rigorousintuition.ca

43 of the 55 people aboard were killed, including Dorothy Hunt, who was carrying $10,000 in $100 bills when the plane crashed.

Grizzly » Mon Sep 18, 2017 12:06 pm wrote:Reminiscent of a Jello Biafra tour... I Love e it! I watch em all..

Elvis » Mon Sep 18, 2017 12:24 pm wrote:Looks good, Robert, will read in full later. I never knew much about the Teapot Dome affair.

As a longtime Watergate buff, I noticed one typo in the excerpt:

43 of the 55 people aboard were killed, including Dorothy Hunt, who was carrying $10,000 in $100 bills when the plane crashed.

FWIW... I'm pretty certain the amount was $100,000.

Dorothy Hunt, Michelle Clark and George Collins took the Flight 533 from Washington to Chicago. The aircraft hit the branches of trees close to Midway Airport: "It then hit the roofs of a number of neighborhood bungalows before plowing into the home of Mrs. Veronica Kuculich at 3722 70th Place, demolishing the home and killing her and a daughter, Theresa. The plane burst into flames killing a total of 45 persons, 43 of them on the plane, including the pilot and first and second officers. Eighteen passengers survived." Hunt, Clark and Collins were all killed in the accident.

Just before Dorothy Hunt boarded the aircraft she purchased $250,000 in flight insurance payable to E. Howard Hunt. In his book Undercover (1974) Hunt claims he was unaware that his wife planned to do this. In the book he also tried to explain what his wife was doing with $10,000 in her purse. According to Hunt it was money to be invested with Hal Carlstead in "two already-built Holiday Inns in the Chicago area".

The following month E. Howard Hunt pleaded guilty to burglary and wiretapping and eventually served 33 months in prison. Hunt kept his silence although another member of the Watergate team, James W. McCord, wrote a letter to Judge John J. Sirica claiming that the defendants had pleaded guilty under pressure (from John Dean and John N. Mitchell) and that perjury had been committed.

Elvis » Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:10 pm wrote:Hm, looking at Google returns, I see a lot of this:

"A large sum of money (between $10,000 and $100,000) was found amid the wreckage in the possession of Mrs. Hunt"...

I didn't realize the amount reported was so inconclusive, I've always remembered it was $100K. Ah well.

Lawmakers Dig Into GOP Operative Who Sought Clinton Emails From Russia

By Allegra Kirkland Published October 16, 2017 5:33 pm

Congressional investigators are digging into a Republican operative’s efforts to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private emails from Russian hackers and his claims to be carrying out that hunt on behalf of members of the Trump campaign, CNN reported Monday.

The Senate and House Intelligence Committees are both reaching out to individuals recruited by the late Peter W. Smith, a veteran Chicago-based opposition research, for inside knowledge about how exactly his email hunt worked. Smith himself was found dead in an apparent suicide weeks after after the Wall Street Journal first reported on his email campaign.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is also probing Smith’s work and whether, as he claimed, he was working “in coordination” with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn or other high-level Trump campaign officials.

An anonymous source told CNN that British security analyst Matt Tait told the House committee that he believed Smith had close ties to Flynn, former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and White House aide Kellyanne Conway. Tait went public with Smith’s efforts to recruit him in a June blog post for Lawfare, where he wrote that it was “apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign” and that he displayed a “reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out.”

Indeed, Smith himself told the Journal that he “knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government.”

The House panel has also interviewed Smith’s former assistant, law student Jonathan Safron, while Senate investigators have contacted Eric York, a separate security expert Smith reached out to for assistance in obtaining and verifying Clinton’s emails, according to CNN.

Conway and Bannon have previously denied any knowledge of this plot. Flynn’s attorney, Robert Kelner, declined CNN’s request for comment.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also requested an interview and documents from far-right blogger Chuck Johnson, who told CNN he had done neither and would refuse any requests for a closed-door interview. Johnson recently joined pro-Russia congressman Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) for a trip to meet with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, where they discussed their shared assessment that Russia played no role in providing Clinton campaign emails to Assange’s publication during the campaign.

Fusion GPS attorney drops bombshell: ‘Somebody’s already been killed as a result of this dossier’

Travis Gettys

09 Jan 2018 at 14:18 ET


Christopher Steele (Telegraph)

At least one person has been killed as a result of the Trump-Russia dossier, according to congressional testimony.

Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August that he could not describe what steps his firm and the dossier’s author had taken to verify the credibility of their sources.

The firm’s attorney, Joshua Levy, explained to lawmakers why Simpson was reluctant to reveal much about their sources or methods.

“It’s a voluntary interview, and in addition to that he wants to be very careful to protect his sources,” Levy told the panel. “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work.”

stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 09, 2018 3:27 pm wrote:

Fusion GPS attorney drops bombshell: ‘Somebody’s already been killed as a result of this dossier’

Travis Gettys

09 Jan 2018 at 14:18 ET


Christopher Steele (Telegraph)

At least one person has been killed as a result of the Trump-Russia dossier, according to congressional testimony.

Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August that he could not describe what steps his firm and the dossier’s author had taken to verify the credibility of their sources.

The firm’s attorney, Joshua Levy, explained to lawmakers why Simpson was reluctant to reveal much about their sources or methods.

“It’s a voluntary interview, and in addition to that he wants to be very careful to protect his sources,” Levy told the panel. “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work.”

Is this another curious death? Or a reference to Peter W. Smith?

Mystery death of ex-KGB chief linked to MI6 spy's dossier on Donald Trump

27 JANUARY 2017 • 9:30PM

Oleg Erovinkin
An ex-KGB chief suspected of helping the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile his dossier on Donald Trump may have been murdered by the Kremlin and his death covered up. it has been claimed.

Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day in mysterious circumstances.

Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier.


Christopher Steele
Erovinkin has been described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Steele writes in an intelligence report dated July 19, 2016, he has a source close to Sechin, who had disclosed alleged links between Mr Trump’s supporters and Moscow.

The death of Erovinkin has prompted speculation it is linked to Mr Steele’s explosive dossier, which was made public earlier this month. Mr Trump has dismissed the dossier as “fake news” and no evidence has emerged to support its lurid claims.

The Russian state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Erovinkin’s body was “found in a black Lexus... [and] a large-scale investigation has been commenced in the area. Erovinkin’s body was sent to the FSB morgue”.

No cause of death has been confirmed and the FSB continues to investigate. Media reports suggested his death was a result of foul play.


Donald Trump with Theresa May, the British Prime Minister in the Oval Office on Friday Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA
It was later claimed he died of a heart attack. Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia-related security threats, believes Erovinkin is the key source to whom Mr Steele refers in his dossier.

Mr Grozev said on a blog: “Insiders have described Erovinkin to me alternately as ‘Sechin’s treasurer’ and ‘the go-between between Putin and Sechin’. One thing that everyone seems to agree – both in public and private sources – is that Erovinkin was Sechin’s closest associate.”

Mr Grozev, of Risk Management Lab, a think tank in Bulgaria, said: “I have no doubt that at the time Erovinkin died, Mr Putin had Mr Steele’s Trump dossier on his desk. He would – arguably – have known whether the alleged... story is based on fact or fiction.

"Whichever is true, he would have had a motive to seek – and find the mole... He would have had to conclude that Erovinkin was at least a person of interest.”


Oleg Erovinkin
Experts expressed scepticism about the theory.

“As a rule, people like Gen Yerovinkin don’t tend to die in airport thriller murders,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services.

Mr Steele, 52, a Cambridge graduate, remains in hiding following his unmasking as the author of the Trump dossier.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01 ... ald-trump/

seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 07, 2017 9:07 am wrote:

Russian Media Outlet Links Treason Case Against Top Cyber-Crime Fighters to American Election Hacking

Dec 5, 2017

A wanted poster for Dmitry Dokuchaev sits on display during news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington / Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg


Russian interference in the U.S. presidential elections is at the heart of a secretive treason case against a former FSB official and three of his alleged accomplices arrested last year, a Russian news startup reports.

Sergei Mikhailov, the FSB’s former head of cyber investigations, was detained on Dec. 5, 2016, together with three alleged accomplices — his colleague Dmitry Dokuchayev, former Kaspersky Lab employee Ruslan Stoyanov, and internet entrepreneur Georgy Fomchenkov.

The four men have been held in Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo Prison on charges of committing treason. The mysterious case has been hidden from public view after being labeled a “state secret.”

“The four men have been hidden away from everyone, to make sure they don’t give away any sensitive information,” the Bell outlet cited Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer for one of the defendants, as saying.

In an extensive investigation published on the one-year anniversary of the group's arrest, the Bell outlet cited two unidentified sources who said the move to arrest the men was ordered by the Russian military intelligence, the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU), in an internal power struggle over state funding.

An earlier report by Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to look into alleged Russian election meddling, said Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC had been targeted by Russian hackers on two separate occasions.

The first attack, allegedly carried out by the FSB, went unnoticed until a second was carried out by the GRU — with the two agencies seemingly working independently of each other.

The United States in December introduced sanctions against both the FSB and GRU for interference in the U.S. elections. But personal sanctions were only leveled against GRU head Igor Korobov and three of his deputies.

It was Mikhailov and his team who provided U.S. intelligence officials with information about the GRU’s attack, the Bell’s sources said.

The New York Times in January had already connected the arrest of Mikhailov and his team to the DNC hack, citing unidentified sources, but this is the first time Russian sources have linked the former FSB official with leaking information about the hack.

According to the Bell’s sources, the men are not officially being tried on charges of leaking information on the GRU’s alleged DNC hack. Russia has consistently denied all accusations of election meddling, so trying the men for passing on information on election meddling— even behind closed doors — would be a tacit admission of guilt, says the Bell.

Instead, the Bell’s sources say, they are being prosecuted for leaking information to the United States on the Russian founder of the Chronopay payment system, Pavel Vrublevsky, in a case that goes back to 2011.
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/the-bel ... king-59810

An American Cover Story for Russia's Undercover Hackers

Feb 1, 2017 — 23:42 — Update: Feb. 14 2017


An unprecedented spy saga plays out at the heart of Russia's intelligence community.


Olya Khaletskaya


Even for a spy thriller, the plot is borderline fantastical.

Two top FSB cyber crime fighters hunt down a group of hackers behind the personal data leaks of some of the Kremlin’s most powerful and mighty.

Rather than arrest them, they take over the organization and put it to their own use. Several months on, the chief cyber detective is outed by his own colleagues at an FSB meeting and escorted out of the room with a bag over his head.

Since the nationalist Tsargrad outlet first broke the story on Jan. 25, more murky details have emerged every day.

Citing anonymous leaks from within the security apparatus, the Russian press reports the officials and two others have been accused of colluding with American intelligence services to expose Russian hacking there. The trail leads from Lubyanka to Bangkok and the United States, and stars characters with names like the Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty.

Real information is scant, but one thing is sure: the four accused are being held at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. Both FSB officials refused to talk to Kogershin Sagiyeva, a member of the independent prison watchdog ONK. But she got a glimpse of them.

“I was amazed by how young they looked,” she told The Moscow Times, “not what you'd expect from high-ranking law enforcement officials.”

Whether or not the men are double agents or victims of an internal power struggle, a purge is under-way and it is expanding like an oil spill.

The Art of Black PR

The story begins in 1990s St. Petersburg, where Vladimir Anikeyev started his career in journalism, according to the Rosbalt news agency. A mediocre writer, Anikeyev nonetheless excelled at “getting the required information.”

Soon, Anikeyev shifted to doing “black PR.” He cozied up to secretaries and insiders to collect incriminating evidence on officials and businessmen, known in Russia as kompromat. He would then either extort money from his victims or sell the information to rivals or media outlets, the report claims.

Joining forces with a number of hackers, he used phishing emails and set up fake Wi-Fi networks at venues he knew were popular with high-placed Kremlin officials, such as the GUM department store on Red Square. After gaining access to the victims’ gadgets, the stolen content was stored on servers in Estonia, Thailand and Ukraine.

Anikeyev and his team took up aliases inspired by British author Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Anikeyev became Lewis, his right hand was Alice and the group’s press representatives went by Shaltai and Boltai (Russian for Humpty and Dumpty).

“That world of inside-out logic best describes Russian politics,” Shaltai told the Apparat.ru news website during an encrypted chat interview several years ago, explaining their name choice.

The group organized anonymous bitcoin cyptocurrency auctions on their own website, offering leaked content to the highest bidder. One source who claimed to have participated in the auctions told The Moscow Times that an average lot would sell for up to $30,000. Some hacks, however, attracted bids as high as $200,000, the source added.

The founder of the illusive Shaltai Boltai hacker group has been uncovered as Vladimir Anikeyev, a native Dagestani and expert in "black PR."
The founder of the illusive Shaltai Boltai hacker group has been uncovered as Vladimir Anikeyev, a native Dagestani and expert in "black PR." Vladimir Anikeyev / Facebook

FSB Ties


Shaltai Boltai, as the group became known, first made itself known to the general public in 2013, when it published an online transcript of President Vladimir Putin’s traditional New Year’s Eve speech, hours before it hit the airwaves.

In 2014, the group hacked Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s Twitter account and sent out tweets announcing his resignation “out of shame for this government’s actions” and criticizing the annexation of Crimea. The group also published the private email correspondence of a number of other high officials and businessmen.

According to Rosbalt, the head of the FSB’s cyber crime investigation unit (TsIB), Sergei Mikhailov, and his deputy, Dmitry Dokuchayev, uncovered Shaltai Boltai’s real identities in 2016. Instead of dissolving the group, however, they took control.

But some argue the nature of the information being leaked proved the group had ties to the FSB from the outset.

A Moscow Times source who claims to have been blackmailed by Shaltai Boltai, insists the information that Shaltai gathered on him “could have been obtained only by surveillance and operative action, not just hacking.” This would mean that Mikhailov could have been involved in Shaltai’s activities from its founding, the source said.

In any case, in autumn 2016, the group got hold of thousands of messages from the official email account of Vladislav Surkov, the coordinator of Russia’s Ukraine policy, and shared it with Ukrainian news websites.


By targeting Surkov, the group might have gone a step too far. In October, Anikeyev was detained after crossing the border into Russia. The arrest was the culmination of an operation that took at least a few months and involved several exchanges with the group, according to a source close to the top-level state authorities. It was not the FSB that arrested Mikhailov, as claimed by most Russian media, but the Federal Security Guard service (FSO), he says.

Within Russia’s security apparatus, the FSO is the FSB’s main competitor. If the sting operation was under FSO control, it would suggest the detentions were part of an internal power struggle between security bodies.

Following his arrest, Anikeyev allegedly started cooperating with the authorities and revealed the supposed involvement of the FSB’s own cyber crime chief, Mikhailov, Russian media reports.

A part of the declassified version Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia's efforts to interfere with the U.S. political process.
A part of the declassified version Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia's efforts to interfere with the U.S. political process. Jon Elswick / AP

A Cover-Up

Mikhailov and deputy Dokuchayev were detained in several months later, in December, and charged with treason. It is unclear, however, what the men stand accused of.

On Jan. 31, the Interfax news agency connected the treason charges to American accusations of Russian hacking ahead of the U.S. presidential elections. It is as close to an official statement as can be expected in Russia.

American intelligence agencies have expressed “high confidence” that the cyber attacks emanated from Moscow. Some now think Mikhailov and his deputy might have funnelled confidential information to the U.S. on Russian hacks of the Arizona and Illinois voter registration databases. To Steven L. Hall, a former CIA head of Russian operations, the connection between the Russian hacking scandal and the recent arrests seems “reasonable.”

“Certainly U.S. intelligence would have loved to talk to Mikhailov,” Hall told The Moscow Times. “But how that could have happened is a complicated question.”

However, according to two Moscow Times sources, the treason charges and the men's supposed link to America are likely a cover story. Politically, the loss of Shaltai Boltai is a big blow to the FSB’s reputation. The U.S. connection makes it easier to explain to an external audience what is, in fact, an internal power struggle, they said.

Rabbit Hole

The scandal shows no sign of ending. So far, according to several media reports, six people have been detained, including the FSB officials, Anikeyev and Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of investigations at Russia’s prominent Kaspersky Lab cybersecurity company.

Meanwhile, at the Lefortovo prison, only Stoyanov agreed to talk with prison monitor Sagiyeva, and only to confirm the date of his detention. Sagiyeva also twice tried to visit Anikeyev, but was told both times he was away at a meeting with investigators.

“Something’s going on,” she told The Moscow Times. “I doubt he is even there.”

As in Shaltai Boltai’s description of Russian politics, nothing in this case is what it seems.
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/tin ... -spy-57013 

 

Tech firm in Trump dossier was target of antipiracy advocates
BY KEVIN G. HALL
khall@mcclatchydc.com

NOVEMBER 15, 2017 12:12 PM

UPDATED NOVEMBER 17, 2017 07:43 AM

WASHINGTON The dossier that has fueled investigations into Russian connections to Donald Trump’s team got a lot right. Indeed, congressional probes and the first guilty plea in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have shown the document’s suggestions that the Kremlin sought for years to cultivate Trump, that it cozied up to key Trump campaign officials, that it worked to sow division in the U.S. electorate and that the campaign had contacts with Wikileaks have all been on target.

Yet among the 35-page dossier’s claims stands one – on the very last page – that is still vexing investigators. It’s the accusation that a company called XBT and its U.S. subsidiary Webzilla hacked the emails of Democratic Party leaders.

“[O]ver the period March-September 2016 a company called XBT/Webzilla and its affiliates had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’” against them, according to the dossier, which was prepared by a former British spy who specialized in Russia.

XBT and web-hosting company Webzilla, while not well known to the American public, have long been the targets of lawyers who fight Internet piracy. They have claimed, in several lawsuits and submissions to regulators, that Webzilla looks the other way while its customers flagrantly steal copyrighted materials.


None of the lawsuits involve the very specific actions described in the dossier, which was published by Buzzfeed on Jan. 10; XBT has brought defamation suits against the online news site and the document’s author, Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent.

McClatchy consulted a wide range of experts and reviewed more than 1,000 pages of court documents, U.S. Copyright Office filings and corporate registry documents in Cyprus, Singapore, Florida and the United Kingdom to learn more about XBT. That review yields a profile of a company and, specifically, two corporate employees whose legal entanglements underscore just how difficult it will be for investigators to dismiss the dossier’s claims.

Indeed, Webzilla employees were linked through litigation and regulatory filings to two companies accused of large-scale copyright violations involving Hollywood movies and subscription pornography. Pirated pornography is often baited with malware that can affect users’ computers in various ways.

“It’s not shocking that Webzilla was listed as a hub for questionable activity. Webzilla is on my radar weekly due to its client base facilitating online piracy on a massive scale,” said Jason Tucker, president of Battleship Stance, a company that manages and investigates copyright infringement for film studios.

Unraveling a Mystery

XBT is based in Luxembourg but run out of Cyprus, and has seven subsidiaries, including Webzilla.

Among the allegations against Webzilla: The International Intellectual Property Association, in a Feb. 9 letter this year to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, complained that Webzilla, as an Internet Service Provider, “serviced and administered” in Cyprus a company called 4shared.com. That’s a file-sharing website that the trade association said draws more requests to remove specific website addresses from search engines than any other in the world. Gurvits insisted that XBT and its subsidiaries had no control of nor access to the website or its data.

Similarly, in joint comments to the U.S. Copyright Office in 2015, 18 music-industry associations complained that Webzilla and an unrelated company routinely fail to take down copyrighted content “despite receiving thousands of notices of infringement.”

XBT counters these complaints are misguided, saying Webzilla hosts websites much like AT&T offers customers its telephone network but has no control over the content of calls.

“The short answer to it is we have no duty to know,” Valentin Gurvits, XBT’s attorney, with the Boston Legal Group, said in an interview. He added that “100 percent, across the board, I have successfully defended Webzilla against these allegations.”

XBT and its main shareholder have repeatedly offered to open logbooks and take questions from the FBI or U.S. law enforcement but nobody has taken them up on the offer, Gurvits said Thursday. He also branded as frivolous the past lawsuits against XBT and Webzilla.

Still, Webzilla has been involved, even if indirectly, with the kinds of alleged bad actors whose companies could easily carry out the activities the dossier claims.

For example, one Webzilla employee, Constantin Luchian, is linked through legal documents to freakshare.com, which bills itself as a free data-hosting service. Freakshare allows users to upload any amount of data; a download link can then be shared with anyone anywhere.

German newspapers cite allegations from prosecutors that freakshare.com is actually one of several related companies that together make up a global criminal enterprise run by two brothers, naturalized German citizens Kastriot and Kreshnik Selimi.

The two had been sought since 2014 by German authorities for allegedly operating piracy portals where users could watch copyrighted movies for free. Kreshnik was arrested in Kosovo in July, a German newspaper reported on Sept. 11; the Germany Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the case.

Luchian, a Moldova-born naturalized U.S. citizen and an officer in Webzilla’s Florida operations, figures in because he was designated to receive notices demanding that freakshare.com remove copyrighted material from its site. Luchian performs that service for a number of similar firms, which he offers through a business he runs called InCorporate Now. As a result, his name has surfaced in numerous piracy complaints.

Making matters even murkier, the filing designating Luchian to receive notices of copyright violations for freakshare.com was made by yet another company, Vollend Plus LP — a firm with a Scottish address that was registered as trading in batteries and battery parts. Vollend’s paperwork also listed two general partners, both offshore companies in the Seychelles, a known tax haven in the Indian Ocean that requires few details about corporate ownership.

“Vollend Plus is a small Webzilla hosting client but otherwise has no relationship to XBT,” said Gurvits, who actually filed the paperwork for Vollend Plus with the U.S. Copyright Office but said he’s done no other business with it.



Luchian is identified in several other lawsuits alleging theft by companies whose copyrighted materials were hosted by Webzilla or for whom Luchian was identified as the person receiving takedown requests.

“Luchian is a smart guy and he sees an opportunity to provide services,” said Gurvits, who filed the paperwork for freakshare.com and represents Webzilla in its lawsuit against Buzzfeed. He noted that knowledge of Russian is an asset as a registered agent for these companies.

screencapture-incorporatenow-webpage
This screenshot shows Constantin Luchian on the website of his Florida-based corporate services company InCorporate Now. It receives takedown notices for numerous Internet sites when they receive complaints of copyright violations.
Several of XBT’s holdings list an address in Fort Lauderdale at a 24-story corporate office tower. The listed phone numbers are actually for the office-leasing firm Regus. A woman answering the phone said Webzilla doesn’t actually have a suite there. It has a “virtual office,” essentially a mail drop.

XBT’s main shareholder, Aleksej Gubarev, has dual citizenship in Russia and Lithuania, his attorney says. Gubarev has said he resides in Cyprus.

XBT is privately held, meaning it reports very little public information about its owners or its earnings. Gubarev is the controlling shareholder in XBT, said Gurvits, and other employees are minority shareholders.

But corporate registry documents in Cyprus, translated from Greek, paint a more complex structure. They show that over the past seven years XBT’s shareholders have included one entity that appears to have no Internet presence at all, and four that are registered in Singapore or Cyprus. One of the four lists Gubarev as its owner. The others disclose little information about their true owners or directors.

The dossier claims that Gubarev was “recruited under duress” by Russian intelligence officials in the hack of Democratic Party leaders — a charge he vehemently denied in a Jan. 11 interview with McClatchy; Gubarev later filed his suit against BuzzFeed.

Connecting Dots

Cyber experts who analyzed the hack of the Democratic National Committee believe it was the result of a large-scale phishing operation conducted by a group linked to Russian intelligence and a past hack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Phishing involves fake emails sent to email accounts in a bid to have users change their passwords; Russian spy agencies capture them to access private computer networks.

One reason XBT and Gubarev may have drawn suspicion is that their success in the open United States and European markets led to an expansion into Russia last year.

The XBT subsidiary Servers.com opened its Russian operation initially with 500 servers in Moscow, where the Internet is tightly controlled by the Kremlin’s intelligence and military services. Since 2016, Russia has required that Internet providers there store data on servers there, giving Russia both a grip on information and the ability to thwart investigations elsewhere.

“Within Russia, there are increasingly stringent laws governing connecting to the Internet,” said Kenneth Geers, a former NATO cyber expert and fellow at the policy think thank the Atlantic Council. “That’s indicative of a higher level of information control that stems from tighter political control.

An exhaustive review of U.S. court documents by McClatchy found no evidence that XBT or its affiliates were ever accused of spreading viruses or employing robot-like computer commands called bots .

But the piracy lawsuits involving personnel from XBT’s U.S. operations underscore how Webzilla as a hosting company could be used to that end.

A high-profile case in 2013 brought by Disney Enterprises and four movie studios for the Internet theft of copyrighted content ended in a settlement, with the defendant, file-uploading site Hotfile, ceasing its operations.

Luchian and another Webzilla employee —Konstantin Bolotin, a Kazakh immigrant and former Webzilla executive who lives in Hollywood, Fla. — figured in the case because of their email exchanges and business relations with Hotfile’s alleged owner Anton Titov. As recently as this March, Luchian was still the agent in Florida for another Titov firm, Lemuria Communications Inc.

screencapture-hotfile-luchian
This screenshot shows Constantin Luchin as the registered agent to receive takedown notices for Hotfile, a company that ceased operating in a settlement with the motion-picture industry over Internet piracy.
Gurvits insisted that Webzilla’s relationship with Hotfile was limited. “Webzilla did NOT rent servers to Hotfile or give access [to the servers] – only floor space, electricity and Internet connectivity,” he said in an email.

Bolotin and Luchian provided sworn depositions in January 2016 in another case, this one brought by the foreign owner of the Metart Network. Metart operates self-described high-end, members-only erotic adult entertainment websites.

The defendant was Sun Social Media, which, Bolotin said in his deposition, he’d launched after leaving Webzilla. Luchian handled accounting for the new outfit, an adult-themed video-hosting company. Hosted by Webzilla, Sun Social had been sued for alleged theft of Metart’s copyrighted pornographic material.

Sun Social Media didn’t have any employees in Florida, Bolotin testified, just paid programmers in Russia and Ukraine to build and maintain a video-hosting platform for subscription porn at his proprietary websites.

But Bolotin and Luchian had curiously faulty memories in their depositions, each unable to remember under oath the year they graduated high school or college. At the time of deposition in 2016 they were respectively aged 29 and 30.

A Star is Porn

The dossier’s most specific allegation against XBT is that porn was a vehicle through which the viruses and bots were used in the hacking of Democratic Party leaders.

A search of domain names shows many porn sites are hosted by Webzilla. Some of the domain names on its servers in Holland include the cringe-worthy maturespantyhouse.com, Japanese-toilet.com and asian-pissing-girls.com.

The website o-suck.com is among the domains hosted by Webzilla in Fort Lauderdale. It self describes as “an amazing arousing journey in the land of Endless Lust.”

Porn accounts for about 6 percent XBT’s business, Gurvits said, citing an audit by KPMG. But the count is of subscriber-based porn sites that are hosted by Webzilla —not the much larger universe of pornography moving across file-sharing websites.

Internet porn is generally legal and profitable, and isn’t necessarily a risk to infect computers, cautioned Stephen Cobb, a senior security researcher with ESET North America in San Diego.

“If you are a legitimate supplier of pornography you do not want to mess up your customer’s computers,” he said, distinguishing between sites that sell subscriptions and those that offer porn for free. “People who spend time on the Internet trying to find free porn or trying to watch porn without paying tend to encounter a lot of malicious code.”

And that’s where the file-sharing sites like freakshare.com and 4shared.com, hosted by Webzilla, come into the picture.

The cyber security firm RiskIQ, in a late 2015 report called Digital Bait, estimated that one in three websites that contain pirated content contained malware. That’s software designed to maliciously seek unauthorized computer access to collect private data and/or inflict deliberate harm.

There’s no evidence that XBT and Webzilla actively sought to spread viruses and other malware. But it’s also clear that it has been accused of allowing the kind of pirated porn that is often baited with malware.

“It’s very common for nation states to use that kind of attack,” said a cyber expert with direct knowledge of the hack on Democratic Party leaders.

While claiming to have no knowledge of any Webzilla or XBT role in the attack, the expert said the hack had all the hallmarks of a state actor that hijacked an unsuspecting website to launch an attack. That suggests that clients of Webzilla could have been used without them or host Webzilla being aware of it.

“It’s always some mom-and-pop company some place. Nobody (in intelligence) does it on their own (system),” said the expert, who demanded anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter and ongoing investigations.

Lawsuit Jousting

If the early proceedings are any indication, the XBT lawsuit against BuzzFeed could be a bruising one. The court has ordered each side to hand over confidential data. BuzzFeed has had to give up readership and click data, while XBT must share tax and financial data and, more importantly, details about the internal policing of its hosting operations. No firm trial date has been set yet, and there is still the chance of settlement.

The dossier was in the hands of McClatchy and numerous other news outlets well before it was published by BuzzFeed. And even before then its impact had been felt.

The day after Christmas last year, just weeks before the dossier exploded on the international stage, Gen. Oleg Erovinkin, a former KGB general, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow.

It wasn’t until a full month later that the world learned this however, when news of his mysterious death became public in news reports from Europe and England on Jan. 27. The reports linked his death to the dossier, which contained certain information that seemed could have only come from him.

Erovinkin was a top aide to Igor Sechin, head of the state energy company Rosneft and widely viewed as the second most powerful man in Russia after Vladimir Putin. Erovinkin was said to have been a go-between for both men

And a day before reports surfaced of Erovinkin’s death, Russian media reported that the top Russian cyber spy, Sergei Mikhailov, was dragged out of an intelligence meeting with a bag over his head and led away in humiliating fashion.

Mikhailov and two others were charged with treason, which led to speculation that they shared information with Steele or a spy agency that gave it to Steele.

Steele has not spoken publicly about the dossier, and did not respond to requests to comment for this story. It may never be known why Steele included the XBT/Webzilla allegations, and proving or disproving them will be extraordinarily difficult, as even those who have complained about the companies acknowledge.

“I have read the dossier. I am familiar with several of the players, as we have spent time investigating them over the years. Mr. Gubarev has taken great care in structuring his enterprises,” said Tucker of Battleship Stance, which also offers content-protection services. “I am not convinced that anyone will find a smoking gun or clear paper trail. It will be near impossible to prove what Mr. Gubarev knew or did not know to the satisfaction of a U.S. court.”

-- Ben Wieder in Washington contributed.

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/poli ... rylink=cpy

Why is Russia letting this information out now they've been in jail for a year now

Report: Death of Former Russian Spy Chief Linked to Dossier on Trump
Ex-KGB general Oleg Erovinkin was found dead in his car in Moscow last month. He was a close associate of a former senior Kremlin official mentioned repeatedly in dossier.
read more: https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.768228

seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 09, 2018 3:36 pm wrote:

stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 09, 2018 3:27 pm wrote:
Is this another curious death? Or a reference to Peter W. Smith?

we'll probably know in a couple hours

ok probably this guy?

Mystery death of ex-KGB chief linked to MI6 spy's dossier on Donald Trump

27 JANUARY 2017 • 9:30PM

Oleg Erovinkin
An ex-KGB chief suspected of helping the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to compile his dossier on Donald Trump may have been murdered by the Kremlin and his death covered up. it has been claimed.

Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor the FSB, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day in mysterious circumstances.

Erovinkin was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and now head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, who is repeatedly named in the dossier.


Christopher Steele
Erovinkin has been described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Mr Steele writes in an intelligence report dated July 19, 2016, he has a source close to Sechin, who had disclosed alleged links between Mr Trump’s supporters and Moscow.

The death of Erovinkin has prompted speculation it is linked to Mr Steele’s explosive dossier, which was made public earlier this month. Mr Trump has dismissed the dossier as “fake news” and no evidence has emerged to support its lurid claims.

The Russian state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Erovinkin’s body was “found in a black Lexus... [and] a large-scale investigation has been commenced in the area. Erovinkin’s body was sent to the FSB morgue”.

No cause of death has been confirmed and the FSB continues to investigate. Media reports suggested his death was a result of foul play.


Donald Trump with Theresa May, the British Prime Minister in the Oval Office on Friday Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA
It was later claimed he died of a heart attack. Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia-related security threats, believes Erovinkin is the key source to whom Mr Steele refers in his dossier.

Mr Grozev said on a blog: “Insiders have described Erovinkin to me alternately as ‘Sechin’s treasurer’ and ‘the go-between between Putin and Sechin’. One thing that everyone seems to agree – both in public and private sources – is that Erovinkin was Sechin’s closest associate.”

Mr Grozev, of Risk Management Lab, a think tank in Bulgaria, said: “I have no doubt that at the time Erovinkin died, Mr Putin had Mr Steele’s Trump dossier on his desk. He would – arguably – have known whether the alleged... story is based on fact or fiction.

"Whichever is true, he would have had a motive to seek – and find the mole... He would have had to conclude that Erovinkin was at least a person of interest.”


Oleg Erovinkin
Experts expressed scepticism about the theory.

“As a rule, people like Gen Yerovinkin don’t tend to die in airport thriller murders,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services.

Mr Steele, 52, a Cambridge graduate, remains in hiding following his unmasking as the author of the Trump dossier.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01 ... ald-trump/

Explosive Fusion GPS testimony details Trump’s alleged ties to international money laundering operations

Brad Reed

09 Jan 2018 at 13:33 ET


Felix Sater and Donald Trump, screengrab from BBC Panorama

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) released the full transcript of testimony that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee — and it contains explosive allegations that President Donald Trump has direct ties to international money laundering operations.

During his testimony, Simpson detailed ways that money had been stolen from a bank in Kazakhstan, then laundered throughout multiple countries — before possibly being funneled in part to the Trump Soho hotel project.

At the center of the ordeal appears to be Felix Sater, a Trump-linked Russian-born businessman who in 1998 pleaded guilty to taking part in a mafia-related stock fraud scheme, and who is now cooperating with an international investigation into an alleged money laundering network.

“So there was a civil case, at least one civil case in New York involving — filed by the city of Almaty… against some alleged Kazakh money launderers,” Simpson testified. “I don’t remember exactly how, but we learned that — it wasn’t from Chris. We learned that Felix Sater had some connections with these people, and it’s been more recently in the media that he’s helping the government of Kazakhstan to recover this money. There’s been media reports that the money went into the Trump Soho or it went into the company that built the Trump Soho.”

Sater’s financial relationship with Trump dates back to at least 2003, when the Trump Organization rented out office space to Sater’s former company.

Even though Trump initially tried to distance himself from Sater after news of his criminal past came to light in 2007, he subsequently tapped Sater in 2010 to scout out real estate. Additionally, Sater presented clients with business cards that claimed he was a senior adviser to Trump, and his office was on the same floor as Trump’s office in Trump Tower.

Sater wasn’t the only figure with ties to organized crime that Simpson found working with Trump, either. As he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, as he also discussed another man involved in the Trump Soho project by the name of Arif Tevfik, who according to Simpson is “an organized crime figure from Central Asia and he had an arrest for involvement in child prostitution.”

A Watergate Moment? The Fusion GPS Testimony Could Change History
Dianne Feinstein’s decision to release Glenn Simpson’s testimony has a long history, and could have a huge impact.
By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
January 11, 2018

One of the most misunderstood quotes from the Watergate scandal is also one of the most famous: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" That was uttered by Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, and it's often assumed it was a tough question hurled at a recalcitrant witness, seeking to implicate Richard Nixon. In fact, it was the opposite. Baker asked that question repeatedly, early in the Watergate hearings, in an attempt to wall off the president from the suspected criminality of his staff. Of course, Nixon actually ran the coverup, as the committee holding those hearings was about to find out.

Baker has always been seen as something of a hero in the Watergate story, and it's really overblown. In the beginning, he met secretly with Nixon to keep him informed about the course of the Watergate committee's investigation. Baker told the president that the plan was to start with public testimony by the smaller fry and move up to high-ranking White House staff. Nixon wanted to make a deal with the committee to have the witnesses testify in private. Since the Democratic majority controlled the committee, that was a non-starter anyway. But much as Baker wanted to help out his president, and may have even believed in the beginning that Nixon was not implicated in criminal misdeeds, Baker was also smart enough not to help Nixon obstruct justice.

Those hearings, held by what was officially called the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, where Baker was the ranking Republican under Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C., the chair, were vastly important in unraveling the scandal. First came former White House counsel John Dean's dramatic testimony that implicated the president, and then the revelation by former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield that Nixon had extensive tape recordings of everything that happened in the Oval Office. Presidential aides H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson all testified, lied to the committee under oath and were subsequently convicted and went to prison. The congressional investigations worked on parallel tracks with two special prosecutors and the press, all of which were vital to the public understanding of the scandal and the scope of the president's crimes.

If Nixon were around today, he'd be able to see how it might have gone if the Republicans had held a congressional majority and supporters like Baker had labored to keep the investigations under wraps. The only dramatic public hearings we've had in the Russia investigation so far involved the testimony of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former FBI Director James Comey, and that was more than six months ago. All the important players, including Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, have testified in secret, with members of the committees more or less under a gag order and only able to comment on what's already in the press. Nixon understood that keeping testimony secret, rather than giving the public the ability to judge the witnesses for themselves, is a real advantage in a cover-up. Having a partisan majority running interference in the Congress is priceless.

The investigation by the House Intelligence Committee under Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has been a farce from the beginning. Nunes has conspired with the White House from the beginning, was caught red-handed and promised to remove himself from any involvement with the Russia probe. (He should have recused himself from the beginning since he served on the Trump transition team, which is a subject of the investigation.) He's still interfering in the investigation and has lately taken to creating elaborate diversions with baseless new fishing expeditions into alleged FBI corruption during the presidential campaign. Nixon would have loved to have such a devoted toady on his team.

The Senate Intelligence Committee seems to be working a bit more professionally, but, one gets the feeling, under some pressure. The Democratic ranking member, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, took to the Senate floor just before Christmas to warn the president against firing special counsel Robert Mueller. But so far the committee has hung together and whatever differences its members may have are not spilling into the public domain. They too are interviewing witnesses in private.

This week, the real action happened on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., decided to release the secret testimony of Glenn Simpson, owner of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that employed former British spy Christopher Steele, compiler of the famous "dossier." Feinstein said she felt compelled to do it because “the innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice." She believed this was the only way to set the record straight.

The innuendo Feinstein refers to includes the disproved assertions that the dossier was the impetus for the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's strange association with dozens of Russians, along with the request by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Justice Department consider prosecuting Steele for lying to the FBI. Lying about what? The senators declined to say. This hostile action, done without consulting other senators on the committee, was clearly meant to smear Steele's reputation and by association the whole investigation. (In fairness, Graham seems to be the main actor here—Grassley, the committee chair, is extremely confused.)

Simpson had asked that his testimony be released, so there was no question of violating anyone's confidentiality. Since Grassley and Graham had apparently decided to act unilaterally as partisan hit men, Feinstein realized that she would have to reciprocate in kind. After all, Democrats had been asking that the testimony be released since August.

The released transcript of Simpson's testimony contains a good deal of interesting information, all of which will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb in the press. But the upshot is that Simpson says Steele (who was effectively his subcontractor) went to the FBI because he learned in the course of his investigation that Russian agents were attempting to conspire with the campaign of the Republican candidate for president. Republicans in Congress have been trying to cover that up for obvious reasons: It's not only damning information on its own, it's also an indictment of every Trump associate who remained silent or played along.

MR. DAVIS: These are the meeting notes from
the June 9th meeting at Trump Tower. These are
Mr. Manafort's notes or they're contemporaneous.
BY THE WITNESS:
A. I could tell -- obviously you know who
Bill Browder is. Cyprus Offshore, Bill Browder's
structure, you know, investment -- Hermitage
Capital, his hedge fund, set up numerous companies
in Cyprus to engage in inward investment into
Russia, which is a common structure, both partially
for tax reasons but also to have entities outside
of Russia, you know, managing specific investments.
I can only tell you I assume that's what that
references. I don't know what the 133 million --
MR. FOSTER: Can I interrupt? And you know
that from research that you did and provided to --
MR. SIMPSON: Yes.
MR. LEVY: Let him finish.
MR. FOSTER: -- research that you did and
provided to Baker Hostetler and their client?
MR. SIMPSON: Yes. There was a -- I can
elaborate a little bit. As part of the research
into how Hermitage Capital worked we looked at
various things, their banking relationships, the
way they structured their investments in Russia. I
don't remember how many, but there was a large
number of shell companies in Cyprus that were used
to hold the investments of individual clients of
Hermitage. So one of the things we discovered from
that was the likely identities of some of
Hermitage's clients.
BY MR. DAVIS:
Q. Do any of the other entries in here mean
anything to you in light of the research you've
conducted or what you otherwise know about
Mr. Browder?
A. I'm going to -- I can only speculate about
some of these things. I mean, sometimes --
MR. LEVY: Don't speculate.
BY THE WITNESS:
A. Just would be guesses.
Q. Okay.
A. I can skip down a couple. So "Value in
Cyprus as inter," I don't know what that means.
"Illici," I don't know what that means. "Active
sponsors of RNC," I don't know what that means.
"Browder hired Joanna Glover" is a mistaken
reference to Juliana Glover, who was Dick Cheney's
press secretary during the Iraq war and associated
with another foreign policy controversy. "Russian
adoptions by American families" I assume is a
reference to the adoption issue.

Man behind MegaFon pictured with alleged Russian gangsters

Simon GoodleyWed 28 Nov 2012 17.12 EST
• Telecoms company's London flotation slips
• Post-Communist Moscow connections emerge

Seated from left: Viktor Averin, Sergei Mikhailov and Andrei Skoch. Lev Kvetnoy is in the back row
The photograph is low quality and appears similar to any taken of a group of male friends after dinner in post-Communist Moscow. But contained within this grainy 1994 shot, are some remarkable characters who have suddenly started to fascinate City bankers.

On the bottom right is Andrei Skoch, now rated as the richest man sitting in the Duma, Russia's parliament. He is also a close friend of the billionaire oligarch and Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov and indirectly a leading figure behind MegaFon, the Russian telecoms business that Usmanov jointly listed on the London and Moscow stock markets on Wednesday.

Sitting next to Skoch is Sergei Mikhailov and, next to him on the front row is Viktor Averin. These are said to be two of Russia's most feared gangsters.

These old connections have suddenly resurfaced as MegaFon – which last week announced the appointment to its board of former Labour minister and one time chairman of the Guardian Media Group Lord Myners – began trading 17% of its shares in London. Coincidentally, that is almost the same size of stake indirectly owned by the Skoch family. The shares fell nearly 3% on their first day.

Skoch, who has placed all of his business interests in the name of his father, Vladimir, declined to answer any questions about his connections when approached by the Guardian in Moscow last week. In a response to questions by email, a spokesperson for Usmanov said there have been "too many unwarranted allegations, rumours and speculations about different people in Russia".

However, Skoch was prepared to give an interview to last Friday's Financial Times in which he admitted knowing Mikhailov and Averin. He also previously spoke about the ties in a 2010 interview with the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, during which he confirmed that the photo was genuine.

He said that he got to know Mikhailov after he and Lev Kvetnoy bought several service companies at Moscow's Vnukovo airport.

Skoch added that he was "introduced" to Mikhailov and Averin as the "owners" of the Vnukovo companies. "We met, discussed terms, and then agreed – the photo was taken afterwards," he said.

Averin subsequently invited him and his wife to a holiday in Prague, in 1995. Skoch was one of 50 guests who celebrated Averin's birthday at the Ritz Hotel. In his Vedomosti interview, Skoch said the guests had been sitting down for 15 minutes over dinner when the Czech police burst in. The police took all the guests down to the station for questioning, photographed them and then let them go. "After that I didn't have any shared history with Viktor [Averin]. Not with him, not with Sergei [Mikhailov]. We didn't have any joint interests," he said.

However, Skoch told the FT last week that he continued to meet Averin for business purposes after the incident, with their last meeting seven years ago when they bumped into each other at a Moscow restaurant. "He's a nice enough guy," he told the paper.

The politician, whose wealth has been valued by Forbes at $4.2bn (£2.6bn), denied that he, Mikhailov or Averin had any links with Russian organised crime. "I can't say they were bandits. They were ordinary businessmen," he told the FT.

"I couldn't say that anyone joined a [mafia] group. That would be incorrect," Skoch also told Vedomosti. In the lawless Russia of the 1990s, he said it wasn't entirely clear "who was in a mafia group and who wasn't". "You'd go into any restaurant and there would be a serious-looking guy sitting there. If you wanted to live, you had to be unafraid," he said.

However, according to Federico Varese, professor of criminology at Oxford University, Mikhailov is the alleged founder of the "Solntsevo fraternity", Russia's most powerful mafia gang.

The group is named after a rundown area of western and southwestern Moscow – the name Solntsevo would translate as Sunnyside in English. Varese dubs the gang "arguably the mightiest organised crime group to emerge from the wreckage of the Soviet Union."

In the same Vedomosti interview Skoch boasts of his close friendship with Usmanov – who has also faced questions about links to Gafur Rakhimov.

Usmanov denies that he has ever had any business dealings with Rakhimov, whom he says was a neighbour of his parents.

Skoch recalled that he met Usmanov in 1995, and went into business, buying a metallurgical industrial complex. The venture succeeded thanks to Usmanov's "intellect", Skoch said, adding: "We are very close. I trust him with my life."

In 2010 Skoch said he saw Usmanov "virtually every day" and had travelled with him to Tashkent when Usmanov had a major operation.

• This article was amended on 29 January 2013 to remove an incorrect reference to Gafur Rakhimov.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/ ... nd-megafon

Scott Stedman

The owner of Trump's Moscow developer, Christodoulos Vassiliades, currently works for the Russian oligarch that bailed out Manafort's Ukrianian business partner Dmytro Firtash for $174 million. The Vassiliades-Vasily Anismov partnership began in early 2017 https://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/10643294 …



Here is where it gets sinister quickly. Anismov, through the companies that Vassiliades manages, recently purchased the Stepnogorsk Mining and Chemical Combine. This Kazakh combine extracts over 4,000 tons of weapons grade uranium annually
‏

Anismov has been in the uranium business since 2009 when one of his companies owned a deposit that had 90 thousand tons of uranium.

He is friends with one of Putin's closest confidants - Arkady Rotenberg. Here are Anismov and Putin in 2012

http://www.dw.com/en/vienna-court-to-de ... a-18419173 …

Anismov and Putin on August 25, 2016 - Coincidentally the same day Julian Assange announced that he had more damaging emails on Clinton https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/25/jullian ... -data.html …

https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/statu ... 5181217794