Majorityrights News > Category: Military Matters

It was quite picky on its target. It went through several checks and when those checks failed, it would not implement the attack. It was obviously probing for a very specific target…you have to put this in context - this was the most sophisticated piece of malware that we have ever seen. So, its kind of strange that someone makes this huge effort to hit one specific target…well, that must be quite a significant target:

Whoever was behind Stuxnet hasn’t admitted they were behind it.

Even after the cyberweapon had penetrated computers all over the world, no one was willing to admit that it was loose, or talk about the dangers that it posed.

Stuxnet first surfaced with a Belarusian security company servicing Iran.

“Had you ever seen anything quite so sophisticated before?”

“Not with this kind of ‘zero-day’ capacity…......... it was the first time in my practice.”

... a third kind of hactivist is sponsored by state governments…

It went beyond our worst fears… our worst nightmares ..and this continued the more we analyzed….

The first time we opened up Stuxnet there was just bad things everywhere.

Just to give you some context, we can go through and understand every line of code for the average threat in minutes… and here we are one month into this threat and we are just beginning to discover what we call its payload, or its whole purpose…

When looking at the Stuxnet code, its twenty times the size of the average piece of code but contains almost no bugs inside of it, which is extremely rare, code always has bugs inside of it. It’s dense and everything does something or does something right in order to conduct its attack.

One of the things that surprised us was that Stuxnet utilized what is called a zero day exploit.

...its a piece of code allows it to spread without you having to do anything…

A zero day is an exploit which nobody knows about except for the attacker; so there’s no protection against it, there’s been no patch released.

There’s been zero days protection against it. That’s what attackers value because they know 100 percent that if they have this zero day that they can get in whenever they want

They’re actually very valuable - you can sell them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then we became worried because immediately we discovered we had more zero days, and again, these zero days are extremely rare.

Inside Stuxnet we had four zero days, and for the entire rest of the year we only saw twelve zero days used.

It blows everything else out of the water ..we’ve never seen this before and never seen it since, either.

Seeing one in a malware you could understand because the malware offers a means to make money, they’re stealing people’s credit cards so its worth their while to use it, but seeing four zero days…could be worth half a million dollars right there in one piece of malware ..this is not your ordinary criminal gang doing this, this is someone bigger.

It’s definitely not traditional crime. Not hacktivists.

It was evident early on, just given the sophistication of this malware that there must have been a nation state involved - at least one nation state involved in the development.

However, there were “breadcrumbs” left…they had to have some human assets steal certificates, which they did, traceable from two companies in close proximity in a business park in Taiwan.

Eventually we were able to see that Iran was the number one infected country in the world.

That immediately raised our eyebrows.

...we’d never seen a threat before where it was predominantly in Iran.

So we began to follow what was going on in the geopolitical world, what was happening in the general news.

At that time there were actually multiple explosions of pipelines going in and out of Iran.

And we noticed that there had been assassinations of nuclear scientists

More breadcrumbs showed that Stuxnet was targeting Siemans progammable logic controllers.

The PLC is like a very small computer attached to physical equipment like pumps, like valves, like motors.

So, this little box is running a digital program and the actions of this program turns that motor on, off, or sets the specific speed.

They control things like power plants, power grids… things in factories… in critical infrastructure ...critical infrastructure is everywhere around us ...transportation, telecommunication, financial services, health care..

So the payload of Stuxnet was designed to attack some very important part of our world.

The payload was going to be very important..

We knew that Stuxnet could have very dire consequences.

Stuxnet caused the centrifuges (of Iranian nuclear reactors) to spin much faster (than programmed for, to the point where they would explode).

Middle East Monitor, “Palestinians discuss development of gas field with Shell”

In February of 2017, The Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) announced that it has been discussing the development of Gaza Marine Gas Field with Shell, Anadolu has reported.

Gaza Marine is about 30km off the coast of the Gaza Strip in the eastern Mediterranean; it is estimated to contain about 28 million cubic metres of gas.

British Gas bought the concession from the Palestinian Authority in 1999 but the development of the project has been on hold due to Israeli obstacles. Preventing the development of the project is part of the internationally-backed Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Shell bought the British Gas stake in Gaza Marine recently, and it is now the main developer of the field.

The Director of the PIF, Mohamed Mustafa, told Anadolu that the current discussions with Shell concentrate on accelerating the development of the project. He noted that there had been a study to connect a pipeline from the field to the sole electricity plant in Gaza. “The most important thing, though, is that we get Israel’s permission for this pipeline because it crosses its land,” he explained.

According to Offshore-technology.com, Shell holds a 90 per cent interest in the field. The stake will reduce to 60 per cent if the PIF and Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) decide to exercise their options. PIF and CCC would subsequently hold 30 per cent and 10 per cent interests respectively.

The PIF is a sovereign Palestinian fund with capital of $800 million.

Natural gas in the Gaza Strip, From Wikipedia:

Significant reserves of natural gas were found offshore from the Gaza Strip. As of early 2015, Gaza’s natural gas was still underwater and the same for almost all of the Levantine gas.[1]

History

The Palestinians signed a memorandum of intent on November 8, 1999 with British Gas and a company linked to the Palestinian Authority, the Consolidated Contractors Company, giving them rights to explore the area.[2][3] The discovered natural gas reserve was calculated to have 35 BCM, larger than Israel’s Yam Tethys maritime gas field.[3] It was found in two small gas fields dubbed Gaza Marine 1 and Gaza Marine 2.

In 1999, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak set aside exploration of Gaza’s offshore resources for a future Palestinian state, with no prior consultation with Israel stipulated.[2] According to Michael Schwartz, Barak deployed the Israeli navy in Gaza’s coastal waters to impede the implementation of the terms of the modest contract between the Palestinian Authority and British Gas (BG) to develop Gaza’s Mediterranean gas resources.[1] Israel demanded that the Gaza gas be piped to facilities on its territory, and at a price below the prevailing market level[4] and that Israel also control all the (relatively modest) revenues destined for the Palestinians — to prevent the money from being used to “fund terror.” In Schwartz’s view, with this Israeli action the Oslo Accords were officially doomed, because by declaring Palestinian control over gas revenues unacceptable, the Israeli government committed itself to not accepting even the most limited kind of Palestinian budgetary autonomy, let alone full sovereignty. In Schwartz’s view, since no Palestinian government or organization would agree to this, a future filled with armed conflict was assured.[1]

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Correction: I spoke too soon about Timothy Snyder being an anti-nationalist, and I did that in light of his estimation that Britain and France were not really nations while they were empires, that their “nationhoods” were creations of post hoc political convenience. Nevertheless, to say that he is against nationalism would not be correct, since in fact he sees the weak state and the destruction of the state as that which abets genocide.

Snyder’s characterology of how Putin’s and Trump’s positions have emerged in fairly conjoint construction is uncanny…

As such he does make of himself a useful idiot in that he exposes one side of the YKW equation - the specific origin and characters of their right wing cohorts, Putin and Trump.

Youtube, “A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Masha Gessen Talks Autocracy with Timothy Snyder”, 12 July 2017:
       
As his fellow Trump/Putin critic, (((Masha Gessen))) would suggest, we would miss the truth of these characters, more like mafia dons than statesmen, if we were to maintain a policy of sheer fact checking. Because essentially, they don’t care. They both have a cynical world view and it is about power - logical consistency is for the naive. By contrast to that, one must have the courage and confidence to tell the true story -

Youtube, “Chatham House Primer: Modern Authoritarianism”, 30 Oct 2017:

This guy, (Ivan) Ilyin, I think was a very interesting philosopher; he is kind of the grandfather of the current Russian “fascism.”  Current Russian “fascists” like Alexander Dugin are a little jealous of him and say that he just serves a technical function in the Kremlin and he’s not that interesting. I think he’s interesting. One of his ideas is that for Russia to have a leader, that person has to be free of history, which is a high demand.

He (Ilyin) was a right-wing Hegelian ...his whole idea was that god created the world and that was a mistake. It’s an interesting view, those of you who know anything about Orthodox theology know that there are references… god created the world, it was a mistake, the factuality of the world is itself sinful, history is itself sinful, contingency, to use the technical term, contingency is sinful, all these facts and passions we have, they’re inherently sinful.

So, in order for Russia to be rescued it has to be rescued by someone who is somehow clean of history.

It has to be a redeemer who comes from beyond history.

What I find so interesting is that this actually happened in a way.

The place that is not history is fiction.

When Mr. Putin came to power, Surkov and the others in the Kremlin literally had a kind of game and then a public opinion poll where they tried to figure out which Russian fictional character would be most attractive to Russians. They came up with this character (Max Otto von) Stierlitz, who was a double agent and a person in a novel, and in a film, in the 70’s, who was a Russian spy who spoke German. That’s why they chose Mr. Putin. So, he literally .. this true people! This is the world we live in. So he literally came from fiction.

Then you connect Mr. Putin to Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is Not a successful real estate developer! That never happened. Mr. Trump bankrupted six companies. He owed billions of dollars to, I think, seventy banks. Until, low and behold, some nice Russians came and said, ‘hey, why don’t you just put your name on some buildings and we’ll give you money for that, and we will build the buildings - which then became his business plan. Which is a great (((business plan))) if you can get it.

Rob Goldstone relaxing, chatting with Trump

The Miss Universe pageant. How did he run (((the Miss Universe pageant)))? The Russians gave him twenty million dollars and he showed up. Which is a great business plan if you can do it.

So, a fictional Russian character comes to power and then creates a fictional American character called Mr. Trump. This happened!

Once the Russians had bailed him out, he then appeared on American television, on celebrity apprentice, playing a successful real estate developer - which he never was.

But as a character, he was great, he could say, “you’re fired!” in a really convincing way.

So, one fictional character then creates another fictional character. And that fictional character also comes to power. ..with the help of all kinds of fictional devices, mostly delivered through the internet.  So there really is an interesting problem of (((genre))) going on in our life.

Shwe Eain Si, maintains vigilance on Islamic imposition, atrocities.

India Today reports on the forced conversion to Islam of Rakhine Hindus in the Bangladesh refugee camps and the discovery of Hindu mass graves in Rakhine by the Myanmar security services. This report dates from September and has gone unnoticed in the West. I found it as the latest entry on the Facebook account of Shwe Eain Si, so the girl obviously hasn’t given up the fight. Good for her.

                    - Mancinblack

A backlog of articles detailing the connection between Chabad-Lubavitch, Putin, the Russian Federation and Trump.

Politico, “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin”, 9 April 2017:

Where Trump’s real estate world meets a top religious ally of the Kremlin.

Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.

Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.

Their respective ambitions led the two men—along with Trump’s future son-in-law, Jared Kushner—to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.

Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”

A few years later, Trump would seek out Russian projects and capital by joining forces with a partnership called Bayrock-Sapir, led by Soviet emigres Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater and Tamir Sapir—who maintain close ties to Chabad. The company’s ventures would lead to multiple lawsuits alleging fraud and a criminal investigation of a condo project in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, the links between Trump and Chabad kept piling up. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter and Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. A few months after the ceremony, Leviev met Trump to discuss potential deals in Moscow and then hosted a bris for the new couple’s first son at the holiest site in Chabad Judaism. Trump attended the bris along with Kushner, who would go on to buy a $300 million building from Leviev and marry Ivanka Trump, who would form a close relationship with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova would host the power couple in Russia in 2014 and reportedly attend Trump’s inauguration as their guest.

With the help of this trans-Atlantic diaspora and some globetrotting real estate moguls, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Red Square can feel at times like part of the same tight-knit neighborhood. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office having proclaimed his desire to reorient the global order around improved U.S. relations with Putin’s government—and as the FBI probes the possibility of improper coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin—that small world has suddenly taken on outsize importance.

Trump’s kind of Jews

Founded in Lithuania in 1775, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement today has adherents numbering in the five, or perhaps six, figures. What the movement lacks in numbers it makes up for in enthusiasm, as it is known for practicing a particularly joyous form of Judaism.

Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, recalled having this trait impressed upon him during one family wedding at which the two tables occupied by his first cousins, Chabad rabbis, put the rest of the celebrants to shame. “They were dancing up a storm, these guys. I thought they were black. Instead they’re just black-hat,” Klein said, referring to their traditional Hasidic garb.

Despite its small size, Chabad has grown to become the most sprawling Jewish institution in the world, with a presence in over 1,000 far-flung cities, including locales like Kathmandu and Hanoi with few full-time Jewish residents. The movement is known for these outposts, called Chabad houses, which function as community centers and are open to all Jews. “Take any forsaken city in the world, you have a McDonald’s and a Chabad house,” explained Ronn Torossian, a Jewish public relations executive in New York.

Chabad adherents differ from other Hasidic Jews on numerous small points of custom, including the tendency of Chabad men to wear fedoras instead of fur hats. Many adherents believe that the movement’s last living leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, is the messiah, and some believe he is still alive. Chabad followers are also, according to Klein, “remarkable” fundraisers.

As the closest thing the Jewish world has to evangelism—much of its work is dedicated to making Jews around the world more involved in Judaism—Chabad serves many more Jews who are not full-on adherents.

According to Schmuley Boteach, a prominent rabbi in New Jersey and a longtime friend of Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, Chabad offers Jews a third way of relating to their religious identity. “You have three choices as a Jew,” he explained. “You can assimilate and not be very affiliated. You can be religious and Orthodox, or there’s sort of a third possibility that Chabad offers for people who don’t want to go the full Orthodox route but do want to stay on the traditional spectrum.”

This third way may explain the affinity Trump has found with a number of Chabad enthusiasts—Jews who shun liberal reform Judaism in favor of traditionalism but are not strictly devout.

“It’s not a surprise that Trump-minded people are involved with Chabad,” said Torossian. “Chabad is a place that tough, strong Jews feel comfortable. Chabad is a nonjudgmental place where people that are not traditional and not by-the-book feel comfortable.”

He summarized the Chabad attitude, which is less strict than the Orthodox one, as, “If you can’t keep all of the commandments, keep as many as you can.”

Torossian, who coincidentally said he is Sater’s friend and PR rep, also explained that this balance is particularly appealing to Jews from the former Soviet Union, who appreciate its combination of traditional trappings with a lenient attitude toward observance. “All Russian Jews go to Chabad,” he said. “Russian Jews are not comfortable in a reform synagogue.”

Putin’s kind of Jews

The Russian state’s embrace of Chabad happened, like many things in Putin’s Russia, as the result of a factional power struggle.

In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.

At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.

The Putin-Chabad alliance has reaped benefits for both sides. Under Putin, anti-Semitism has been officially discouraged, a break from centuries of discrimination and pogroms, and the government has come to embrace a state-sanctioned version of Jewish identity as a welcome part of the nation.

As Putin has consolidated his control of Russia, Lazar has come to be known derisively as “Putin’s rabbi.” He has escorted the Russian leader to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and attended the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, Putin’s pet project, on the Jewish Sabbath. Putin returned that favor by arranging for Lazar to enter the stadium without submitting to security checks that would have broken the rules for observing Shabbat.

In 2013, a $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow under the auspices of Chabad and with funding from Abramovich. Putin donated a month of his salary to the project, while the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, pitched in by offering relevant documents from its archives.

In 2014, Lazar was the only Jewish leader present at Putin’s triumphal announcement of the annexation of Crimea.

But the rabbi has paid a price for his loyalty to Putin. Since the annexation, his continued support for the Russian autocrat has caused a rift with Chabad leaders in Ukraine. And for years, the Russian government has defied an American court order to turn over a trove of Chabad texts called the “Schneerson Library” to the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Shortly after the opening of the tolerance museum, Putin ordered the collection transferred there instead. The move made Lazar the custodian of a prized collection that his Brooklyn comrades believe is rightfully theirs.

If Lazar has any qualms about his role in all the intra-Chabad drama, he hasn’t let on publicly. “Challenging the government is not the Jewish way,” the rabbi said in 2015.

Trump, Bayrock, Sapir

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, as Trump looked for business and investors in the former Soviet Union during the first years of this century, he struck up an enduring relationship with a firm called Bayrock-Sapir.

Bayrock was co-led by Felix Sater, a convicted mob associate.

Sater and another Bayrock employee, Daniel Ridloff, who like Sater later went on to work directly for the Trump Organization, belong to the Port Washington Chabad house. Sater told POLITICO Magazine that in addition to serving on the board of the Port Washington Chabad house, he sits on the boards of numerous Chabad entities in the U.S. and abroad, though none in Russia.

The extent of Sater’s ties to Trump is a matter of some dispute. Working out of Trump Tower, Sater partnered with the celebrity developer on numerous Trump-branded developments and scouted deals for him in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Sater escorted Trump’s children Ivanka and Don Jr. around Moscow to scour the city for potential projects, and he worked especially closely with Ivanka on the development of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium building in Manhattan whose construction was announced on “The Apprentice” in 2006.

In 2007, Sater’s stock fraud conviction became public. The revelation did not deter Trump, who brought him on as “a senior advisor to the Trump Organization” in 2010. In 2011, a number of purchasers of Trump SoHo units sued Trump and his partners for fraud and the New York attorney general’s office opened a criminal inquiry into the building’s marketing. But the purchasers settled and agreed not to cooperate with the criminal investigation, which was subsequently scuttled, according to the New York Times. Two former executives are suing Bayrock alleging tax evasion, money laundering, racketeering, bribery, extortion and fraud.

Under oath, Sater has described a close relationship with the Trumps, while Trump has testified under oath that he barely knew Sater and would not be able to pick his face out in a crowd. Several people who worked closely with Sater during this period and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation from both men, scoffed at Trump’s testimony, describing frequent meetings and near-constant phone calls between the two. One person recalled numerous occasions on which Trump and Sater dined together, including at the now-defunct Kiss & Fly in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

“Trump called Felix like every other day to his office. So the fact that he’s saying he doesn’t know him, that’s a lot of crap,” said a former Sater colleague. “They were definitely in contact always. They spoke on the phone all the time.”

In 2014, the Port Washington Chabad house named Sater its “man of the year.” At the ceremony honoring Sater, the chabad’s founder, Shalom Paltiel, recounted how Sater would spill his guts to him about his adventures working as a government cooperator on sensitive matters of national security.

“I only recently told Felix I really didn’t believe most of it. I thought perhaps he watched too many James Bond movies, read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” said Paltiel at the ceremony. “Anyone who knows Felix knows he can tell a good story. I simply did not put too much credence to them.”

But Paltiel went on to recount receiving special clearance years later to accompany Sater to a ceremony at the federal building in Manhattan. There, said Paltiel, officials from every American intelligence agency applauded Sater’s secret work and divulged “stuff that was more fantastic, and more unbelievable, than anything he had been telling me.” A video of the event honoring Sater has been removed from the Port Washington Chabad house’s website but is still available on YouTube.

When I contacted Paltiel for this article, he hung up the phone as soon as I introduced myself. I wanted to ask him about some of the connections I’d come across in the course of my reporting. In addition to his relationship with Sater, Paltiel is also close to “Putin’s rabbi” Lazar, calling Lazar “my dear friend and mentor” in a short note about running into him at Schneerson’s gravesite in Queens.

According to Boteach, this is unsurprising, because Chabad is the sort of community where everybody knows everybody else. “In the world of Chabad, we all went to Yeshiva together, we were all ordained together,” Boteach explained. “I knew Berel Lazar from yeshiva.”

The Port Washington Chabad house has another Bayrock tie. Among its top 13 benefactors, its “Chai Circle,” as listed on its website, is Sater’s partner, Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif.

Arif, a former Soviet bureaucrat turned wealthy real estate developer, owns a mansion in Port Washington, an upscale suburb, but he makes a curious patron for the town’s Chabad. A Kazakh-born citizen of Turkey with a Muslim name, Arif is not Jewish, according to people who have worked with him. In 2010, he was arrested in a raid on a yacht in Turkey that once belonged to the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, and charged with running an international underage prostitution ring. Arif was later cleared of the charges.

Before the scandal on Ataturk’s yacht, Arif partnered closely with Trump, Ivanka Trump and Sater in the development of Trump SoHo along with the Sapir family, a New York real estate dynasty and the other half of Bayrock-Sapir.

Its patriarch, the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.

Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.

Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.

Trump attended the bris. A month earlier, in May 2008, he and Leviev had met to discuss possible real estate projects in Moscow, according to a contemporaneous Russian news report. An undated photograph on a Pinterest account called LLD Diamond USA, the name of a firm registered to Leviev, shows Trump and Leviev shaking hands and smiling. (The photograph was first pointed out by Pacific Standard.)

That same year, Sapir, an active Chabad donor in his own right, joined Leviev in Berlin to tour Chabad institutions in the city.

Jared, Ivanka, Roman, Dasha

Also present at the Sapir-Rosen bris was Kushner, who along with his now-wife Ivanka Trump has forged his own set of ties to Putin’s Chabad allies. Kushner’s family, which is Modern Orthodox, has long been highly engaged in philanthropy across the Jewish world, including to Chabad entities, and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Kushner was active in the university’s Chabad house. Three days before the presidential election, the couple visited Schneerson’s grave and prayed for Trump. In January, the couple purchased a home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood and settled on the city’s nearby Chabad synagogue, known as TheSHUL of the Nation’s Capital, as their house of worship.

In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump are also close with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Abramovich, an industrialist worth more than $7 billion and the owner of the British soccer club Chelsea FC, is the former governor of the Russian province of Chukotka, where he is still revered as a hero. He owes his fortune to his triumphant emergence from Russia’s post-Soviet “aluminum wars,” in which more than 100 people are estimated to have died in fighting over control of aluminum refineries. Abramovich admitted in 2008 that he amassed his assets by paying billions of dollars in bribes. In 2011, his former business partner, the late Boris Berezovsky—an oligarch who had fallen out with Putin and gone on to live in exile at the Trump International on Central Park West—accused him of threats, blackmail and intimidation in a lawsuit in the United Kingdom, which Abramovich won.

Abramovich was reportedly the first person to recommend to Yeltsin that he choose Putin as his successor. In their 2004 biography of Abramovich, the British journalists Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgely write, “When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator.” The biographers compare the two men’s relationship to that between a father and a son and report that Abramovich personally interviewed candidates for Putin’s first cabinet. He has reportedly gifted Putin a $30 million yacht, though Putin denies it.

Abramovich’s vast business holdings and his personal life overlap with Trump’s world in multiple ways.

According to a 2012 report from researchers at Cornell University, Evraz, a firm partly owned by Abramovich, has contracts to provide 40 percent of the steel for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose completion was approved by Trump in March after years of delay. And in 2006, Abramovich purchased a large stake in the Russian oil giant Rosneft, a company now being scrutinized for its possible role in alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. Both Trump and the Kremlin have dismissed as “fake news” a dossier that alleges that a recent sale of Rosneft shares was part of a scheme to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia.

Meanwhile, his wife, Zhukova, has long traveled in the same social circles as Kushner and Ivanka Trump: She is a friend and business partner of Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, one of Ivanka’s closest friends, and a friend of Karlie Kloss, the longtime girlfriend of Kushner’s brother, Josh.

Over the years, Zhukova has grown close to Jared and Ivanka themselves. In February 2014, a month before Putin illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Ivanka Trump posted a photo to Instagram of herself with Zhukova, Wendi Deng, a bottle of wine, and the caption, “Thank you [Zhukova] for an unforgettable four days in Russia!” Deng was recently rumored to be dating Putin, though she denied it. Other photos from the trip show Kushner was also present in Russia at the time.

Last summer, Kushner and Ivanka Trump shared a box at the U.S. Open with Zhukova and Deng. In January, Zhukova reportedly attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka Trump’s guest.

On March 14, The Daily Mail spotted Josh Kushner dining with Zhukova in New York. According to the outlet, Josh Kushner “hid his face as he exited the eatery with Dasha.”

A week later, at the same time Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were vacationing in Aspen with her two brothers and their families, Abramovich’s plane flew from Moscow to Denver, according to a flight tracking service. Abramovich owns two properties in the Aspen area.

A spokesman for Abramovich declined to comment on the record about the Colorado overlap. The White House referred queries about the couples to a personal spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump. The spokeswoman, Risa Heller, initially indicated she would provide answers to questions about the Colorado overlap and recent contacts between the couples, but did not do so.

President Trump has reportedly sought security clearances for Kushner and Ivanka, who have taken on growing roles in his White House. For anyone else, a close personal relationship with the family of a top Putin confidant would present significant hurdles to obtaining security clearances, former high-ranking intelligence officials said, but political pressure to grant clearances to the president’s children would be likely to override any security concerns.

“Yes, such connections to Russia should matter for a clearance,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA Moscow station chief. “Question is, will they?”

“I don’t think the Trump family camp will have any trouble with security clearances, as long as there’s no polygraph involved,” said Milt Bearden, former chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division. “It’s absolutely crazy, but not going to be an issue.”

***

With Washington abuzz about the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump world’s relationship with Putin’s Kremlin, their overlapping networks remain the object of much scrutiny and fascination.

In March, the New York Times reported that Lazar had met last summer with the Trump administration’s special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, then a lawyer for the Trump Organization. The men characterized the meeting as a normal part of Greenblatt’s campaign outreach to Jewish leaders and said it included general discussion of Russian society and anti-Semitism. The meeting was brokered by New York PR rep Joshua Nass, and Lazar has said he did not discuss that meeting with the Russian government.

In late January, Sater met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to discuss a proposed Ukraine peace deal that would end U.S. sanctions on Russia, which Cohen then delivered to Trump’s then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House, according to the Times. Cohen has given varying accounts of the episode.

According to one Jewish Republican who said he sees Cohen “all the time” there, Cohen himself is a regular presence at the Midtown Chabad on Fifth Avenue, a dozen blocks south of Trump Tower and a half-dozen blocks south of his current office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Cohen disputed this, saying, “I’ve never been to a Chabad and I’ve never been to one in New York City either.” Cohen then said he last stepped foot in a Chabad over 15 years ago to attend a bris. He said the last Chabad-related event he attended was on March 16 at a hotel in Newark when he spoke at a dinner honoring Trump’s secretary of veterans affairs, David Shulkin. The dinner was hosted by the Rabbinical College of America, a Chabad organization.

To those unfamiliar with Russian politics, Trump’s world and Hasidic Judaism, all these Chabad links can appear confounding. Others simply greet them with a shrug.

“The interconnectedness of the Jewish world through Chabad is not surprising insofar as it’s one of the main Jewish players,” said Boteach. “I would assume that the world of New York real estate isn’t that huge either.”

Zionist Report, “COMMENTARY: Trump and Putin – Agents of Chabad-Lubavitch”, 28 Mar 2017:

Americans have given up on America a long time ago, and pretty soon they will get a real taste of their atrocious mistake. When countries don’t have what it takes to assume their responsibility, the result, without a doubt, is their own destruction.

“Trump and Putin: Agents of Chabad-Lubavitch”

The following is a section I wrote on November 7, 2016; it was part of an update titled Why the globalists will announce Trump as the winner of the election. I’m reposting it on this page because it contains information that is vital to your understanding of what’s really going in the world right now. So here goes…

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Breitbart, “Anti-Mass Migration Central European Nations Volunteer €35 Million To Reinforce EU Borders”, 15 Dec 2017:

The four central nations that comprise the Visegrad group (V4) have set aside 35 million euros to help European Union (EU) member states protect the political bloc’s external borders against illegal mass migration.

The four countries that make up the Visegrad group, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia, have all agreed to donate the money to protect the EU external border in an announcement this week. All four countries are attending a EU conference to discuss migration issues beginning Thursday AP reports.

Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico commented on the move saying, “if we will see good projects in the future, first of all, projects that are effective, we are ready to spend even more money because we really want to show solidarity.”

Mayor Laszlow discusses overwhelming success of Hungary’s border fence - “instituted because we’re ‘normal” - the fence cut migration to Hungary by 99%

Some of the countries in the V4 group have been accused of a lack of solidarity by some in EU leadership. The Hungarian government has been particularly critical of those in Brussels who have argued about solidarity.

Breitbart London @BreitbartLondon

EU Dismisses Hungarian Request for ‘Solidarity’ over Border Controls, ‘We Won’t Support Fences’http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/09/04/eu-dismisses-request-border-securitty/ 10:00 PM - Sep 4, 2017

EU Dismisses Hungarian Request for ‘Solidarity’ over Border Controls, ‘We Won’t Support Fences.’

Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs replied to the EU elites in September writing, “The distorted narrative that is spun from Brussels attempts to convince European citizens that somehow European solidarity should be connected to accepting migrants, many of whom have crossed illegally into the territory of the EU.”

Kovacs also argued that Hungary had funded EUR 883.2 million from its own budget in order to protect the EU external borders.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has consistently argued against mass migration, said Thursday that the new injection of cash will also go toward helping control illegal migration from Libya.

The EU, along with Italy have funnelled money into Libya to help train coastguard recruits and some allege that the Italians have even paid local warlords to stop the influx of migrants.

All four Visegrad group countries continue to refuse to participate in the EU’s migrant redistribution scheme with Prime Minister Fico noting, “Quotas do not work, they are ineffective, the decision on quotas really divided the European Union.”

A whistleblower has told House Democrats that eleven minutes into Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn [shown inset] was texting a former business associate to say, “we’re going to rip-up those (Russian) sanctions and a lot of people are going to make a lot of money.” Flynn specified that their private nuclear proposal which Flynn had lobbied for would have his support in the White House.

TampaBayTimes, “Whistleblower: Flynn texts broached nuclear plan, sanctions”, 6 Dec 2017:

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Donald Trump delivered his presidential inaugural address last January, his national security adviser Michael Flynn told a former business associate in text messages that a private plan to build nuclear reactors in the Mideast was “good to go” and that U.S. sanctions hobbling the plan would soon be “ripped up,” a whistleblower told congressional investigators.

The witness did not specify which sanctions Flynn was referring to in his texts. But the nuclear project that Flynn and his business associate had worked on together was stymied by U.S. financial sanctions on Russia.

The witness’s account, made public Wednesday by the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, raises new concerns about the extent to which Flynn may have blurred his private and public interests during his brief stint inside the White House.

Trump fired Flynn in February, saying he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, pleaded guilty in federal court last week to one count of making false statements to the FBI and is now a cooperating witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian intermediaries during the 2016 election.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday the whistleblower’s allegations raise concerns that Flynn improperly aided the nuclear project after joining the White House as one of Trump’s top national security officials. The project has yet to get off the ground.

Cummings detailed the whistleblower’s allegations in a letter to committee chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and urged Gowdy to authorize subpoenas to Flynn and his business associates to learn more about his efforts.

In a reply late Wednesday, Gowdy said he had shared Cummings’ letter with Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman and ranking Democrat heading the House intelligence committee inquiry into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Gowdy spurned Cummings’ request for subpoenas, echoing his replies to previous Cummings subpoena requests.

“If you have evidence of a crime, you should provide it to the Special Counsel immediately,” Gowdy wrote.

Flynn had been a paid consultant for the venture before he joined the Trump campaign last year. The plan, backed by a group of investors, nuclear power adherents and former U.S. military officers, was to construct dozens of nuclear reactors across the Mideast with aid from Russian and other international private interests.

House Democrats noted that a federal ethics law requires White House officials to refrain for a year from dealing with any outside interests they had previously worked with on private business.

“Our committee has credible allegations that President Trump’s national security adviser sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the financial gain of his former business partners,” Cummings said.

The whistleblower told House Democrats that while Trump spoke in January, Flynn texted from the Capitol steps to Alex Copson, the managing director of ACU Strategic Partners and the nuclear project’s main promoter. The whistleblower, whose identity was not revealed in Cummings’ letter, said that during a conversation, Copson described his messages with Flynn and briefly flashed one of the texts, which appeared to have been sent 10 minutes after Trump was sworn in as president.

“Mike has been putting everything in place for us,” Copson said, according to the whistleblower. Copson added that “this is going to make a lot of very wealthy people.” The whistleblower also said that Copson intimated that Flynn would ensure that U.S. financial sanctions hobbling the nuclear project were going to be “ripped up,” allowing investment money to start flowing into the project.

Attorneys for Flynn and Copson did not immediately return email and phone requests for comment. White House lawyer Ty Cobb declined to comment on the allegation.

In Flynn’s plea agreement last week, prosecutors said he lied to FBI agents about his discussions on sanctions against Russia with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition.

Copson had promoted a succession of nuclear projects designed to include Russian participation dating back to the 1990s. In an earlier note to the committee, Copson said his firm had provided Flynn with a $25,000 check — left uncashed — and paid for Flynn’s June 2015 trip to the Mideast as a security consultant for the project.

Flynn’s financial disclosure did not cite those payments, but he did report that until December 2016, he worked as an adviser to two other companies that partnered with Copson’s firm. That consortium, X-Co Dynamics Inc. and Iron Bridge Group, initially worked with ACU but later pushed a separate nuclear proposal for the Mideast.

___

Associated Press writers Chad Day and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

NewsWeek, “Flynn’s Secret Text Messages Show Trump Colluded With Russia, Experts Say”, 6 Dec 2017:

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, told a former business partner that economic sanctions against Russia would be “ripped up” as soon as Donald Trump took office, according to an anonymous whistleblower.

The revelation is the latest evidence suggesting the Trump campaign may have agreed to help Russia in exchange for Russia’s help getting Trump elected president, experts say.

Special counsel Robert Mueller had already secured Flynn’s cooperation in his investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, and Wednesday’s revelation publicly provides new evidence that will embolden Trump critics, experts say.

“It won’t come as a surprise to the special counsel, but it reveals to the public that there was something in the nature of an exchange or quid pro quo,” Lisa Griffin, a law professor at Duke University, told Newsweek.

“There are at least four potential avenues of criminality that the special counsel and others are exploring, and this provides more circumstantial evidence,” Griffin continued. “This might be relevant to the possibility of a bribery case, or assistance with the campaign that was done in exchange for what the Russians want most: the easing of sanctions.”

Whistleblower: Flynn was doing private Russia-related business on his phone during Trump’s inauguration speech https://lnkd.in/d2STwWp
7:52 PM - Dec 6, 2017

Flynn Was Conducting Private Russia-Related Business on His Phone During Trump’s Inauguration Speech, Whistleblower Tells Congress.

Flynn pleaded guilty last week to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador at the time, including speaking with him about U.S. sanctions against Russia. Flynn is known to have maintained close business ties with people in Russia and Turkey.

According to the whistleblower, Flynn also wanted U.S. sanctions against Russia lifted in order to complete an international energy project he was working on. The whistleblower said Flynn texted his former business associate on the day of Trump’s inauguration to say that the project was “good to go.”

The information was given to Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who published an open letter on Wednesday to the committee’s chairman, Trey Gowdy, explaining the revelations.

“General Michael Flynn—within minutes of Donald Trump being sworn in as president—was communicating directly with his former business colleagues about their plans to work with Russia to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East,” the letter reads.

“Our committee has credible allegations that President Trump’s national security advisor sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the
financial gain of his former business partners,” Cummings continued. “These grave allegations compel a full, credible and bipartisan congressional investigation.”

Flynn Was Conducting Private Russia-Related Business on His Phone During Trump’s Inauguration Speech, Whistleblower Tells Congress.

The revelation is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date that the Trump administration wanted to cancel U.S. sanctions against Russia, and it sheds light on why Flynn originally lied about his conversation with the Russian ambassador, a former Watergate prosecutor says.

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Offendedamerica, “For Jews, Supporting Trump is a Moral Imperative”, 27 Nov 2017:

By Jacob Wohl

Spread the Truth

Donald Trump is the first Zionist President.

Trump is as close as we have ever come to having the first Jewish President.

President Trump understands that the duty to protect Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State is a moral one. Uniquely, Trump understands that there are good guys and bad guys in the Middle East, and Israeli’s are inarguably the good guys.

Previous presidents were perfectly happy to support Israel insofar as that support furthered the advancement of America’s national security and intelligence complexes. The problem, of course, is that previous presidents approached support for Israel amorally, and in many cases, immorally.

Under previous US Presidents, the US Government was willing to stand by as the UN, or as they now like to be called, the “International Community”, leveled one abusive measure after another against the Israel. When the United Nations passed a resolution saying “Zionism is a form of Racism”, they showed clearly what side the “International Community” is on.

Even though the International Community has shown their collective moral compass to be dubious at best, Obama fetishized them in a way that the world could never have imagined. Obama idolized the same “International Community” that gives Iran, a nation whose state policy is Holocaust Denial, a seat at the table.

By contrast on October 12, Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from UNESCO after years of UNESCO (and the UN at-large) demonstrating clear anti-America and anti-Israel bias.

Regardless of Barack Obama’s religious affiliations, which remained in question throughout his presidency, his intellectual affiliations remained clear. Obama was a disciple of Noam Chomsky, William Kunstler and Andrew Cockburn. Obama’s Harvard sensibilities lead him down the path of becoming an anti-Israel social justice crusader from a very young age.

While Trump’s support from non-practicing Jews remains anemic, he is overwhelmingly supported by Orthodox Jews. According to a survey by the American Jewish Committee, fifty-four percent of Orthodox Jews say that they voted for Trump. For reference, Clinton garnered just 13% of the Orthodox vote while receiving 78% of the Reform vote. Trump doesn’t just win with Evangelical Christians, he wins with religious people at-large.

On the roster of world leaders, Trump is in a class of his own when it comes to defending Israel in moral terms, rather than in dry, pragmatic terms of US regional interests. Trump understands the fact that Israel has no morally equivalent adversary, and he defends the historical record that clearly makes Israel the rightful land of the Jewish people.

Perhaps president Trump’s empathy for Israel and the Jewish people extends from his rather unique position as the first President to have a daughter and son-in-law who are Orthodox Jews. Perhaps his empathy for Israel and the Jewish people extends from his own devout Christian heritage and understanding that Jews are God’s chosen people. Wherever the roots of Trump’s ideology come from, his position is clear.

President Trump understands the eternal struggle for survival of the Jewish people, while also understanding the eternal struggle of members of the Arab world, who wish to eliminate them.

President Trump unconditionally supports Israel and the Jewish people.

As Jews, we owe it to him to reciprocate.

Offendedamerica, “Trump is Crushing the Left’s Social Orthodoxy”, 13 Oct 2017:

Jacob Wohl

Spread the Truth

President Trump’s speech this morning to the 2017 Values Voters Summit was a bolt of lightning to the gatekeepers of the left’s social orthodoxy. President Trump enumerated his unapologetic appreciation for old-school values.

Liberals were horrified, and described the speech as “turning back the clock”. They were horrified at the idea that Trump may bring us back to an era where political correctness is considered a nuisance, not a necessity. An era of decency, where women are women, and men are men.

The left is terrified that Trump may turn back the social clock to a time when the term “lady-like” wasn’t considered a sexist epithet, but rather a trait in women that is admirable. They’re terrified that Trump may usher in an era where a man opening the door for a woman isn’t considered sexism (for assuming she cannot open it herself), but instead is revered as decent.

The left looks at the Trump years as a new Dark Ages. A horrible time where the “stupid conservatives” think that more nurses are women than are men, because women make better nurses, not because they were forced to become nurses by the subconscious collective patriarchy.

The left knows that Trump’s supporters participate in dangerous practices such as enrolling their sons in the Boy Scouts, while only allowing their daughters to join the Girl Scouts.

The left is worried sick that Trump’s moral leadership may create an untenable environment where test scores are decided based on how many questions you answer correctly, regardless of your race.

The left is in a state of panic that doctors may again use the term “mentally ill”, instead of “gender confused”.

Most of all, the left is worried that the Pledge of Allegiance will be again be considered a mandatory show of patriotism, rather than a burdensome imposition of “White Privilege”.

So far, the evidence suggests that all of the these fears by the left are becoming a reality.

President Trump is ending Affirmative Action, while protecting homeschooling. He’s saying Merry Christmas, while removing the government mandate for churches to fund abortions. He’s conspicuously protecting Israel while mercilessly killing Islamic terrorists, all the while neglecting to give tortured, excuse-laden explanations why people turn to Islamic extremism.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, your president believes in the Constitution, he believes in Judeo-Christian values and he believes in American Exceptionalism. While those in the media and on the far-left look at this new reality as the most dire crisis of our time, most Americans are celebrating it.