Jason Leopold Profile picture
Sep 22, 2020 5 tweets 4 min read Read on X
🚨NEW investigation from the #FinCENFiles

VEB Russian Bank Linked To Spy Ring

The Russian bank VEB has long operated in the United States — despite dozens of suspicious activity reports outlining concerns that it was a threat to national security.
buzzfeednews.com/article/scottp…
Here's a suspicious activity report that has never been revealed nor released that JP Morgan Chase filed with #FinCEN on VEB

documentcloud.org/documents/7215…
VEB told BuzzFeed News it has “never been involved in any illegal activities”

The bank said that our disclosure of SARs was illegal and that as it “cannot verify the authenticity” of the documents received by BuzzFeed News, it did not wish to comment further.
The SARs filed by other banks relating to VEB and its clients and sent to FinCEN document suspected national security risks. One raised the possibility that a VEB subsidiary helped bankroll Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and facilitated an arms deal to a sanctioned country.

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More from @JasonLeopold

Jul 17
NEW FOIA Files SPECIAL EDITION: 2 yrs ago, I filed a #FOIA request w/Secret Service for records of threats to Trump & security breaches at MAL between 2017& 2024. Last Wed, Secret Service finally turned over the documents. They're wild.

🧵

bloomberg.com/news/newslette…



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Long before the assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday, I spent years using the #FOIA to look into the way the Secret Service responded to threats against all of its protectees & political violence in general.
The 159 pages of records I received from Secret Service last Wednesday provide a behind the scenes look at how the agency responds to potential threats against presidential protectees.
Read 9 tweets
Jun 13
BIG SCOOP: I obtained the 266-page transcript of the intv Special Counsel Robert Hur's team conducted with Biden's ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, during their probe into Biden's handling of classified records

A FOIA Files special edition (please subscribe)
bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
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Portions of Zwonitzer’s testimony were briefly mentioned in Hur’s final report, but the transcript fleshes out the narrative of how he ended up entangled in the high-profile investigation and reveals what he told Hur's team Image
Zwonitzer was fiercely protective of Biden. He noted more than once that Biden’s memory was sound – in stark contrast to Hur’s own conclusions –and that much of what ended up in his book came from the president’s diaries and recollections.
Read 12 tweets
May 31
NEW in this week's FOIA Files newsletter: I just obtained docs from NARA and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s about the discovery of ... wait for it... a stolen document that’s been missing for two decades! Plus, another internal report I obtained shows how NARA’s internal watchdog investigated a series of disturbing threats sent to former President Barack Obama at his presidential library
bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
I’ve never made it a habit of requesting documents that pertain to the inner workings of NARA itself, which is how I wield the FOIA when I’m looking to open up a government agency. But my approach changed after news broke about the agency’s yearlong effort to recover boxes of presidential records that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago. Since then, I’ve filed dozens of requests and have liberated some really interesting records about what took place behind the scenes.
A few weeks ago, the agency’s inspector general sent me another batch of documents: reports of various internal investigations that haven’t been previously disclosed.

One in particular is fascinating and it’s a twist on the suddenly relevant theme of missing documents. It’s related to the work of a special unit called the Archival Recovery Team that’s tasked with tracking down missing records and artifacts that were lost or stolen from NARA facilities.
Read 10 tweets
May 26
From my #FOIA archives

A couple of years ago, I obtained a transcript of an off the record discussion Obama had with progressive journalists about Trump as he was leaving office.

This is what he told them. 21 page transcript linked in the story.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
“I think that four years is okay,” Obama said. “Take on some water, but we can kind of bail fast enough to be okay. Eight years would be a problem. I would be concerned about a sustained period in which some of these norms have broken down and started to corrode.”
“I think his basic view -- his formative view of foreign policy is shaped by his interactions with Malaysian developers and Saudi princes, and I think his view is, ‘I’m going to go around the world making deals and maybe suing people,’” Obama said. “But it’s not, ‘let me launch big wars that tie me up.’ And that’s not what his base is looking from him anyway.”
Read 7 tweets
May 10
NEW FOIA Files🧵: The FBI just sent me a set of docs that’s directly related to Trump’s hush money trial. They're business records from First Republic Bank, where Trump’s former atty Michael Cohen opened an account to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels.

1/

bloomberg.com/news/newslette…Image
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The details around the bank activity have been widely reported, but many of the underlying financial documents haven’t surfaced. And since cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom, the public largely hasn’t seen the evidence at the center of the trial

2/
How I got these documents is kind of a long story. Five years ago, I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI. It was for all the interview summaries – or ‘302s’ as they’re known – from key witnesses questioned during the Mueller probe

Since Cohen was a witness, I’m now in possession of 25-pages of his supplemental interview material

3/
Read 7 tweets
Apr 7
A little backstory on this week's FOIA Files newsletter 🧵

Not long after Russia launched airstrikes in Ukraine in 2022, I started seeing tweets that said some of Russia’s targets were labs where Ukraine had secretly been developing bio weapons w/the help of the US govt
1/
The allegations seemed to be an obvious attempt to justify the invasion. They garnered thousands of retweets. Soon Fox News was amplifying the claims.

2/
The stories had a huge impact. One poll in late March of that year found that more than a quarter of Americans believed the US-Ukraine bioweapons theory.

3/
Read 9 tweets

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