“Shnaider’s rise to become one of Canada’s wealthiest men (he was on Forbes’ list of billionaires by the age of 36) was helped by Boris Birshtein, his father-in-law and mentor in business.”
“FT spoke with a former KGB officer who worked in the 1980s in the agency’s foreign intelligence arm. He explained how, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Communist party and the KGB scrambled to stash money abroad.”
“in the late 1980s, Birshtein was one of the western businessmen whose companies became linked with KGB figures involved with the agency’s efforts to build up international business interests.”
“Birshtein did recall agreeing in the mid-1980s to participate in a Soviet plan to set up international business ventures that was led by Georgi Arbatov, head of a prestigious Moscow think-tank. According to a defector’s account...Arbatov was also a KGB asset codenamed Vasili.”
“In 1991, shortly before the Soviet Union would finally collapse, Birshtein’s company hired Leonid Veselovsky as an economic adviser on a one-year contract.”
“But the former KGB officer told the FT that Veselovsky had also served as a senior officer in the KGB’s foreign operations arm and had been “the mastermind of KGB money laundering”.”
“... even after the F.B.I. committed more resources to the hunt, bureau officials faced difficulties in penetrating Iran for intelligence about the missing American [Bob Levinson].” nytimes.com/2016/01/23/wor…
“As a result, they turned to businessmen and others willing to aid the search in exchange for favors from the United States, such as obtaining visas or having their names removed from watch lists.”
🤔 Not suspicious at all...
“Those recruited that way included Boris Birshtein, a Toronto-based businessman, and Madzhit Mamoyan, an ethnic Kurd who lives in Moscow.” 🤔🤔
Because what legitimate totally-not-associated-with-Russian-intelligence Canadian businessman hasn’t been called upon to free kidnapped CIA consultants from their Iranian captors, right? 🤷♂️
IMO, this is the interesting part: “in the summer of [2011], Mr. Birshtein went to see Douglas Coe, a lay minister and spiritual leader of the Fellowship Foundation, about Mr. Levinson. The businessman considered Mr. Coe a friend and religious mentor.”
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“Today, Mr. [William] Sessions (father of TX GOP congressman Pete) is a lawyer for one of the FBI's "Most Wanted": Semyon Mogilevich, a Ukraine-born Russian whom the FBI says is one of Russia's most powerful organized-crime figures.” wsj.com/articles/SB117…
Hiring the best lawyers to help Kremlin proxies launder funds and assist with foreign policy undertakings.
Ok @clearing_fog@sisu_sanity@Ex67T20@csFraudAnalysis@BullMeechum3 we’ve all talked often about: 1. The infiltration at DOJ from former Alfa Bank attorneys from Kirkland and Ellis: Barr, Benczkowski, Clark, Rosen. 2. The mysterious data transfers between Trump Tower, Alfa Bank
...and Spectrum Health. 3. The many Russia connections between Erik Prince, Paul Behrends, Dana Rohrabacher, Opus Dei, Robert Hanssen, yada yada. 4. The Andy Khawaja Allied Wallet laundering large cash donations into campaigns disguised as multiple small payments
5 Wirecard et al
But @Ex67T20 just tipped me off to the fact that former Kirkland and Ellis Alfa Bank attorney Brian Benczkowski quashed the investigation into the mysterious data transfer.
“Russia launched a proxy war in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. That war, which is ongoing, along with the Crimean land grab were the opening salvos in Russia's hybrid conflict against Western democracies” newsweek.com/ukraine-was-pu…
"It's not an internal strife. It's not an ethnic conflict. It's not an indigenous conflict. It is one where on the eastern side you have 100 percent Russian command and control of what's happening there,"
Further, the war is no longer simply a regional conflict. In addition to Russia's hybrid aggression against the West, the war in Ukraine is now at the nexus of an increasingly interwoven web of geopolitical interests—including China's.
@words_matter18@lanacurl@HunterJCullen 💯
Wedge issue inserted into our political dialogue engineered to divide, distract, & damage. All part of Russia’s long game hybrid warfare campaign. Combined with gun control & the mythological “war on Christmas”. Much like the language/culture issues that they use in Ukraine.
@words_matter18@lanacurl@HunterJCullen And how they use the engineered immigration crisis to divide, disenfranchise, alienate, and agitate the citizenry of Europe.
@words_matter18@lanacurl@HunterJCullen Have you also noticed that a certain US political movement consistently employs these talking points (abortion, guns, religion, immigration) to divide and anger US society? And that this same party consistently pushes policy that exacerbates economic inequality?
Spoiler: When a certain set of policy makers (who happen to be among the same set who travelled to Russia and came home opposed to sanctions) claimed that we couldn’t “afford” to address climate change, they knew better.
Not a coincidence that these same policy makers pushed reckless deregulation to make the grid vulnerable to the climate change that they refused to mitigate.