Ten days into the new administration, a Russian military push in the Arctic was the subject of concern and a post here.
At the time, both Russian appropriation of Arctic waters for drilling
and Russian control of Arctic sea routes as those waters thaw (guess
why) were the issues. Days later, on Thursday February 2 came this post:
Throwback Thursday: I TOLD You to #WatchThisSpace!!! The issue there was disclosure of oil company funds going to foreign governments.
Here we are 13 weeks later, and oh what a tangled web we see described by Dr. Vanessa Neumann in The Daily Beast today. Dr. Neumann, Daily Beast points out, is "a Venezuelan-American and president of the trade integrity and political risk consultancy Asymmetrica."
Many big oil companies funded Trump’s inauguration. Only one is deeply in debt to the Kremlin.
Dr. Vanessa Neumann
04.27.17
The oil company’s half-million donation to Donald Trump’s
Inaugural Committee wasn’t illegal. But it certainly wasn’t moral. And
the cash may have come from the Kremlin, at least indirectly.
Recently
released Federal Election Commission filings show that Citgo, the U.S.
subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (known
as PDVSA) gave Trump more money than Shell or Walmart. The donation is
unusual for PDVSA: Citgo had not donated to previous presidential
inaugural committees.
Citgo’s donation to
the Trump Inaugural Committee and the horrifying images emerging from
Venezuela’s weeks of brutally repressed protests (26 killed, 437
injured, and 1,289 arrested—according to Venezuela’s attorney general;
Venezuelan prisoner rights NGO Foro Penal says 1,536 have been “detained” as of April 25)
are connected: Russian money and influence is behind both of them. Some
of those detained are tortured in Venezuela’s equivalent of CIA
headquarters, known as “The Tomb,” for its subterranean torture
chambers. The Inaugural Committee donation came days after Citgo (a
Delaware-incorporated company with operational headquarters in Houston) mortgaged 49.9 percent of its holdings to Rosneft,
an oil company controlled by the Kremlin. That enabled Citgo’s parent
company PDVSA to make its bond payments. Rosneft is sanctioned by the
U.S. Treasury Department. So is its CEO, Igor Sechin, “Russia’s Darth
Vader.” One of the most feared men in Russia, Sechin is close to
Vladimir Putin and is one of Putin’s key instruments of geopolitical
power. Net net: If Venezuela defaults on its bond payments, Rosneft
(i.e., Putin & Co.) could own several refineries, nine pipelines,
and distribution terminals all across the Eastern U.S., from Texas to Maine,
without any government oversight. If the Russians end up owning Citgo,
they will be using American consumers to fund their autocracy and
Assad’s brutality in Syria.
Yes,
you read that correctly. No, your eyes do not deceive you. Holy
moly! Sechin's name comes up as does, in a very disturbing way,
Rosneft. Where did we see those names before? Oh, right! The
Christopher Steele memos! Those documents were highlighted in a second,
then seemingly unrelated, post here also on February 2: Throwback Thursday Part II: The Russians, the Memos, the Sanctions – The Art of the Steal.
Dr.
Neumann has pulled the whole cat's cradle into a coherent web that
reaches, now, from the Arctic to the Caribbean to the Middle East and
remains about Russia, oil, money, Syria, and elections, and threatens a
new refugee crisis.
As we approach the 100th day, remember this
from 13 weeks ago? We still do not know who bought those shares. It's a
good guess that Carter Page knows.
Hillary
Clinton and her team tried to warn us. But, you know, emails,
wikileaks, ‘flawed,’ ‘ill,’ and ‘shrill.’ Not the perfect (female)
candidate – which is the enemy of not just the good, but of the best
yet.
Keep watching this space! Here's a pretty picture for #ThrowbackThursday.
We should know by now, two weeks in, what the new administration's
tactic is. Like a shell game con artist, they employ a certain sleight
of hand. They throw a fireball out that dazzles, enrages, and engages
attention. While we are attending to this distraction, even more serious
shady doings are going on somewhere else that we somehow miss. An
example.
Yesterday, Trump's meandering, inept introduction of
Black History Month so astonished (and, frankly, amused to the point of
Twitter parodies) that while we were all attending to 199-year-0ld
Frederick Douglass "who has done a terrific job that is being recognized
by more and more people," the Senate confirmed Rex Tillerson for
secretary of state while Congress removed an anti-graft section of
Dodd-Frank that will permit petroleum companies (among others) to
conceal payments to foreign governments. Actually, according to one
source, all of these things happened.
Today, at the National Prayer Breakfast, there was this:
"And
I want to just pray for Arnold if we can, for those ratings" Trump says
after boasting Apprentice "went down the tubes" once he left”
The media and the social nets went nuts! Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
Natasha Bertrand
The
US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control on Thursday
published an amendment to President Barack Obama's sanctions order
against Russia to "authorize certain transactions" with Russia's Federal Security Service.
The
new authorization will allow US companies to pay up to $5,000 a year to
the FSB — which oversees technology imports into Russia — to secure
licenses from the security services to export information technology
products to Russia, as long as other aspects of the sanctions order
aren't violated, according to the document published by the Treasury.
Obama
issued harsh sanctions against the FSB — first in April 2015 and again
in December of last year — which it accused of playing a role in hacking
campaigns targeting US citizens and infrastructure during the 2016
presidential campaign. Read more >>>>
Who's going to notice this after Trump prayed for Arnold's pitiful ratings?
Of course back on September 24, Hillary Clinton's campaign issued this statement.
Friday, HFA senior national spokesperson Glen Caplin released the following statement in response to the new bombshell report that Trump’s foreign policy adviser is being probed for suspected meetings with senior Russian officials:
“It’s
chilling to learn that U.S. intelligence officials are conducting a
probe into suspected meetings between Trump’s foreign policy adviser
Carter Page and members of Putin’s inner circle while in Moscow. You
have to ask why he would meet with Igor Diveykin, who is believed by
U.S. officials ‘to have responsibility for intelligence collected by
Russian agencies about the U.S. election.’ This comes as Russian hackers
continue their attempts to influence the outcome of our elections,
something Trump openly invited. This is serious business and voters
deserve the facts before election day. Read more >>>>
WALLACE:
Secretary Clinton, I want to clear up your position on this issue,
because in a speech you gave to a Brazilian bank, for which you were
paid $225,000, we've learned from the WikiLeaks, that you said this, and
I want to quote. "My dream is a hemispheric common market with open
trade and open borders." So that's the question...
TRUMP: Thank you.
WALLACE:
That's the question. Please quiet, everybody. Is that your dream, open
borders? CLINTON: Well, if you went on to read the rest of the sentence,
I was talking about energy. You know, we trade more energy with our
neighbors than we trade with the rest of the world combined. And I do
want us to have an electric grid, an energy system that crosses borders.
I think that would be a great benefit to us.
But you are very
clearly quoting from WikiLeaks. And what's really important about
WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage
against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts
of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that
information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet.
This
has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly,
from Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies
have confirmed, to influence our election.
So I actually think the
most important question of this evening, Chris, is, finally, will
Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make
it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in in this election,
that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually
encouraged in the past? Those are the questions we need answered. We've
never had anything like this happen in any of our elections before.
WALLACE: Well?
TRUMP: That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders, OK? How did we get on to Putin?
WALLACE:
Hold on -- hold on, wait. Hold on, folks. Because we -- this is going
to end up getting out of control. Let's try to keep it quiet so -- for
the candidates and for the American people.
TRUMP: So just to finish on the borders...
WALLACE: Yes?
TRUMP:
She wants open borders. People are going to pour into our country.
People are going to come in from Syria. She wants 550 percent more
people than Barack Obama, and he has thousands and thousands of people.
They have no idea where they come from.
And you see, we are going
to stop radical Islamic terrorism in this country. She won't even
mention the words, and neither will President Obama. So I just want to
tell you, she wants open borders.
Now we can talk about Putin. I
don't know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well,
that would be good. If Russia and the United States got along well and
went after ISIS, that would be good.
He has no respect for her. He
has no respect for our president. And I'll tell you what: We're in very
serious trouble, because we have a country with tremendous numbers of
nuclear warheads -- 1,800, by the way -- where they expanded and we
didn't, 1,800 nuclear warheads. And she's playing chicken. Look,
Putin...
WALLACE: Wait, but...
TRUMP: ... from everything I see, has no respect for this person.
CLINTON: Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.
TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.
CLINTON: And it's pretty clear...
TRUMP: You're the puppet!
CLINTON: It's pretty clear you won't admit...
TRUMP: No, you're the puppet.
CLINTON:
... that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United
States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people,
that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list,
break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get
help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.
So
I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We've never had a
foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 --
17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded
that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest
levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I
find that deeply disturbing.
WALLACE: Secretary Clinton...
CLINTON: And I think it's time you take a stand...
TRUMP: She has no idea whether it's Russia, China, or anybody else.
CLINTON: I am not quoting myself.
TRUMP: She has no idea.
CLINTON: I am quoting 17...
TRUMP: Hillary, you have no idea.
CLINTON: ... 17 intelligence -- do you doubt 17 military and civilian...
TRUMP: And our country has no idea.
CLINTON: ... agencies.
TRUMP: Yeah, I doubt it. I doubt it.
CLINTON:
Well, he'd rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian
intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us. I find that
just absolutely...
We were warned by Hillary even
though no government agency stepped up to clarify the situation. Some
of what we heard back then appears, more specifically, in what have come
to be known as the Christopher Steele Memos.
There
we learned, not only of Kremlin quid pro quos for the lifting of
sanctions, as cited below, but also of potential 'kompromat' on Trump.
(see p.9) Unfortunately, the media focused heavily on the 'kompromat'
which involved some hanky-panky with prostitutes rather than on the
bigger picture which included influencing U.S. voting blocs in order to
get Trump elected so that sanctions could be lifted. The implication of
that 'kompromat' is, of course, that Trump can be blackmailed to do
anything the Kremlin wants.
An
unverified dossier with claims about President Donald Trump’s ties to
Russia contained allegations that the CEO of Russia’s state oil company,
Igor Sechin, offered former Trump ally Carter Page and his associates a
19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on
Russia.
The dossier says the offer was made in July 2016, when Page was in Moscow
giving a speech at the Higher Economic School. The claim was sourced to
“a trusted compatriot and close associate” of Sechin, according to the
dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele.
“Sechin’s
associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal
and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered
Page and his associates … up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in
Rosneft,” the dossier said. “In return, Page had expressed interest and
confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia
would be lifted.” Read more >>>>
While
it remains true that these memos have not been verified, it is awfully
spooky that these sanctions are being lifted. Can we expect the Ukraine
sanctions to fall next?
Oh, and by the way, subsequent to all of that there was this in October! No one knows who bought those shares.
Hillary Clinton and her team tried
to warn us. But, you know, emails, wikileaks, 'flawed,' 'ill,' and
'shrill.' Not the perfect (female) candidate - which is the enemy of not
just the good, but of the best yet.
The
next time the 'central committee' sends up a flare, look in the other
direction. That is where the damage will be occurring - in the shadows.
Watch this space!
