Durham was a distraction away from Trump's connection to Alfa Bank in Russia.

[Kid Berwyn]

11. Peter Dale Scott observed Alfa Bank has big clout in DC.

Peter Dale Scott is considered the father of “Deep Politics” — the study of hidden permanent institutions and interests whose influence on the political realm transcends the elected, appointed, and career officials who come and go.

A professor of English at Berkeley and a former Canadian diplomat, he is the author of several critically acclaimed books on the pivotal events of our country’s recent past, including American War Machine (2010) and The American Deep State (2018), which are relevant to the story below.

The Mueller Report, Alfa Bank, and the Deep State
PETER DALE SCOTT 04/29/19

Excerpt…

The various speculations about the Trump link to Alfa and Fridman, whether innocuous or shady, justify a closer look at the charges about Alfa’s influence two decades ago. (Scott, American War Machine, 187.)

As the Guardian reported in 2002, Alfa’s 1990s clout in Washington was demonstrated when its oil company, Tyumen,

was loaned $489m in credits by the US Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburton…. The [Clinton] White House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol Hill [which then was Republican controlled] … The State Department’s concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for mafia connections.

Veteran newsman Knut Royce (a major contributor to three Pulitzer Prize–winning stories) reported the details:

Under the guidance of Richard Cheney, a get-the-government-out-of-my-face conservative, Halliburton Company over the past five years has emerged as a corporate welfare hog, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.

One of these loans was approved in April by the U.S. Export-Import Bank. It guaranteed $489 million in credits to a Russian oil company [Tyumen, owned by Alfa] whose roots are imbedded in a legacy of KGB and Communist Party corruption, as well as drug trafficking and organized crime funds, according to Russian and U.S. sources and documents.

[Two reports, one by “a former U.S. intelligence officer,” and one by the Russian FSB] claim that Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest and most profitable, as well as Alfa Eko, a trading company, had been deeply involved in the early 1990s in laundering of Russian and Colombian drug money and in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europe …

The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Group’s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.” (Please go here for full text.)

In 2013 Tyumen Oil was acquired by the Russian oil company Rosneft, which had just signed a multibillion-dollar oil exploration deal with Exxon, allegedly “the biggest oil deal ever.” The deal — put on hold by President Barack Obama’s imposition of sanctions on Russia — was so huge that, according to the Wall Street Journal, its temporary cancellation “put Exxon at risk.” (Daniel Gilbert, “Sanctions Over Ukraine Put Exxon at Risk: Deal With Russia’s Rosneft to Drill in Arctic Is Crucial to Oil Company,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2014. The deal was originally made by Rosneft with BP, but the BP deal was blocked by a successful legal challenge from a company controlled by Fridman.)

In April 2017, after Exxon’s Chairman, Rex Tillerson, became Trump’s first secretary of state, “Exxon tried to get permission from the Trump administration to resume drilling in Russia. The Treasury Department denied the waiver.” (A year later, Trump fired Tillerson.)

What Mueller did research, he did thoroughly. I suspect that his findings will create problems for Trump and maybe other politicians. But the report’s silence on the Trump-Alfa connection — if not broken by eventual release of counterintelligence information now redacted — is an indication that the bank’s clout in Washington is still as powerful as it was in the 1990s.

Since the election, Trump has also acted in ways that will protect Alfa Bank from criminal investigations. In July 2018, Brian Benczkowski was narrowly confirmed as head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, despite Democratic concerns over the fact that he had previously, while a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, represented the Alfa Bank in the investigation of whether its computer servers had contacted the Trump Organization. (1)

And William Barr, now attorney general, also worked at Kirkland & Ellis during the Bank Alfa investigation, leading Newsweek to ask a week ago whether he should not now recuse himself from matters affecting the Mueller report. (2)

Continues…

https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/the-mueller-report-alfa-bank-and-the-deep-state/