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For those who dismiss the Steele Dossier as “fiction” … here are a few questions:
Do Russian Informants die over a “fiction”?
Do Russian ‘Leakers to the West’ get charged with Treason, over a “fiction”?
Afterall the Kremlin has left a trail of “dead Journalists” in its wake, for decades now.
How much more would an ‘Intel Source’ be judged ‘harshly’ on that sliding scale (of ‘unhelpful’ news).
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Did someone die because of the Steele dossier?
CBS News — Jan 9, 2018
[...]
Steele's dossier was published in full by Buzzfeed in January 2017 after being offered to numerous news outlets. And it has been speculated that Oleg Erovinkin, a former KGB general and chief of staff to Igor Sechin [CEO of Rosneft], was one of the primary sources for the document.
Sechin, the CEO of state-owned Russian oil giant Rosneft, plays a major role in the dossier, which accuses him of having secret meetings with Trump campaign officials as an intermediary of the Russian government. Erovinkin was found dead in his car in December 2016, according to Russian media. It was later claimed that he died of a heart attack.
Fusion GPS lawyer: Someone has already been killed over publication of Trump dossier
[...]
In closed-door testimony with the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Simpson was asked by investigators if Fusion GPS took steps to “assess the credibility” of sources used by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who compiled the dossier.
“Yes, but I’m not going to get into sourcing information,” Simpson replied.
Simpson then declined to answer a follow-up question. When asked why he was declining to answer, his attorney, Joshua Levy, said Simpson “wants to be very careful to protect his sources.”
“Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier, and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work,” Levy added
Was This Russian General Murdered Over the Steele Dossier?
by Amy Knight, TheDailyBeast — 01/23/2018
[...]
Of all the officials who serve under Putin, Sechin is the most powerful. Erovinkin, as chief administrator at Rosneft, was Sechin’s right-hand man and must have known everything about Sechin’s contacts with Americans. Those included the former head of ExxonMobil, now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. (Sechin once said he felt thwarted by U.S.-imposed sanctions that kept him from riding motorcycles in America with his friend Tillerson.)
More importantly, in terms of allegations made by the Steele dossier and currently the focus of multiple investigations in Washington, Erovinkin was in a position to keep track of contacts with Trump advisers in considerable detail.
Steele wrote in his dossier that “a Russian source close to Rosneft President [sic] Igor Sechin” had confided details of a secret July 2016 meeting in Moscow between Sechin and Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. The two had allegedly discussed bilateral energy cooperation between the United States and Russia, along with the lifting of Ukraine-related economic sanctions against Russia. As a quid pro quo, Sechin was said to have offered Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19 percent stake in Rosneft, which was due to be privatized. Page reportedly indicated that Trump, if elected president, would lift sanctions.
Here’s a few more details on that proposed Rosneft deal.
Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier
How the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump’s ties to Russia.
[...] Meanwhile, around the same time that Erovinkin died, Russian authorities charged a cybersecurity expert and two F.S.B. officers with treason.
In the spring of 2017, after eight weeks in hiding, Steele gave a brief statement to the media, announcing his intention of getting back to work. [...]
One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President.
[...]
As in most espionage cases, the details made public so far are incomplete, and some rumors in Moscow suggest that those arrested may be scapegoats in an internal power struggle over the hacking. Russian media reports link the charges to the disclosure of the Russian role in attacking state election boards, including the scanning of voter rolls in Arizona and Illinois, and do not mention the parallel attacks on the D.N.C. and the email of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.
[...]
The arrests, according to reports by the Russian newspaper Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, among others, were made in early December and amounted to a purge of the cyberwing of the F.S.B., the main Russian intelligence and security agency.
Those arrested by the agency’s internal affairs bureau included Sergei Mikhailov, a deputy director of the Center for Information Security, the agency’s computer security arm, and Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior researcher at a prominent Russian computer security company, Kaspersky Lab.
A nationalist publication, Tsargrad, and RBC, a respected business newspaper, identified on Friday a third suspect, Dmitry Dokuchayev.
[...]
This is Part Seven of a BuzzFeed News investigation. [concerning mysterious Russian Deaths]
Part One: Poison In The System
Part Two: From Russia With Blood
Part Three: The Man Who Knew Too Much
Part Four: The Secrets Of The Spy In The Bag
Part Five: Everyone Thinks He Was Whacked
Part Six: Holes In The Investigation
[...] In the wake of that attack [poisoning former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England], the British government has opened a review of all 14 suspicious deaths linked to Russia that a BuzzFeed News investigation exposed last year.
We should be reviewing these Russian efforts at “diplomatic persuasion” too.
They have “ways” of making you [not] talk.
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I wouldn’t trust the Kremlin — farther than we can ‘throw them’ … given their ‘mysterious’ track record:
Scott Simon, NPR.org — April 21, 2018
[...]
Journalism is a dangerous trade in Russia.
Dozens of Russian journalists have been murdered since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Glasnost Defense Foundation. They weren't covering shooting wars or riots but powerful Russian institutions. A surprising number have implausibly fallen or slipped to their deaths.
Funny how our “president” doesn’t share the same qualms — about “trusting Russia,” now isn’t it?
Ha … ha.
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