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Signature Bank - Wikipedia

Signature Bank was founded in 2001 by former executives and employees of Republic National Bank of New York after its purchase by HSBC. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature…

Republic New York was controlled by billionaire Edmond Safra, who was killed in a fire in his Monte Carlo penthouse apartment by his nurse Ted Maher. Republic New York Corporation was sold shortly after its chairman's death to HSBC Bank USA, the US subsidiary of HSBC of the UK.

1975: Republic New York acquires American Swiss Credit Company, Ltd., formerly part of Franklin National Bank.

In 1972, Michele Sindona, a banker with close ties to the Mafia, the pseudo-masonic lodge P2, and the Nixon administration, purchased a controlling interest in

Long Island's Franklin National Bank from Laurence Tisch, Chairman of Loews Corporation, which owned hotels in Italy. Later the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency declared Tisch an unqualified director for reasons of conflict of interest, paving the way for Sindona to take over

Franklin. Sindona paid more than Tisch had paid for the stock. Tisch was later sued by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) for breach of fiduciary duty with respect to the sale of his shares to Sindona.

In 1991, Les Wexner formed with billionaire Charles Bronfman

the Study Group, which is more widely known as the Mega Group. The group was a loosely organized club of some of the country's wealthiest and most influential businessmen who were concerned with Jewish issues. Max Fisher, Michael Steinhardt, Leonard Abramson, Edgar Bronfman, and

Laurence Tisch were some of the members.

Since the 1858 Sepoy Rebellion gave a bad name to Britain's East India Company, the United Fruit Company sponsors have preferred to spin off the dirtier side of its opera­tions into separable entities which may be disowned when necessary

. For Asia, the new incarnation of "John Company," the inheritor of the old Venetian trade network in opium, spices, and slaves, became the 1864- founded Hongkong and Shanghai Bank [HSBC], stilI the central bank for the world opium traffic. For Latin America it became the

New Orleans and Boston-based United Fruit Company.
The sometimes bewildering change of faces at United Fruit-from the old, odd alliance of New Orle­ ans gangsters and Boston Brahmins of the 1930s to the Max Fisher-Carl Lindner combination--does not really disguise a long-term

continuity of operations.

The Iselin family sponsored United Fruit's formation at the turn of the century through Central Trust of New York, the commercial bank which con­ trolled all the rail routes (including the predecessor of the modern Illinois Gulf Central) from

New Orleans to the Midwest grain belt. Central Trust board member Andre Iselin and fellow board member Samuel Unter­ meyer, the trustifier of the Midwest grain milling industry, reincarnated the old Venetian monopoly over grain trade in the

United States. Local New Orleans “fruit vendors” like Nicholas Zemurray, and Boston shipowning inter­ ests who had hauled opium for the East India Company since 1820 (e.g., the Forbes and Cabot interests) merged into United Fruit Co. under Central Trust sponsorship.

Central Trust became, in 1929, Hanover Trust, and in 1968 merged into Manufacturers Hanover Trust.

On May 6, 1895, Louis Marshall married Florence Lowenstein, a cousin of his partner, Samuel Untermyer.

Republic New York Corporation was the holding company for Republic

National Bank of New York, Safra Republic Holdings, and Safra Republic Bank.

From 1980 until Safra's death, Walter Weiner was Safra's attorney and CEO of Republic National Bank of New York and, in 1983, Weiner became chairman of the bank.

The sale of Trade Development Bank

to American Express for more than US$450 million in 1983, turned into a legal battle between the two parties. The financier came out on top, winning a public apology from American Express for starting a smear campaign against him.

In 1996 Safra co-founded Hermitage

Capital Management with Beny Steinmetz and Bill Browder. The hedge fund became one of the most important investment companies in Russia and later became famous in connection with the Sergei Magnitsky affair.
On 17 August 1998, Safra's Republic National Bank of New York lost 45%

of its net income due its large holding of Russian bonds after the 1998 Russian financial crisis.

Magnitsky was an auditor at the Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan, working for its owner, Jamison Firestone. He worked with Firestone Duncan client Hermitage Capital Management, an

investment advisory firm accused of tax evasion and tax fraud by the Russian Interior Ministry.

Jamison Firestone founded the law firm of Firestone Duncan in 1993 in Moscow, with his close friend Terry Michael Duncan.

On October 3, 1993, Terry Duncan was shot and killed by a

sniper during the Russian Constitutional Crisis while aiding the wounded at the Ostinkino Television Centre.

In April 2018, Natalia Veselnitskaya announced that on behalf of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, she was investigating Bill Browder and

Hermitage Capital, but denied working for the Kremlin.

Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya (born 22 February 1975 Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union) is a Russian lawyer. Her clients include Pyotr Katsyv, an official in the state-owned Russian Railways, and

his son Denis Katsyv, whom she defended against a money laundering charge in New York.

On 9 June 2016, Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower, which they scheduled after Emin Agalarov's publicist, Rob Goldstone, told Donald Jr.

that she was a "Russian government attorney" offering incriminating information on Hillary Clinton due to "its government’s support for Mr. Trump".

On or around June 9, 2016 prior to and following the Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya met with Fusion GPS co-founder

Glenn R. Simpson, ostensibly related to hearings that involved their mutual client Denis Katsyv, concerning charges of Russian tax fraud and money laundering originally uncovered by Magnitsky.

In September 2015, Fusion GPS was hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative

political website, to do opposition research on Trump and other Republican presidential candidates. In spring 2016 when Trump had emerged as the probable Republican candidate, the Free Beacon stopped funding investigation into Trump. From April 2016 through October 2016, the

law firm Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, retained Fusion GPS to continue opposition research on Trump. In June 2016, Fusion GPS retained Christopher Steele, a private British corporate intelligence

investigator and former MI-6 agent, to research any Russian connections to Trump. Steele produced a 35-page series of uncorroborated memos from June to December 2016, which became the document known as the Steele dossier.

Fusion GPS provided Marc Elias, the lead election lawyer

for Perkins Coie, with the resulting dossier and other research documents.

The Washington Free Beacon website is financially backed by Paul Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund manager and conservative activist.

In 2003, Christopher Steele was sent to Bagram Airfield in

Afghanistan as part of an MI6 team, briefing Special Forces on "kill or capture" missions for Taliban targets, and also spent time teaching new MI6 recruits.

Christopher Steele served as a senior officer under John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from

2004 to 2009. Steele was a counterintelligence specialist and was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko and participated in the investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006. It was Steele who quickly realised that Litvinenko's death "was a Russian state 'hit'".

Twelve years later, Russian double agent Boris Karpichkov alleged that Steele himself was included in a hit list of the Russian Federal Security Service, along with Sergei Skripal who was poisoned in 2018 by a binary chemical weapon Novichok in Britain.

Sergei Skripal settled

in the UK in 2010 following the Illegals Programme spy swap.

Skripal was co-opted to the military intelligence (GRU) from the Airborne Troops. In the early 1990s, he was posted as a GRU officer at the embassy in Malta. In 1994, he obtained a position in the military attaché′s

office in Madrid, Spain. In 1995, according to the FSB and other sources, while in Spain, he was recruited to British intelligence by British intelligence agent Pablo Miller posing as Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo. According to intelligence sources cited by The Times in March 2018,

Skripal was first spotted for potential development as an asset by Spanish intelligence but was approached by the British recruiter around July 1995 and was given the codename 'Forthwith'. According to the FSB, Pablo Miller was also involved in efforts to recruit other Russian

assets and was in contact with Alexander Litvinenko.

Pablo Miller worked for Christopher Steele's London-based private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, which produced the Steele dossier.

From April 2016 into early May, the Washington Free Beacon and the

Clinton Campaign/DNC were independently both clients of Fusion GPS. This overlap led to confusion in the media.

The Free Beacon was founded by Michael Goldfarb, Aaron Harrison, and Matthew Continetti.

Matthew Continetti is married to Anne Elizabeth Kristol, the daughter of

William Kristol, Vice President Dan Quayle's Chief of Staff.

In 1997, William Kristol co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert “Terra 🐳” Kagan. He is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (renamed in 1981 from the International Center for Economic Policy Studies) is a conservative American think tank focused on domestic policy and urban affairs, established in Manhattan in 1978 by Antony Fisher and William J. Casey, a

former CIA director.

Following the dissolution of the OSS in September 1945, William Casey returned to his legal and business ventures. After serving as a special counsel to the United States Senate (1947–1948) and associate general counsel to the Point Four Program (1948).

Point Four was the first global U.S. foreign aid program, yet it drew some inspiration from the nation's wartime Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), which extended technical assistance to Latin American countries. Nelson Rockefeller, the administrator of

the OCIAA, strongly supported the establishment of Point Four in congressional hearings.
According to the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, it was the initiative of the then legal counsel to the president Clark Clifford.

From 1982 to 1991, Clark Clifford served as chairman of

First American Bankshares, which grew to become the largest bank in Washington, D.C. The bank was nominally owned by a group of Arab investors, but in order to assuage fears from the Federal Reserve, Clifford had assembled a board of distinguished American citizens to exercise

day-to-day control. In 1991, Robert M. Morgenthau, the District Attorney for New York County (coterminous with the borough of Manhattan), disclosed that his office had found evidence that BCCI secretly owned First American.

Safari Club members, the BCCI, and the United States

cooperated in arming and funding the Afghan mujahideen to oppose the Soviet Union.

The creation of the Safari Club coincided with the consolidation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The BCCI served to launder money, particularly for Saudi Arabia and the

United States—whose CIA director in 1976, George H. W. Bush, had a personal account.

In May 1976, Ted “Blonde Ghost” Shackley was made Associate Deputy Director for Operations, serving under CIA director George H. W. Bush. After Jimmy Carter had succeeded Gerald Ford as

President and replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner, Shackley was relieved of his post in December 1977, before officially retiring from the organization in 1979 – when the Carter administration announced wide cuts in the CIA's network of officers and informants. Reportedly, he

was forced out of the CIA by Turner who disapproved of Shackley's involvement with former agent Edwin P. Wilson, who was under federal investigation for smuggling explosives to Libya.

In 1971, with the CIA's knowledge and approval, Edwin P. Wilson moved to the

Office of Naval Intelligence, where he worked full-time for a secret intelligence unit called the Naval Field Operations Support Group (NFOSG) or Task Force 157.

Task Force 157 was involved in some of the most sensitive intelligence missions. The unit's top secret communications

channel was used to set up Henry A. Kissinger's secret 1971 visit to China.

While young Jon Huntsman Jr. was visiting the White House in 1971 during his father's service as special assistant to the president, a pantsless Henry Kissinger invited the young man to hop up on his lap

like Santa and confided to the 11-year-old that he was secretly traveling to China. “Ho, ho, ho Santa gon bring back the China white smack and make it snow blow all in my big fat sack and sleigh,” a jolly Heinz called out.

President Barack Obama nominated Jon Huntsman Jr. to

serve as the United States Ambassador to China on May 16, 2009, noting his experience in the region and proficiency in Mandarin Chinese.

In January 2014, Huntsman was named chairman of the Atlanticist think-tank the Atlantic Council.

In 2015, Burisma was one of the founders of

the International Forum on Energy Security for the Future and partnered the Electric Marathon. In 2017, Burisma signed a partnership agreement with the Atlantic Council to promote anti-corruption measures.

The panelists of the keynote session included the Vice Prime Minister of

Ukraine Volodymyr Kistion, the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002) and Ambassador at Large for Counter-Terrorism (2002-2004) Joseph Cofer Black, the European Commissioner for Energy (2004 and 2009) Andris Piebalgs, and the Director of the Atlantic Council

Dina Patriciu Eurasia Center and the US Ambassador to Ukraine (2003-2006) John E. Herbst.

Herbst was particularly successful in building interagency support and using the concept of smart power through policy committees and coordination teams that include persons from the

United States Agency for International Development and the departments of Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and Treasury.

In 1983 the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs launched a research division known as the Program on

Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense (aka Program on Nonviolent Sanctions, or PNS), which operated as a research division under the framework and policies of the center. Its focus was the use of nonviolent sanctions as a substitute for violent interventions. It was

founded by Gene Sharp, who also founded the independent non-profit Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) a few months later.

The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA), formerly Center for International Affairs (CFIA) is a research center for international affairs and

the largest international research center within Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The Center for International Affairs was founded in 1958 by Robert R. Bowie and Henry Kissinger, assuming its current name in 1998 following an endowment by Albert and Celia twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Weatherhead and the Weatherhead Foundation.

In 1970, a bomb was detonated in the Semitic Museum, which the center was located in at that time, due to the center's connection to Henry Kissinger and its research activities.

As part of the wider anti-war movement of the 1960s,

student organisations such as the Harvard chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) ran anti-war activities on campus. In November 1966 for instance, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was prevented from leaving the campus by a group of about 800 students.

SDS held their first meeting in 1960 on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor, where Alan Haber was elected president. The SDS manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was adopted at the organization's first convention in June 1962, based on an earlier draft by

staff member Tom Hayden. Under Walter Reuther's leadership, the UAW paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron.

Tom Hayden grew up attending a church led by Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest noted for his anti- twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Semitic teachings, and who was also known nationally during the time of The Great Depression as the "radio priest".

The manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society has been called the left's response to the Sharon Statement.

Amongst the attendees were several future

conservative leaders including historian Lee Edwards, Howard Phillips, Don Lipsett (co-founder Philadelphia Society), Paul Niemeyer (United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit), William A. Rusher (National Review publisher), Allan Ryskind (publisher of Human Events)

and M. Stanton Evans. It was decided to organize a new organization which was named the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Evans was selected to draft the founding principles of the group, named Sharon Statement after Buckley's residence. Evans said he was influenced by the

works of conservative thinkers such as F. A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Whittaker Chambers.

Late in life, Russell Kirk taught one semester a year at Hillsdale College, where he was distinguished visiting professor of humanities.

Larry P. Arnn has served

as Hillsdale College president of the college since 2000.

In 1980, Arnn became an editor for Public Research, Syndicated in the United States. He was one of four founders of the Claremont Institute in Claremont, California, and served as its president from 1985 to 2000.

The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank based in Upland, California. The institute was founded in 1979 by four students of Harry V. Jaffa.

As a PhD student, Harry V. Jaffa became interested in Abraham Lincoln after discovering a copy of the Lincoln–Douglas debates

in a used bookshop.

Jaffa points out that safety and happiness are the principal virtues of Aristotelian political life in his Politics. Jaffa also points to Federalist No. 43, in which James Madison declares that safety and happiness are the aims of all political institutions,

and George Washington's first inaugural address as cementing the link between human happiness and government and therefore the ancient roots of the American founding.

Federalist No. 43 is an essay by James Madison, the forty-third of The Federalist Papers. It was published on

January 23, 1788, under the pseudonym Publius, the name under which all The Federalist papers were published.

The paper contains the only reference to the Copyright Clause in The Federalist Papers. In the brief discussion of the Clause, Madison states that "the utility of this

power will scarcely be questioned." He also notes the Framer's intent for the federal government to have exclusive jurisdiction over patent and copyright law.

F43 also deals with the Treason Clause of the U.S. Constitution. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…