Just a month ago, we had a brief update on the saga of Matt Gaetz’s good friend Joel Greenberg, specifically that investigators had uncovered a lot more than they’d expected. It’s looking now that it involves members of the Florida Republican establishment, the Florida mob (but I repeat myself), and shady Russian spooks.
Gaetz ally Joel Greenberg is giving investigators new information, prosecutors say
At a brief hearing in Orlando federal court Monday, Roger Handberg, an assistant US attorney, said that Greenberg has made allegations to investigators that "take us to some places we did not anticipate."
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Handberg called the need for a second delay "unusual" but added the department was in an "unusual situation given the number of different investigations and lines of investigation we are pursuing."
One of those lines led directly to a couple of crooks named Keith Ingersoll and James Adamczyk. A forensic audit of the Seminole County Tax Collector’s office had uncovered mysterious payments to one of Ingersoll’s companies, as well as the purchase of a former bank building which had been flipped by Adamczyk for a $260,000 profit.
Looking deeper, the feds have uncovered a joint fraud perpetrated by Ingersoll and Adamcyzk, plus at least one other co-conspirator who has since died. The two have now been indicted [pdf] for wire fraud, conspiracy, and other charges related to a scheme in which they convinced some idiot to give them millions of dollars for alleged deposits on bogus real estate deals. They convinced their mark, since at east early 2016, to repeatedly wire huge amounts (like, $1 million at a time) to a “lawyer” (who’d lost his license in 2008) to hold in escrow towards the purchase of real estate in Florida, Nebraska, and the Bahamas. They’d promised the victim 9% interest plus unspecified earnings on the profit of resale of the properties.
After the “lawyer” died, Adamczyk then took on that role himself. The pair forged real estate contracts and made up the identities of both sellers and buyers in a bid to keep their victim mollified. However, when s/he began to become nervous and demanded repayment, the pair stalled by claiming that Adamczyk had contracted Covid and could not leave Costa Rica. The pair scammed some $12 million in all.
But there’s a lot more there there.
Ingersoll was also involved, with his good friend Aaron (Chris) Miller, in a dodgy crypto currency affair that leads to a whole bunch of other shitbags. (Ingersoll was fired from the Belle Isle (FL) Police Dept. in 2012 after he was rolled up in a felony warrant raid by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office against Miller, who has quite a long rap sheet.) Pretty much everyone involved is super-creepy, and there’s reason to believe that it goes well beyond just the usual grift. Because republicans and their money-grubbing inevitably attract Russian spooks.
These are really serious charges, and it’s clear that these guys are connected to a lot of other shady business. It’s possible that investigators are looking into other things that these two were involved with, and that this rather self-contained indictment will be used to bully them to give up others.
I won’t go over it all here because it’s a very deep rabbit hole. Instead, I’ll post these two threads from open source investigator extraordinaire @gal_suburban — who never ceases to surprise me. For those looking to keep abreast of Gaetz-adjacent Florida sleaze, both her work and that of the Orlando Sentinel are not to be missed. (If you can stomach it. These are all people who fit in perfectly with the likes of Don jr. and his hideous girlfriend.)
One of the really interesting threads, though it may be destined to remain obscure involves Russian Intelligence. Because of course. We long ago came to understand that Putin’s spooks have put a lot of effort into getting close to shitbag republicans with more (other people’s) money than brains.
A figure at the heart of the crypto scam (although he denies involvement) is Mikhail Morgulis, a creepy emigré from the former Soviet Union and self-described spiritual scholar who runs something called the Spiritual Diplomacy Foundation, which purports to be about bringing Western Fundamentalist Christians closer to Eastern European dictators. Or something like that.
Unsurprisingly, his activities include co-opting Republicans, such as Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), who has been described by Morgulis as an adviser to his “foundation”. He’s also behind an organization of far-right shitbags called US-Ukraine Observer, which has attended elections in the Russian-occupied Donbas region and Belarus. Unsurprisingly, they’d given those elections very high marks.
One of Morgulis’s cohorts in US-Ukraine Observer, btw, is Frank Abarnathy, a Tennessee lawyer whose license had been (briefly) suspended [pdf] in 2002 after he was caught trying to steal an elderly client’s money by drawing up a Last Will that left it all to him. Only the best people.
Morgulis is also connected to Sergei Millian, head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce. The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Millian is an agent, if not an officer, of Russian Intelligence. Millian is once again in the news after the indictment of Igor Danchenko, who’d been one of Christopher Steele’s sources. Millian is suspected to have been involved, along with Oleg Deripaska, with conducting a disinformation campaign which suckered Steele. (Although the evidence for that remains understandably sketchy. Doc Wheeler has been covering it.)
It’s believed that Morgulis is a prime mover in support of RACC through the Russian diaspora inside the US. During the 2016 election campaign, Morgulis and Millian discussed organizing that diaspora to support Donald Trump.
And so it goes. Those of you who are disappointed that Gaetz himself has not been indicted should take heart that this investigation has proved to be leading to all kinds of scumbaggery. It’s clear that prosecutors have had to branch off. This in no way should suggest that Gaetz is in the clear.
Evidence that the church is penetrated by the KGB comes from my own experience as a KGB intelligence officer. Among other young officers, I was offered a place some years ago in the church's Spiritual Academy, a university that is attached to its headquarters in Zagorsk, outside Moscow. This special place in the academy (coming from a KGB quota and without the usual competitive entrance examination) offered a "splendid career" in the church hierarchy and substantial material benefits. I declined, but there was no shortage of volunteers.
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But the party couldn't be satisfied with that loose system of informers and agents. The informers couldn't be fully trusted. So the next step was penetration of the church by the most trusted KGB officers. This process started no later than the mid-'50s. The program was supervised by what's now known as the KGB's Fifth Directorate (responsible for ideology) with support from the Second Directorate (which handles counterintelligence). By the late 1980s, the church had been fully penetrated. The mirage was built.
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The penetration operation gives one more benefit to the KGB -- more specifically, to its First Chief Directorate, which is responsible for foreign intelligence. They have discovered that the church provides KGB officers with very attractive cover for espionage activities abroad. Their biggest complaint was that the number of clerical-cover positions available wasn't nearly enough for their needs.
Putting the KGB in a Cassock: Why Moscow is Infiltrating the Soviet Orthodox Church
Victor Sheymov (writing as Victor Orlov), Washington Post; July 17, 1988