Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's JournalCraig Unger: Did FBI's McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?
Did the FBI’s Charles McGonigal Help Throw the 2016 Election to Trump?
The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.
By Craig Unger
The National Review, February 1, 2023
In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it?
Specifically, I knew that:
* Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence.
* The Russian mafia laundered millions of dollars through Donald Trump’s real estate by purchasing condos in all-cash transactions through anonymous corporations that did not disclose real ownership.
* Trump Tower was a home away from home for Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most brutal leaders of the Russian mafia, and at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran alleged criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.
* Trump was some $4 billion in debt when the Russians came to bail him out via the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm that was largely staffed, owned, and financed by Soviet émigrés who had ties to Russian intelligence and/or organized crime.
Much of my material came from FBI documents. A lot came from open-source databases. It made no sense. There was an astounding amount of data on the public record. The FBI had launched enormous investigations of the Russian mafia in the 1980s. They had staked out a New York electronics store that was a haven for KGB officers. They knew that’s where the Trump Organization bought hundreds of TV sets. They had their eyes on Ivankov and other Russian mobsters who were denizens of Trump’s casinos and bought and sold his condos through shell companies. They had to know that Trump laundered money for and provided a base of operations for the Russian mafia, which was, after all, a de facto state actor tied to Russian intelligence. They had to know that the Russians repeatedly bailed Trump out when he was bankrupt. They had to know that Russia owned him.
Snip…
As FBI director, Freeh had warned that Russian organized crime posed a grave threat to the United States that far transcended mere criminality. It is not clear how much he was paid by Prevezon after he switched sides, but Freeh later bought a $9.38 million mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, just a 10-minute drive from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Then there was the late James Kallstrom, who ran the FBI’s New York office in the mid-’90s and oversaw successful investigations into both the Italian Mafia and later the Russian mob. Kallstrom had developed close friendships with two key players in the Trump-Russia saga. He worked closely with then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani in the investigation of the Cosa Nostra network that led to the famed Mafia Commission Trial of 1985–1986. Going even further back, Kallstrom had also been friends with Donald Trump since around 1973, when Kallstrom was putting together a Trump-funded parade in New York to honor Vietnam veterans.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/170328/charles-mcgonigal-throw-2016-election
Unger has been on to the BFEE gangsters since they were in business with the bin Laden clan.
Another guy who won't forget is Timothy SNYDER
The Specter of 2016McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America
Timothy Snyder
January 26, 2023
We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.
On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.
Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win. We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation. Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt. And again, the issue is not just the particular person. If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process.
For me personally, McGonigal's arrest brought back an unsettling memory. In 2016, McGonigal was in charge of cyber counter-intelligence for the FBI, and was put in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. That April, I broke the story of the connection between Trump's campaign and Putin's regime, on the basis of Russian open sources. At the time, almost no one wanted to take this connection seriously. American journalists wanted an American source, but the people who had experienced similar Russian operations were in Russia, Ukraine, or Estonia. Too few people took Trump seriously; too few people took Russia seriously; too few people took cyber seriously; the Venn diagram overlap of people who took all three seriously felt very small. Yet there was also specific, nagging worry that my own country was not only unprepared, but something worse. After I wrote that piece and another, I heard intimations that something was odd about the FBI office in New York. This was no secret at the time. One did not need to be close to such matters to get that drift. And given that FBI New York was the office dealing with cyber counterintelligence, this was worrying.
The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. When that failed, Russia had invaded Ukraine, under the cover of some very successful influence operations. (If you find that you do not remember the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it is very possibly because you were caught in the froth of Russian propaganda, spread through the internet, targeted to vulnerabilities.) The success of that propaganda encouraged Russia to intervene in the United States, using the same methods and institutions. This is what I was working on in 2016, when a similar operation was clearly underway in the United States.
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https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016
Putin put Trump in power and some in the national security establishment were corrupted and lied about it.
Bully will keep at it and at it...
…until the victim gets up and punches the bully in the nose.
Joe Biden stands up to Putin in new PBS Frontline...
…as VP and shows President Biden standing up to Putin now.
The program, “Putin and the Presidents” is online and on-demand:
https://www.pbs.org/video/putin-and-the-presidents-gmztxm/
Poppy Bush claimed victory in the Cold War and recommended capitalism-freedom for all the Russias, Bill Clinton sounded the alarm about Putin the KGB trained feller, Smirko Bush talked a lot after looking into his soul and inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, Obama stood up against the little dictator with VP Biden doing a lot of the work, and Trump seemed to actively do Putin’s bidding.
But it was Biden who said to Putin’s face, after Putin reminded him of what George W Bush saw: “I don’t think you have a soul.” Putin replied, “Then we understand each other.”
Wonder what else Dip's paid for?
Security footage shows Georgia county Republican chair, election official present during breach of voting equipmentPBS, Politics Sep 6, 2022 12:40 PM EST
ATLANTA (AP) — Two months after the 2020 presidential election, a team of computer experts traveled to south Georgia to copy software and data from voting equipment in an apparent breach of a county election system. They were greeted outside by the head of the local Republican Party, who was involved in efforts by then-President Donald Trump to overturn his election loss.
A security camera outside the elections office in rural Coffee County captured their arrival. The footage also shows that some local election officials were at the office during what the Georgia secretary of state’s office has described as “alleged unauthorized access” of election equipment.
Security footage from two weeks later raises additional alarms — showing two people who were instrumental in Trump’s wider efforts to undermine the election results entering the office and staying for hours.
The security video from the elections office in the county about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta offers a glimpse of the lengths Trump’s allies went to in service of his fraudulent election claims. It further shows how access was facilitated by local officials who are entrusted with protecting the security of elections while raising concerns about sensitive voting technology being released into the public domain.
Georgia wasn’t the only state where voting equipment was accessed after the 2020 presidential election. Important information about voting systems also was compromised in election offices in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Colorado. Election security experts worry the information obtained — including complete copies of hard drives — could be exploited by those who want to interfere with future elections.
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/security-footage-shows-georgia-county-republican-chair-election-official-present-during-breach-of-voting-equipment
Bishop Romero
From the Kellogg Institute:
Monsignor Oscar Romero y Galdamez, fourth archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated while presiding at a memorial Mass in the Carmelite chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia on March 24, 1980. The Archbishop was standing behind the altar, preparing the gifts of the offerty, when two mercenaries approached the chapel and fired a single shot from a U.S. military assault rifle. Archbishop Romero died within minutes from shock and blood loss. He died as a martyr and a prophet, as the greatest source of hope for millions of oppressed and impoverished Salvadorans, and as the greatest threat to the greed and arrogance of the oligarchy of 14 families that ruled El Salvador as if it were their own fiefdom.
Romero had undergone a Metanoia that transformed him from a timid defender of non- controversial virtues into a towering champion of the faith and of the faithful. He had discovered, in his own words: “The word of God is like the light of the sun. It illuminates beautiful things, but also things which we would rather not see.”
Much of the illuminated reality was utterly unconscionable. Less than a month after his installation as archbishop of El Salvador, his friend and colleague Rutillo Grande, SJ, was machine-gunned as “punishment” for helping peasants organize to secure self-determination. Soon after, a right-wing paramilitary group ordered all Jesuits to leave the country or to face execution. Although Fr. Grande’s murder had enormous impact on Romero, he realized that it was not an isolated incident. Literally tens of thousands of men, women, and children were murdered by military and para-military death squads under the guise of “anti-communism,” “law and order,” and “maintenance of traditional values.” On one day alone—January 22, 1979—paramilitary snipers killed 21 people and wounded 120 more while they were staging a peaceful protest march through downtown San Salvador. In rural areas, campesinos were murdered on a daily basis and their bodies were left to rot on road sides, as warnings to others who might “forget their place.” The death squads, commanded by Major Roberto D’ Aubuisson, a Salvadoran army officer who founded the right-wing ARENA political party, and self-proclaimed “fuhrer of San Salvador”— routinely murdered, tortured, raped, and looted with absolute impunity. The police and the courts existed primarily to exonerate the guilty and to punish those victims who dared to speak about the mistreatment they had suffered.
Beyond the overt violence, Oscar Romero saw institutionalized social and economic injustice on a pervasive scale. Two percent of the population controlled 57 percent of the nation’s usable land, and the 16 richest families owned the same amount of land utilized by 230,000 of the poorer families. The use of the comparative, rather than the superlative, is intentional since the poorest families had no land whatever, and were forced to sleep in ditches and muddy fields. Hungry farm workers were beaten or shot for eating a piece of the very produce they had grown. Mines and factories operated under the theory that it was cheaper to replace a dead or crippled worker than to repair defective equipment. Sixty percent of all babies died at birth, and 75 percent of the survivors suffered severe malnutrition. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children died from diseases that could have been cured by basic medications.
Facing such realities, Archbishop Romero began to ask his now-famous questions: “How can Christians do such things to each other? What can the Church do to help?” He found his answer in the realization that he had been called to Christ a second time, to the Christ who spoke to him in the Beatitudes. He found it also in the principles of the Liberation Theology that he had once condemned; in the voices that had risen at the Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate at Medellín, Colombia, and in the simple yet powerful truth of Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez’ dictum: “To know God is to do justice.”
In the last sermon Romero preached, only one day before his assassination, he spoke directly to the military: “I want to make a special appeal to soldiers, national guardsmen, and policemen: each of you is one of us. The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a man telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you; in the name of God I command you to stop the repression.”
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https://kellogg.nd.edu/archbishop-oscar-romero
Simply for putting the Gospel in action, he became an enemy of the rich and powerful.
Looks like Barr Obstructed Justice
John Durham's secret criminal investigation reportedly involved Trump, not Clinton or the FBIPETER WEBER
The Week, January 27, 2023
Excerpt…
When Durham and Barr made a very unusual trip to Italy in September 2019, "Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes," the Times reports. Barr and Durham "decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore," but instead of assigning it to another prosecutor, Barr had Durham quietly investigate the matter, "giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time."
"Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned, and whether anyone at the White House ever found out," the Times adds. This "extraordinary fact" that Durham opened a criminal investigation of Trump "has remained secret," though "a garbled echo became public" when the Times, in October 2019, reported that Durham's review had become a criminal inquiry, presumably (but erroneously) because "Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry."
Barr, "who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening," the Times notes.
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https://theweek.com/arizona/1020435/arizona-legislature-exempts-itself-from-state-public-records-law
A hearty welcome to DU, GGoss! Outstanding OP and thread!
Personally, I think Barr will claim he covered up for Trump in order to keep “Anti-Putin” national security operations secret, meaning don’t rock the boat wherein the rich get richer and the rest of humanity can drop dead.
Frank Figliuzzi on his former co-worker...
Fourth, as disturbing as the McGonigal indictments are, there is some solace in the fact that they don’t contain a charge of espionage. That means, as far as we know, McGonigal didn’t do what Robert Hanssen did: share classified national defense information with foreign powers. McGonigal held a much higher, and even more sensitive, position than Hanssen did. If McGonigal had sold secrets to adversaries, the damage could be almost insurmountable. If there’s anything to be thankful for here, it’s that maybe — just maybe — FBI New York’s top spy catcher had a line that even he would not cross.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/arrest-fbi-agent-linked-russian-oligarch-major-blow-rcna67060
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