Day: December 6, 2024
Ivanishvili targeted by Magnitsky Act sanctions
On December 5, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Global Magnitsky sanctions, discussing ways to enhance their implementation and international coordination. Among other issues, the committee discussed ongoing human rights abuses by the Georgian government against demonstrators, expressing hope that Magnitsky sanctions could help address these violations.
William Browder, financier, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and one of the initiators of the Magnitsky Act, spoke about the role of corruption in Georgia’s current crisis and accused Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire and informal ruler of Georgia, of effectively creating this crisis.
“Where did Ivanishvili get his money? From Russia. How did he build his fortune? Through Gazprom and other Russian state-owned companies. In my experience, these companies are highly corrupt.
Ivanishvili earned several billion dollars and returned to Georgia. So how do the Russians control this? They tell him: ‘You earned money in potentially questionable ways. We can seize it all, initiate a criminal investigation, or do nothing—if you help us.’ And so he has been actively assisting them ever since.
Therefore, it would be fair to say that the current illegitimate government of Georgia is a Russian puppet regime, and Bidzina Ivanishvili plays a very active role in this situation. This is one example of how corruption operates,” said William Browder.
He also stated that “corrupt people in power do not want the next government to investigate their actions,” and therefore “refuse to hand over power and manipulate elections.“
U.S. Helsinki Commission co-chair Senator Ben Cardin, who chaired the meeting, expressed hope that the Magnitsky Act sanctions would help Georgia get back on the right path.
“What is happening on the ground right now is unacceptable. The current government is treating the Georgian people inappropriately,” Cardin said.
What is the Magnitsky Act?
Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old Russian tax consultant and lawyer of Ukrainian descent, exposed corruption and abuse of power by the Russian government. In 2008, he was arrested and killed in a Russian prison 11 months later.
In 2012, the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, aimed at holding members of the Russian government accountable for Sergei Magnitsky’s death.
An updated version of the law in 2016 expanded its scope, allowing the U.S. government to impose sanctions – freezing assets and banning entry to the United States – on government officials worldwide implicated in human rights abuses.
Categories
Patel knows FBI’s dirty secrets
 |
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from |
OPINION:
Democrats were so committed to the FBI and its cherished Russian dossier in 2017 that they vouched for its author, Christopher Steele, quoted it at hearings and saw it as a sure way to bring down new President Donald Trump.
But then Kash Patel crashed their party.
Mr. Patel, as senior counsel and overseer of spook programs, was a critical figure in then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ investigation of the FBI’s drive to entrap Mr. Trump in a Russia election conspiracy.
In January 2018, the Republican released the bombshell Nunes memo. It exposed for the first time how the FBI took Mr. Steele’s unreliable gossip and cited it to back up its court affidavits. The FBI corrupted what was supposed to be a fact-based judicial process under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on an American’s communications — in this case, those of Trump volunteer Carter Page.
Worse, Mr. Patel discovered that the senior FBI leaders at the time, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, never told the court that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic Party funded and trafficked the dossier.
The Patel-driven Nunes memo brought howls of protest from Democrats and the aligned news media.
But a year later, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz released his damning report that corroborated Mr. Patel’s work. He concluded that the FBI concealed facts, lied and rigged the affidavits.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff tried to counter Nunes-Patel with his own memo. It proved laughably wrong.
If the Senate confirms Mr. Patel’s appointment, he will become the protagonist in a streaming TV original series. The whistleblower who exposed the FBI arrives triumphant as its top cop.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, who will either resign or be fired, never came to grips with what he inherited in August 2017: a scandal-marred front office that needed shaking up. A place that embraced a hoax to bring down a president. Instead, Mr. Wray’s FBI continued to do the Democrats’ bidding by putting parents under surveillance, targeting pro-lifers and whistleblowers and raiding Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
In the meantime, FBI agents did the Black Lives Matter kneel in public and put out inaccurate crime statistics.
Mr. Patel’s congressional investigation, over 60 interviews and thousands of pages of documents provided him with a unique view of how the once-august bureau operates.
Mr. Patel’s federal resume includes stints as a Department of Justice prosecutor, senior intelligence and Pentagon official and Trump White House National Security Council staffer.
He told his story in a 2023 book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” which displays a dramatic cover photo of Mr. Patel exiting Mr. Trump’s Marine One.
The book begins innocently enough.
“I’m just a guy from Queens and Long Island with the same story as so many others,” he writes. “I didn’t have some special upbringing or education. My parents aren’t rich or famous. They’re just a couple of working-class immigrants from India.”
But he quickly gets to the point.
“The Nunes Memo and [House committee] documents later revealed that the Deep State conducted an unprecedented spying operation against the Trump campaign in an apparent effort to tarnish Trump’s reputation and derail his election,” he writes.
He adds, “The FBI knew about Steele’s bias and that the Clinton campaign and the [Democratic National Committee] had paid for the dossier at the time they submitted their FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page, but they never told the FISA judge either of these facts, as was required by law.”
As the 2016 election approached, the FBI realized it had nothing to leak after opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Mr. Trump that summer.
“In my opinion,” Mr. Patel writes, “the FBI agents behind Crossfire Hurricane must have been getting nervous as the 2016 campaign came to a close. They launched a FISA warrant based on the Democrat Steele Dossier, sicced an FBI informant on a Trump campaign official, doctored evidence, hid exculpatory information, spied on the Trump campaign, and buttressed their case with drunken tavern talk. Yet despite all that, the FBI’s investigation was coming up with nothing. Nobody in the Trump campaign was found coordinating with the Russians.”
The “drunken tavern talk” refers to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling a Department of State official that he shared a drink with Trump volunteer George Papadopoulos, who supposedly said something incriminating about Russia, which he later denied.
This hearsay tidbit was enough for the aforementioned Mr. McCabe, who was then FBI deputy director.
In a list of egregious FBI acts later documented by special counsel John Durham, his report singled out this McCabe gambit as one of the worst.
On July 31, 2016, a momentous date in sordid FBI history, Mr. McCabe ordered Mr. Strzok to open a full investigation of Trump world immediately, the Durham report states. (A week later, Mr. Strzok texted his girlfriend that “we’ll stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president.)
“The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information,” Mr. Durham said. “Further, the FBI did so without any significant review of its own intelligence databases, collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.”
When hearing of Mr. Patel’s nomination, Mr. McCabe rushed to his employer, CNN, to express his disgust at Mr. Trump’s choice, which he described as horrible, unthinkable and conniving.
Stay tuned. 2025 will be a lot like 2017.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.