The famous phrase has always been: follow the money. Never more relevant than now. I’m going to offer some source links as I go along. But, for the most part, I’m simply going to summarize the important elements of my book (“Maggie’s Hammer” – https://maggieshammer.com/) and the articles I’ve written since 2015, expanding on my book.
One of the primary informants for my book, Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli Intelligence officer and former counterterrorism adviser to Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, told me that, beginning in the Eighties, much of the focus of the global military-intelligence-business community has been on making pots of money from illegal and illicit activity (arms deals, drug-running, trafficking, money-laundering).
We start in the Eighties. In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Hussein thought it would be a quick war. It wasn’t. It became a war of attrition. And both sides needed vast amounts of arms. The UN had placed an embargo on arms sales to the two countries. Everyone ignored the embargo, and sold arms covertly. $80 billion over the decade to Iran, and $60 billion to Iraq.
Kickbacks were offered willy-nilly, all over the place. The subject of my book, Hugh Simmonds CBE, close to Margaret Thatcher, helped to launder profits and kickbacks for British Intelligence, senior members of the British Conservative Government and Party, Ari Ben-Menashe (and the Israelis), and Robert Maxwell (British billionaire and former Labour Party politician), in London.
Robert Maxwell had developed close contacts with communist Eastern European countries. Although communist in name, these countries still had to make money and had thriving black markets, controlled by the Eastern European and Russian Mafia, headed by one Semion Mogilevich. Maxwell went into business with the Russian Mob, and arranged to store hundreds of millions of dollars of the CIA and Mossad, Iran-Iraq arms profits in financial institutions in Eastern Europe.
Hugh, who as a lawyer specialized in money management, helped Maxwell with his money-laundering. Somehow or another, Hugh got into trouble. Maybe, he got sticky fingers; maybe, he annoyed too many people. Even now, I have not been able to get to all of the truth. In any event, Hugh ended up dead, in mysterious circumstances, in a leafy glade, near our hometown in England, in November 1988. Shortly after that, a financier called Bill Browder began advising Maxwell.
Maxwell himself then developed sticky fingers. His legitimate business enterprises ran short of money. Different sources have differing accounts of what happened next. On one thing they are all agreed, however. Maxwell turned up dead in 1991, floating in the Mediterranean.
Ari told me that the CIA did it, because Maxwell was helping himself to their funds in Eastern Europe. My British Intelligence contact tells me it was the Israelis, for much the same reason, and because Maxwell had threatened the Israelis that he would reveal that they had done a dirty deal with Kryuchkov (the KGB head who attempted an unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev in 1991), where Kryuchkov would release Soviet Jews once Israel recognized his coup. And so on.
The thing is, all of Maxwell’s networks remained. As did all those hundreds of millions of dollars in Eastern Europe. Entering the Nineties, Donald Trump’s enterprises in the US hit a brick wall, not unlike Maxwell’s. The two were acquainted. Trump was having difficulty getting money out of New York banks. He turned to the Russians. And specifically the Russian Mob. This much is generally recorded. What is not recorded generally is that Trump also stepped into Maxwell’s shoes.
Talking heads are falling all over themselves, chattering about Epstein and Ghislaine, even about Bob Maxwell. But, they’ve missed the point that, in the early Nineties, Trump took over from Maxwell as primary bagman for the Russian Mob. I’ll give you a couple of links. If you’re interested, you have to follow them about two or three posts along, to get the full story – https://tinyurl.com/75psnerz and https://tinyurl.com/4s96fw92.
Towards the end of the Nineties, Bill Browder went off to Moscow to do his own thing. Set up a brokerage firm in Moscow, called Hermitage Capital Management. Quickly discovered that Putin had his own way of doing business. Every foreign financial firm had to have some Russian directors. The Russian directors would then hack into the companies’ accounts, and launder vast sums overseas.
Bill Browder’s Russian accountant. Sergei Magnitsky, discovered the hacking and the laundering, reported it to Browder, and confronted the Russians. Browder got out by the skin of his teeth. Magnitsky was imprisoned and died of torture.
Browder then spent the next few years lobbying in Europe and the US. In 2012, the US Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, the purpose of which was to punish all those Russians involved in the death of Magnitsky and with the theft from Hermitage, not least by confiscating any and all overseas assets.
The problem was this. Putin’s deal was that he received 50% of all laundered assets from all of the foreign businesses that were laundering illegally out of Russia. By common consent, the totality of Putin’s illegal assets outside of Russia had risen to about $70 billion. This meant that the piddling amount that Putin got from Hermitage technically could lead to all of his $70 billion being frozen. Putin was not a happy camper in 2012.
So, in the run-up to the US elections of 2016, Putin had people wandering all over Washington, DC, using any device they could dream up to inveigle political candidates to agree to repeal the Magnitsky Act. This was what led to all the charges of collusion. Putin didn’t give a toss who won in the 2016 elections – provided the winner(s) agreed to work assiduously to repeal the Magnitsky Act. And this is another huge element of this story that most talking heads are missing.
Was Trump suborned by the Russians? Trump was already suborned. Both he and Putin were in thrall to Mogilevich, who, after the fall of the communist apparatus, became the leader of all organized illicit activity in and out of Russia.
However, as far as Magnitsky and 2016 were concerned, Putin’s agents were attempting to suborn anyone. They offered opposition research, hacking, data-mining, whatever the up-and-coming Washington pol wanted. This is where and how the Steele Dossier entered the equation.
The Russians were behind the Dossier. Originally, it was financed by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet. When Trump became the 2016 Republican nominee, Hillary and the DNC took over the Dossier, since it contained research on Trump.
Don Jr. thought he was being offered dirt on Hillary, when he met with Russians at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in June 2016. He left the meeting early, because he had no idea what the Russians were talking about when they kept mentioning the Magnitsky Act. Hillary dealt with Russian information when she took over the Steele Dossier. At least a couple of Congresspeople were also approached. This was never just Trump. But he bit. Some.
Was there election interference and collusion? Mueller says there was election interference by the Russians. He could not make a criminal link between Trump and the Russians in this regard. The latest allegations by Tulsi Gabbard are that Obama originally found no collusion, but then distorted the intelligence assessment, to come up with a different conclusion. It’s a bit more complicated than that.
Trump had been laundering money for the Russians for thirty years by this point. Once Putin took over, the separation between state, intelligence, and Mob pretty much blurred. Trump was dealing with all of them – exclusive of any election matters. Personally, I don’t think Trump was that interested in Russian help. And I’m not sure any election interference made all that much difference. Insofar as anyone might be interested, after this spiel, I do offer an AI summary collating information and critique about what Tulsi is alleging, in a companion post.
What is more important is that, during 2016, while Trump was actively campaigning, Putin decided to sell 19% of Rosneft, the Russian oil and gas company, to Qatar, and to allow Trump to act as broker, and pocket a cool $500 million as a brokerage fee. Once more, this is not something the chattering classes are mentioning (https://tinyurl.com/yv3sdhkp).
Ok. But why didn’t Obama and the Democrats simply reveal all of this? I have no real clue. The Tulsi summary that I offer in the companion post suggests that there is some truth to the allegations that Obama messed with the intelligence assessment about Trump-Russia collusion.
What I do know is that, in the Noughts, when Mueller was Director of the FBI, he launched an investigation into Trump’s money-laundering. By 2016, this had been underway for some ten years. There is some reasonable speculation that this is why Trump ran for President in 2016.
Maybe, Obama et al realized they could no longer push this investigation along? Maybe, they were appalled at the thought that a Russian puppet would be in the White House, and wanted to find some excuse to delegitimize Trump, even impeach him? However, maybe Obama also took the view that while collusion would be tenable, revelation that a Presidential candidate was this corrupt might upset political balance in the US? So, maybe Obama plumped for collusion, not corruption?
What was clear at the time (2016) was that Mueller and others were furious that all of the new hearings and investigations about collusion totally buried the ten-year FBI investigation. Mueller attempted to rescue the situation by becoming special counsel. The circumstantial evidence is that he was hoping to leverage Trump into resignation or acceptance of a one-term Presidency, using the ten-year investigation as a stick. This did not work out. And Mueller walked away empty-handed.
It is perhaps not surprising that Trump didn’t bend to the Mueller pressure. Trump had become President. But, there is one further fact, that is interesting, if not necessarily indicative of much. One of the first acts by Trump as President was to fire the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. This Attorney had begun a federal case that was about to be settled against an import company. Further investigation by me determined that this import company just happened to be in receipt of all of the monies stolen from Hermitage. Trump fired the Attorney, and ordered the case to be shut down. Thereby protecting Putin’s $70 billion.
So, where does Epstein fit into all of this? Nowhere. And that is the point. Well. Almost. Epstein, Trump, and their alleged involvement with minors, while utterly reprehensible, was not the primary issue. Both political sides (at least those in Washington and in the know) are making hay on both sides of the Epstein argument, either to reveal or to hide deeper secrets.
Epstein and Maxwell were likely Israeli Intelligence assets. Epstein got his start in London in the Eighties, hanging around the same people as the subject of my book, Hugh Simmonds. It was in London in the Eighties that Epstein met Bob Maxwell and Ari, who were having dealings with Hugh. Epstein’s first forays were into arms dealings, along with Ari, Bob Maxwell, and Hugh. Ari was using assets to blackmail politicians. As Epstein later did. Any serious investigation into Epstein and Trump would inevitably lead to the whole connection between Trump, Israelis, Russians, Mob, Putin, and money-laundering.
And that pretty much sets out why Trump is so skittish about Epstein and Russia and collusion. And why he is getting Tulsi to run an alternative narrative. In which regard, and as promised, I set out the AI summary about Tulsi’s allegations in a companion post.
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