but he and associated Russian Oligarchs/Ukrainian Mobsters also appear to have been involved in the earlier regime change in Kiev along with the aborted effort in Moscow and the ongoing one in Washington that are connected to the others. Don't be too surprised if it turns out Oleg is working for no one but himself.
If the
triple-agent you're referring to from 17 years ago is who I think you're referring to, I don't know why you would think anything went wrong. All's well that end's badly for the American people, who wind up signing off on 6 trillion dollars worth of endless war against phantom terrorists. Sounds pretty successful if you're in the business of war.
Corruption on top of
Corruption on top of corruption, on top of corruption. But still we are to believe that these are the "good guys". Give me a fuggin break.
If you haven't figured it out yet, elected officials have very little power. They do what they are told, or they don't get elected.
I can't stand it when one wants to argue that one side is somehow better than the other when they are both so clearly dirty. I advocate for the whole thing going boom. Starting from scratch is the only chance there is of fixing this disgusting mess.
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
Simplicity
Russiagate, defined in one sentence to the FBI: You are trying to create something out of nothing.
If that were true, Dear Oleg would be the event horizon
on the edge of his own giant Black Hole. Something massive there from which no light and no evidence ever registers on recording devices. We only know of its existence because it sucks in everything around it.