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Casey Michel 🇰🇿

20 Jul, 9 tweets, 4 min read

https://twitter.com/scotusreporter/status/1417559067535499278

‘He and two other defendants are accused of acting and conspiring to act as agents of the UAE between April 2016 and April 2018.’

https://twitter.com/scotusreporter/status/1417559067535499278

Yet another high-level Trump official charged with secretly acting as a foreign lobbyist: justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…

Said it before, but absolutely amazing how the Trump campaign(s) breathed new life into FARA.

Legislation effectively dormant for 75 years—and then Trump came into the picture, and all of his sycophants couldn’t stop themselves whenever a foreign government came knocking.

https://twitter.com/cjcmichel/status/1230976555213606913?s=20

And these aren’t even all the Trump officials who should be charged with FARA violations yet.

Rudy Giuliani, Richard Grenell, and plenty more can’t feel great about more FARA-related charges coming.

https://twitter.com/cjcmichel/status/1230976555213606913?s=20

Barrack’s secret work on behalf of the UAE included:

—Changing Trump’s speeches to praise the UAE
—Writing pro-UAE op-eds
—Pushing pro-UAE diplomatic staffing decisions
—Pushing pro-UAE policy

One thing that's clear from this Tom Barrack arrest: What he did on behalf of (and with the help of) the UAE dictatorship was far, far more egregious than anything Maria Butina, who received the same charge, ever did.

https://twitter.com/cjcmichel/status/1417876731906625545

Liaising directly with the UAE's dictatorial leadership, working directly with Trump, helping craft White House policy directly. Effectively spying directly on the highest rungs of the U.S.

All on behalf of the UAE.

https://twitter.com/cjcmichel/status/1417876731906625545

Also: The UAE is the dictatorship that spends far and away the most on donations to American think tanks. No other dictatorship even comes close.

static.wixstatic.com/ugd/3ba8a1_4f0…

https://twitter.com/grudkev/status/1417897678311133186

+1 This was a foreign dictatorship secretly co-opting one of the U.S. president's advisers and close friends, secretly tilting American policy to its own ends, and secretly accessing—secretly spying on—the White House.

Just an insane ploy. And it worked.

https://twitter.com/grudkev/status/1417897678311133186

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More from @cjcmichel

Casey Michel 🇰🇿

@cjcmichel

16 Jul

@apmassaro3

NEW: For years, the US’s “golden visa” program allowed anyone with a bit of dirty money to buy American residence—and eventual American citizenship.

But that may finally be about to change.

Alongside the great @apmassaro3: foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/16/oli…

Traditional offshore havens—Cyprus, Malta, etc—get plenty of attention for their "golden visa" or "golden passport" systems.

But look at the U.S. version. Look at how cheap it is, how easy it is to access—and how much further an American passport can go.

foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/16/oli…

It's not just price (and passport) that makes the U.S. "golden visa" program so appealing for kleptocrats.

Kleptocrats can provide whatever information they want about the source of their money, knowing they'll rarely, if ever, be turned down by American authorities.

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Casey Michel 🇰🇿

@cjcmichel

28 Jun

Fantastic dive into Canada's overlooked role as an international money laundering ("snow-washing") haven of its own: …aredservices-ex.objectstore.gov.bc.ca/ag-pssg-cc-exh…

Real estate and lawyers play an outsized role—a familiar playbook.

The Canadian government's claims that Canada has a "robust and comprehensive anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regime" are "simply not credible."

In Canada, "relatively simple strategies like [using lawyers and real estate] probably work as well today as they did 20 years ago... From a launderer's point of view, why try harder when old strategies still work perfectly well?"

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Casey Michel 🇰🇿

@cjcmichel

25 Jun

@S_de_Oliveira

Great paper from @S_de_Oliveira on placing Africa (and African elites) in broader offshoring context:

https://twitter.com/WillFitzgibbon/status/1403751244565471235

Some highlights below (1/n)

Foreign direct investment in Africa could be as low as a *quarter* of African capital flight per year:

Context:

—Per the OECD, "an estimated 10 trillion Euros are currently held in offshore accounts."

—Offshore accounts are now "the most important instruments in the contemporary globalized financial system."

—Offshore is not "a violation of the system, but the system itself."

Read 5 tweets

Casey Michel 🇰🇿

@cjcmichel

24 Jun

https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1408083578873843713

One of the (many) things we discuss on the klepto reputation-laundering front in this week's episode: universities.

Specifically, how kleptos have turned to Western universities to whitewash their reputation, impact future scholars, and gain access to Western policy-makers.

https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1408083578873843713

https://twitter.com/cjcmichel/status/1397556102720589824

On the topic of oligarchs, kleptocrats, and the like using American and British universities to launder their reputations, can't recommend enough this paper:

https://twitter.com/cjcmichel/status/1397556102720589824

Quick thread pulling out the highlights. (1/n)

One of the key challenges in monitoring financial flows into American/British schools is actually disentangling "foreign" and "domestic" flows.

I.e., Qatar- and China-linked funding use Western shell companies or offshore entities to obscure the source of the money.

Read 13 tweets

Casey Michel 🇰🇿

@cjcmichel

23 Jun

The Lincoln administration implemented a policy of “pure Jacksonian removal” of the Dakota from Minnesota, “a dispossession that went far beyond a ‘relocation’”:

(This is from: penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12507/38…)

Thomas Jefferson proposed an ‘“Indian Amendment’ by way of an idea he called ‘removal,’ the wholesale transfer of tribes from their eastern lands to the West”

Read 8 tweets