Latvia 🇱🇻 and Germany 🇩🇪 🧸👀
Baguettes w/ 117 tag
https://www.senate.gov/
Russia hands married couple long jail terms for spying for Latvia
4 days ago
MOSCOW, Dec 24 (Reuters) - A Russian court sentenced a married couple in the Kaliningrad region to long jail terms on Thursday after finding them guilty of spying for Latvia, the FSB security service said, saying the pair had been found guilty of state treason.
The wife, Antonina Zimina, who received 13 years, was recruited by Latvia's security services in 2012 while travelling abroad, the FSB said in a statement. She then started to gather classified information and hand it over to Latvia, it said.
Her husband, Konstantin Antonets, got 12.5 years in jail. The FSB said Antonets had been recruited as a spy by his wife in 2015 and had stolen information from his then employer the Kaliningrad region's economics ministry and passed it over to Latvia.
The couple denied any wrongdoing and will appeal the verdict, their lawyer, Mikhail Bayev, told the MBKH online news site.
Their case, which was held behind closed doors, has previously made headlines in Russia with reports that state prosecutors had accused them of sharing a photograph with Latvia of an FSB officer who had attended their wedding.
There was no mention of that alleged incident in the FSB's statement on Thursday.
Kaliningrad is a heavily militarised Russian region that lies on the Baltic Sea between EU members Lithuania and Poland. Moscow captured the region from Germany towards the end of World War Two.
http://www.msn.com/en-xl/europe/top-stories/russia-hands-married-couple-long-jail-terms-for-spying-for-latvia/ar-BB1cdZfm
CIA director won’t be the most important intelligence official in the Biden administration. That’s going to be Avril Haines, whom Biden has tapped as the first woman to be director of national intelligence (DNI).
The relationship between the director of national intelligence and the CIA director has varied under each of the three administrations since Congress created the DNI position in 2004. The law establishing it gives the director more prestige than budgetary power or chain-of-command authority. That’s rendered its importance a function of whatever a given president wants. The Biden camp considers the director of national intelligence to be more properly the leader of the intelligence agencies than a coordinator among them. And with Haines, Biden will have a DNI he’s worked with for over a decade.
Cohen “has a very good relationship with Avril Haines,” said the ex-Trump senior official. “I think that makes for a very good start for the administration.”
While Cohen is neither a CIA lifer nor a Democratic powerbroker—typical choices for Democratic presidents to send to Langley—he also isn’t a dark horse candidate.
Cohen, an attorney by training, was an architect of the infamous 2001 PATRIOT Act while at the Treasury Department’s legal-counsel office. The provision he crafted, however, had to do with increasing reporting requirements for banks against money laundering, rather than its intrusive surveillance and policing measures. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Cohen spent five years at the Treasury tracking and combating financial networks that facilitate terrorism or evade economic sanctions.
Cohen was one of the architects of the Obama administration’s economic strangulation of Iran. Tony Blinken, now Biden’s choice for secretary of state, told The New York Times in 2014 that without Cohen’s “relentless efforts we would not be where we are in terms of getting the Iranians to the negotiating table with the chance of reaching a diplomatic solution.” Cohen, in a speech that year, called for the Iran sanctions “carefully designed and customized to maximize pressure” and hailed them for “imped[ing] Iran’s ability to acquire material for its nuclear program, isolat[ing] it from the international financial system, drastically slash[ing] its oil exports, and depriv[ing] it of access to a sizeable portion of its oil revenues and foreign reserves.” Cohen also had the gargantuan task of harming the so-called Islamic State’s wallet at a time when it commanded oil assets worth $1 million per day. The Obama people called Cohen their “financial Batman.”
He moved to the CIA in early 2015 to succeed Haines as deputy director. It was a delicate time at Langley. Haines had been involved in limiting the declassification of the Senate torture report and in absolving CIA officials who spied on Senate investigators. Cohen had no such baggage as the agency sought to repair its relationship with its Senate overseers. But a former agency official told Yahoo News’ Jenna McLaughlin that Cohen was “fully involved in the drone program.”
Outside Cohen’s work in financial intelligence, he’s perhaps best known in intelligence circles for implementing an internally controversial reorganization to make the CIA more digitally fluent. And outside of intelligence circles in general, he’s perhaps best known as a Game of Thrones extra.
More recently, Cohen has been among the dozens of Obama administration veterans working at the WestExec Advisors corporate consultancy. That company’s alumni include two people slated to be among Biden’s most powerful cabinet officials: Blinken and Haines. Along with Haines and Morell, Cohen lent public support to the nomination of Gina Haspel, the current CIA director who is implicated in post-9/11 torture.
Out of office, Cohen has warned opponents of the Iran nuclear deal and advocates of overthrowing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro that they won’t be able to sanction their way to regime change. Along with Haines and Morell, Cohen wrote a scathing piece in April about Trump’s politicization of the intelligence agencies, something that will be an immediate concern for the next DNI and CIA director.
Their article contained an implicit rebuke of Haspel, whom they all supported: “Not a single intelligence community leader said a word publicly when [Trump ally and] former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova attacked the whistleblower who prompted impeachment proceedings as a presidential assassin, the equivalent, he said, of John Wilkes Booth… their silence sent its own message to the intelligence workforce regarding their willingness to appease the president.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/david-s-cohen-financial-batman-in-the-lead-to-run-bidens-cia
President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers.
“I started seeing things that were not correct, so I did my own little investigation, because I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was correct” she said. “You never want to draw attention to something if there is not anything there.”
The whistleblower said she only saw metadata, that is names and dates when the general’s financial records were accessed. “I never saw what they saw.”
By March 2016, the whistleblower said she and a colleague, who was detailed to Treasury from the intelligence community, became convinced that the surveillance of Flynn was not tied to legitimate criminal or national security concerns, but was straight-up political surveillance among other illegal activity occurring at Treasury.
“When I showed it to her, what she said, ‘Oh, sh%t!’ and I knew right then and there that I was right – this was some shady stuff,” the whistleblower said.
“It wasn’t just him,” the whistleblower said. “They were targeting other U.S. citizens, as well.”
Only two names are listed in the whistleblower’s official paperwork, so the others must remain sealed, she said. The second name is Paul J. Manafort Jr., the one-time chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The other names include: Members of Congress, the most senior staffers on the 2016 Trump campaign and members of Trump’s family, she said.
“Another thing they would do is take targeted names from a certain database – I cannot name, but you can guess – and they were going over to an unclassified database and they were running those names in the unclassified database,” she said.
This ruse was to get around using classified resources to surveil Americans, she said. Once the Treasury personnel had enough information about someone they were targeting from the black box, they would go to the white box for faster and more informed search.
Complaint filed with Treasury Inspector General
In March 2017, she filed a formal whistleblower complaint with Acting Treasury Inspector General Richard K. Delmar, who continues in that office today, she said. Beyond Delmar acknowledging receipt of the complaint, the inspector general never followed up on the matter.
This formal complaint was a follow-up to an August 2016 notification to Delmar that did not meet the full requirements of formal complaint, but it provided Delmar with the details of Treasury’s surveillance of Flynn, she said.
The whistleblower filed a subsequent complaint with the Office of Special Counsel May 2017, which is the permanent office established to work with whistleblowers and is not related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
This surveillance program was run out of Treasury’s Office of Intelligence Analysis, which was then under the leadership of S. Leslie Ireland. Ireland came to OIA in 2010 after a long tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency and a one-year stint as Obama’s daily in-person intelligence briefer.
The whistleblower said Treasury should never have been part of the unmasking of Flynn, because its surveillance operation was off-the-books. That is to say, the Justice Department never gave the required approval to the Treasury program, and so there were no guidelines, approvals nor reports that would be associated with a DOJ-sanctioned domestic surveillance operation.
“Accessing this information without approved and signed attorney general guidelines would violate U.S. persons constitutional rights and civil liberties,” she said.
“IC agencies have to adhere to Executive Order 12333, or as it is known in the community: E.O. 12-Triple-Three. Just because OIA does not have signed guidelines does not give them the power or right to operate as they want, if you want information on a U.S. person then work with the FBI on a Title III, if it is a U.S. person involved with a foreign entity then follow the correct process for a FISA, but without signed AG guidelines you cannot even get started,” she said. Title III refers to the FBI authority to electronically surveil Americans.
Top Obama Treasury officials among those who unmasked Flynn
Because the intercepts from Flynn’s Dec. 29, 2016 phone call with the Russian ambassador Sergei were captured by an entity other than Treasury, Patrick Conlon, the OIA director, who succeeded Ireland, was on the list of 37 Obama administration officials who either requested that Flynn’s name be unmasked or were shown the unmasked surveillance product.
Conlon accessed the Flynn file Dec. 14, 2016.
There must have been some kind of meeting that day. These are all of the other Treasury Department officials looking at Flynn that day: Secretary Jacob Lew, Acting Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis A. Daniel “Danny” McGlynn, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Michael Neufeld, Deputy Secretary Sarah Raskin, Under Secretary Nathan Sheets and Acting Under Secretary Adam Szubin.
Lew is the only one who made the list again, this time Jan. 12, 2017 – and if his deputy’s name sounds familiar, Raskin is the wife of Rep. Jamin B. “Jamie” Raskin (D.-Md.), one of the House Prosecutors, who argued for the removal of Trump after his impeachment. The congressman’s wife was also an Obama-appointed Federal Reserve governor.
https://tennesseestar.com/2020/05/18/exclusive-the-treasury-department-spied-on-flynn-manafort-and-the-trump-family-says-whistleblower/
Don’t kidnap the taxman, dethrone your local reps though
Seems like the forte drone isn’t needed rn and now we balls deep