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Jason Leopold Profile picture
@JasonLeopold
Sep 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
NEW from our ##FinCENFiles cache of records. This story is amazing.

A Russian Billionaire With Close Ties To Putin And the White House Made $600K in Suspicious Payments To Nobu

🍣🍣🍣 buzzfeednews.com/article/johnte…
Here is the 15-page suspicious activity report a bank sent to Treasury's Financial crimes Enforcement Network regarding these suspicious payments, revealed here for the first time #FinCENFiles

documentcloud.org/documents/7216… ImageImageImageImage
🚨Confidential government documents reveal that for a time, Crocus International, headed by billionaire Russian real estate developer Aras Agalarov, paid Nobu’s hefty licensing fees through untraceable offshore companies, which are a red flag for possible money laundering
The arrangement led the bank’s investigators to threaten to stop accepting the payments entirely. Some came through a Latvian bank that has since been shut down due to its involvement in a Russian money laundering scheme.

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More from @JasonLeopold

Jason Leopold Profile picture
Dec 20
NEW: The last edition of FOIA Files this year! This week, we’re going out on a lighter note & highlighting the Deep Cuts—the redacted, obscure & overlooked docs buried in stacks of newsworthy releases that are so good they could have been hit singles!
bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and helped make my weekly newsletter a success. It’s been an amazing 1st year, despite the fact that govt agencies have tried to wear me down by throwing roadblocks in my way. But I’m well aware that obtaining documents via FOIA is a battle so I was prepared.
Since I launched FOIA Files nine months ago, I’ve liberated more than 6,000 pages of documents on a wide-range of issues and shared them with the public. (If you missed any of the previous 35 editions you can find them here.)
bloomberg.com/authors/AV1xN7…
Read 4 tweets
Jason Leopold Profile picture
Dec 15
🧵 If you can spare a couple of hours, please read this groundbreaking, yearlong global investigation by my @business colleagues into the money, opportunity & exploitation into the booming fertility industry. I guarantee once you start reading you won't be able to stop

🎁 bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-…
To tell its story, my colleagues follow a teenage girl in India, lured into selling her eggs; a model in Argentina whose genetic makeup is prized; a mother in Greece, told by police that her eggs were stolen; and two “egg girls” from Taiwan who have put themselves at risk to earn money in the US.
This project began when Kanoko Matsuyama, a health-care reporter in Bloomberg’s Tokyo bureau, noticed that private equity firms were snapping up in vitro fertilization clinics around the world
Read 9 tweets
Jason Leopold Profile picture
Nov 22
🔎 Here's the backstory about the ODNI intelligence memo on Putin campaign to assassinate his enemies I exclusively obtained after pursuing it for years.

🧵 Image
Lawmakers tucked language inside a 2016 intelligence spending bill that tasked ODNI with preparing a classified intelligence assessment for the committees. Specifically, it was to be about “the use of political assassinations as a form of statecraft by the Russian Federation since January 1, 2000.”Image
The directive from Congress, which the public was unaware of at the time, also called for ODNI to produce a list of prominent Russians, including politicians, businessmen and journalists, “that the intelligence community assesses were assassinated by Russian Security Services”
Read 15 tweets
Jason Leopold Profile picture
Oct 25
NEW FOIA Files newsletter is out!

Emails and text messages obtained by FOIA Files from the US Forest Service reveal how investigators responded to threats aimed at FEMA personnel who were aiding victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina Image
After my former @BuzzFeedNews colleague @bri_sacks (a kickass reporter) broke the story in WaPo that
a North Carolina man—armed with an assault rifle—threatened FEMA personnel, forcing them to be relocated I deployed the Freedom of Information Act to see what else I could find out.
Using the FOIA to report breaking news is really difficult because federal agencies are required to respond to requests within 20 working days, long past the date of “breaking” news. But there are ways journalists can speed up the process. You can ask an agency to grant you expedited processing because there’s a threat to life and safety and an urgency to inform the public about actual government activity. That cuts the response time down to 10 calendar days if you can make a compelling case and the agency agrees.
Read 13 tweets
Jason Leopold Profile picture
Oct 18
NEW FOIA Files newsletter is out! IRS dropped the motherlode in my lap: 1600 pages of docs I've been waiting 4 yrs for about the controversial decision to emblazon Trump’s name on millions of Covid-era stimulus checks

🧵
bloomberg.com/news/newslette…Image
It turns out the IRS took the extraordinary step of seeking a legal opinion on whether it was appropriate to add Trump's name to the checks.

IRS officials were worried that they were personally being used by the White House to promote Trump’s reelection and would be in violation of the Hatch Act and other federal laws.

The conclusion: it was legalImage
When the news broke, coverage was focused on Mnuchin and what led to the Treasury’s decision to add Trump’s name to the checks. To this day, there still isn’t a definitive answer.

But what had gone unreported, until now, is the uproar that ensued inside the IRS after Mnuchin’s directive was handed down.
Read 14 tweets
Jason Leopold Profile picture
Aug 23
NEW FOIA Files newsletter:

I obtained damning internal reports that show USAID probed allegations of bribery, child labor & child sexual abuse at humanitarian orgs it funds, Twitter threats posted from its own employee & the outing of a CIA officer
🧵
bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

Image
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In February, I filed a #FOIA request with the agency’s internal watchdog – the Office of Inspector General – for all of its final reports on closed investigations in 2023 and 2024. That’s generally a pretty good way to find out if there's been any accountability for wrongdoing related to an agency's work.
A couple months after I filed my request, the inspector general’s FOIA office did something uncommon, compared with other federal agencies: it released documents to me every two weeks – nearly 400 pages.
Read 21 tweets

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