I have a probably-naive question: I’ve been thinking about the various organized crime figures who’ve managed to avoid serious legal consequences by serving as confidential informants on terrorism related cases. And this has made me consider the reasons that certain crime states
Clearly some of this is part of their hybrid warfare strategy to use proxies to attack, divide, and weaken the target societies. Some of this is presumably to divert law enforcement and NATSEC resources away from other endeavors.
But how much is purely to engineer opportunities for meaningless “cooperation” so that they can essentially buy a get-out-of-jail-free card, whenever the need arises?
‘“…it is true that stolen paintings are used as collateral in exchange for drugs, weapons and sometimes as what we call ‘get out of jail free cards’ to bargain with the police,” said Christopher A. Marinello of Art Recovery International.’
Do these crime states inflame and support the jihad just so that they can throw the jihadists under the bus later on, if necessary, to negotiate protection for the profitable criminal networks?
And I wonder how the jihadists would feel about it, if they ever figured out that they were being set up and used as an expendable asset to protect a criminal enterprise in which they shared no meaningful portion of the profits?
“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.
“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.”
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.