Thread by @JMichaelWaller

“Russophobia” is trending now. This is an old KGB and FSB theme. I was first labeled with it in 1993 because I said the US should condition all Russia recovery aid on Russia uprooting the old KGB. Plenty of Americans - including some current 🇺🇦 champions, called me that.

The record should show that the Clinton Admin - including Strobe Talbott, Al Gore, Richard Morningstar, and USAID (esp its Rule of Law program) that OPPOSED support for Russians who sought to uproot former KGB & prevent categories of its officers from holding public positions.

I was a contractor for the USAID Rule of Law program in Russia in the early/mid-1990s and was fired for pushing to fund Russian groups that sought to uproot the re-named KGB and its networks, and for promoting “lustration” which would have prevented chekists from holding office.

A supervisor of that USAID program, a Russian-speaking American scholar of law, privately agreed with me but looked away when I was fired in order to keep her high-paying contractor job. She’s now a professor at a prestigious university in Virginia. I’ll write about her someday.

She and others like her looked the other way so as to keep not only their contracting gigs, but to play the game among Washington policymakers, journalists, etc., covering up for them and elevating one another professionally. You’ll go far if you shut your eyes and go along.

Many were active over the past 30 years in Ukraine. All networked together, training cadres for one another, funded through USAID/EU/Soros networks as if a single organism. Tight with Hillary. Some became intelligence officers & senior diplomats. Some became wealthy contractors.

The irony is that many of them were in Russia in those decisive 1992-94 years, as I was. They designed & channeled the cash to Russia’s rule of law programs. Had they funded lustration, they would have screened people like Putin, then a St. Petersburg city official, from power.

At the same time, Soros Foundations were funding Russian reformers & human rights figures who were actively working to uproot the KGB and screen chekists from public office. When they started getting traction around 1994, Soros cut off all of them at once. No explanation given.