This is pretty startling, from the paper formerly known as Business Insider, which has gotten hold of a somewhat redacted official whistleblower complaint from an FBI counterintelligence Russia expert alleging he (the officer is pretty certainly a man) has been prevented by management from working with a source who talks about Giuliani and other Trump associations in context of Giuliani’s Ukraine activities and possibly others, and retaliated against in all kinds of awful ways for reports he’s submitted. He’s basically not allowed to report these things if he learns them.
He doesn’t directly identify who’s going after him, but it’s associated with the FBI’s New York Field Office, which is a red rag to all us Mueller freaks, and the Insider story doesn’t mention that, or a number of other things that stand out when you’re reading the document itself. In fact I don’t think Insider has a very good sense of what it’s got, and all I want to do here is try to recast the material a little in what I call a “narratological” approach to make it clear what the story actually is, for not just the Mueller freak but still more the aficionado of Impeachment I.
The story begins when the Mueller investigation was replacing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in early or mid 2017, and the author was right in the middle of it, getting admirable work done; he doesn’t say so, but I have this vague impression one of the things he would have been working on was the verification of the Steele reports, and identification of the Russia-supplied disinformation with which the dossier was afflicted, which was welcome to the Bureau:
But he was also directly involved in studying the links between Russian intelligence and oligarchy, and especially the financing of their active measures in the US at the time of the 2016 US election, and as he was doing it becoming aware that his work was being seen as “sensitive” in the upper ranks:
For example, at the beginning of 2019, one of his best confidential human sources, codenamed Dynamo, ran into suggestions that former vice president Biden’s son Hunter might be doing some unauthorized lobbying for the Ukrainian company that had employed him. The whistleblower, noting how the same allegations had begun to leak into the US press, began wondering if they might be a Russian intelligence disinformation operation aimed at Biden’s expected presidential candidacy, and noted the doubts in his report. He also had some doubts about his interpretation of the material because he doesn’t know Ukrainian the way he knows Russian and it had to be translated by another hand.
The reporting on Hunter Biden got him some attention from field officers in Baltimore who were studying Hunter’s sexual behavior and drug abuse and didn’t have any information on this kind of impropriety, and a good deal of praise from unnamed bosses (“My supervisors were delighted that I had collected this information about Burisma, notwithstanding the obvious political sensitivity”), but nobody ever followed up on the doubts he’d expressed.
Very different was the response when his work on money laundering turned up a financial relationship between the Ukrainian oligarch Pavel (or Pavlo) Fuks, who’d been one of Trump’s potential partners in a Trump Tower Moscow project back in 2008, and Trump attorney Rudolf Giuliani, who’d taken a $300,000 payment to serve as Fuks’s “lobbyist” (Giuliani denied the lobbying, telling Dynamo he was getting the money for “security consulting”), along mounting evidence through 2020 and 2021 that Fuks was an asset of Russian intelligence while posing as a pro-independence Ukrainian patriot—this climaxes in the leadup to the 2022 invasion, when Fuks is said to have helped the invaders make the case that they were fighting Ukrainian Nazis: he
launched a false flag campaign to justify Russian invasion. According to [Rolling Stone], Fuks paid local residents of the city of Kharkiv to paint swastikas on the walls of synagogues.[26][27]
Or as corroborated by the whistleblower,
The whistleblower’s reporting on Fuks’s money laundering, which involved figures as exalted as ex-president Yanukovych and top oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy, lost Fuks his US visa and earned him a position on the Organized Crime Watch List, as well as sanctions for his agent Andriy Telizhenko, but the information on Giuliani just disappeared; nobody ever followed up on it with the whistleblower.
I think I’m running into some kind of length limit here; I’ll post and return with a Part II.
It sure seems like if you have enough money (Fuk you money?) you skate, and if not (Kharkiv) not so much. This might be related to that Marshall post about oligarchs and power Jordan brought up in the comments in Part 2.
It sure seems like if you have enough money (Fuk you money?) you skate, and if not (Kharkiv) not so much. This might be related to that Marshall post about oligarchs and power Jordan brought up in the comments in Part 2.