Конечная остановка

[tijd]

I expect these will be side by side in a lot of textbooks. pic.twitter.com/lyJEnKHJ7Z
- southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 14, 2021

Прошло четыре года с основания этого сообщества. Пришло время подводить итоги.

Цель достигнута только отчасти. С одной стороны, многое прояснилось, и нужно быть слепым, чтобы не замечать, что у пока еще президента Трампа " все дороги ведут к Путину". С другой стороны, многое остается в тумане, и неизвестно, прояснится ли в ближайшем будущем.

Расследование Мюллера прояснило детали российской спецоперации 2016 и задокументировало преступные попытки помешать этому расследованию, но в итоге эти попытки оказались успешными. Мюллер не стал расследовать денежный след и не смог прояснить связь Стоуна с Викиликс и связь Манафорта с Килимником. За то, что они держали язык за зубами, старые приятели Стоун и Манафорт были вознаграждены президентским помилованием от своего сообщника.

Trump rewarding Roger Stone for his silence by commuting his sentence makes me think about this:

Sen. Leahy: “Do you believe a president could lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient’s promise to not incriminate him?”

Bill Barr: “No. That would be a crime.” pic.twitter.com/5LN058AKM2
- Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 14, 2020

Во время утверждения в Сенате генпрокурора Барра, его спрашивали про эту ситуацию.

Senator Leahy: Do you believe a President could lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient's promise to not incriminate him?
Barr: No. That would be a crime.
https://www.congress.gov/116/chrg/CHRG-116shrg36846/CHRG-116shrg36846.htm

Отцы-основатели США дебатировали возможность подобной ситуации и решили, что в случае чего Конгресс сможет помешать злоупотреблению президентом права на помилование путем импичмента.

“The president ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself,” Mason warned. “If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection? The case of treason ought, at least, to be excepted.”
Madison had a ready answer. “There is one security in this case,” he said. “If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/21/the-president-himself-may-be-guilty-why-pardons-were-hotly-debated-by-founding-fathers/

Отчет Мюллера об этом упоминает, хотя и уклоняется от прямой рекомендации импичмента:

Congress has the authority to prohibit the corrupt use of “anything of value” to influence the testimony of another person in a judicial, congressional, or agency proceeding, - which would include the offer or promise of a pardon to induce a person to testify falsely or not to testify at all.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf



В январе 2001, в последний день своего президентства Бил Клинтон вызвал большой скандал помилованием миллиардера и патентованного жулика Марка Рича, который скрывался от американского правосудия в Швейцарии.

Редакционная статья New York Times:

Bill Clinton's last-minute pardon of Marc Rich, the shadowy commodities trader who fled to Switzerland in 1983 to avoid American justice, was a shocking abuse of presidential power and a reminder of why George W. Bush's vow to restore integrity to the Oval Office resonates with millions of Americans who otherwise disagree with the new president's politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/opinion/an-indefensible-pardon.html

Клинтон оправдывался тем, что руководствовался исключительно соображениями милосердия и не получал от этого помилования никакой личной выгоды.

"The suggestion that I granted the pardons because Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise, made political contributions and contributed to the Clinton library foundation is utterly false. There was absolutely no quid pro quo. Indeed, other friends and financial supporters sought pardons in cases which, after careful consideration based on the information available to me, I determined I could not grant.
In the last few months of my term, many, many people called, wrote or came up to me asking that I grant or at least consider granting clemency in various cases. These people included friends, family members, former spouses of applicants, supporters, acquaintances, Republican and Democratic members of Congress, journalists and total strangers. I believe that the president can and should listen to such requests, although they cannot determine his decision on the merits. There is only one prohibition: there can be no quid pro quo. And there certainly was not in this or any of the other pardons and commutations I granted."
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/18/opinion/my-reasons-for-the-pardons.html

Как позже стало известно, о помиловании Рича настойчиво просил Израиль.

With the help of attorney Jack Quinn, who had previously been a member of Clinton’s staff, Clinton received a request signed by Barak, Shimon Peres, Ehud Olmert (then mayor of Jerusalem), Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, Spanish King Juan Carlos and a number of leading members of the Jewish community in the U,S., Switzerland and the world of finance.
But it was then-Prime Minister Barak who, in addition to signing the request, also took action to convince Clinton to take the step. He held two persuasive discussions with the outgoing president, in which he applied a great deal of pressure on him to sign the pardon. In one conversation - according to social activist Eldad Yaniv, who was present in the next room - Barak shouted at Clinton, insisting that he approve the pardon. In addition there was also a conversation with Peres.
This is what Yaniv writes in his online book “U-Turn”: “[The pardon] could be important,” Barak shouted at Clinton. “Not only from the financial aspect, but also because he helped the Mossad in more than one instance.” Later, during the investigation of Bill Clinton, the U.S. authorities published the texts of the phone conversations between Clinton and Barak: Clinton said, “I know quite a few things about that. I just got a long memo and am working on it. It’s best that we not say much about that.” Barak replied: “OK, I understand. I’m not mentioning it in any place.”
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-jewish-billionaire-who-cost-hillary-her-presidency-1.5465414

“Donald Trump belongs in jail.”

Ex-FBI Director @Comey says while he “obviously believes” the president should be in jail, he doesn’t think “pursuing that is in the best interests of the American people”, adding Joe Biden should "consider" pardoning Donald Trump #Newsnight pic.twitter.com/RUghKyq5nW
- BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) January 13, 2021

После отставки Клинтона ФБР и федеральная прокуратура Нью-Йорка проводили расследование обстоятельств помилования Рича, но не обнаружили состава преступления. По совпадению как расследованием Рича, так и расследованием его помилования занимался Джеймс Коми, будущий директор ФБР.

When Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he brought the young Comey into the highly prestigious office, where from 1987 to 1993 he was in charge of the case against financier Marc Rich, who had fled the U.S. after being indicted for tax evasion and illegal dealings with Iran. In 1996, Comey served as deputy special counsel for the Senate Whitewater Committee and, later that year, became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. In 2002, he was named the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where his most widely known case resulted in putting lifestyle guru Martha Stewart behind bars for obstruction of justice and making false statements. As U.S. attorney for the Southern District, he also led a criminal investigation into Bill Clinton’s highly controversial pardon of Rich, which resulted in no prosecution. President George W. Bush then appointed him deputy attorney general, in 2003.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/james-comey-fbi-director-letter

ФБР опубликовало материалы расследования обстоятельств помилования Рича в ноябре 2016, за неделю до выборов и вскоре после печально известного " письма Коми".

FBI finally releases some records of its investigation into the Clinton Foundation https://t.co/ZAAhln4TcB
- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 1, 2016



Одной из стран, где Марк Рич оставил неизгладимый след, была молодая Российская Федерация. О том, как Рич учил русских воровать, писал Пол Хлебников, главный редактор русского издания Форбс, убитый неизвестными в 2004.

According to Klebnikov, Rich came into the picture around 1990, when the Soviet Union began to open up to outsiders.
“Governmental authority began to crumble. All these local Communist Party bosses got to strike deals on their own,” the author tells me.
Based in Switzerland, with its secretive banking laws, Rich was in a prime position to help Russia’s plunderers carry out their dirty work. Klebnikov reported that Rich dealt in oil, aluminum, zinc and other raw commodities.
“He’d strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company,” explains the author. “He’d say, ‘OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at 5 to 10 percent of the world market price.
“‘And in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'”
For at least two years, as the Soviet Union was in its death throes, Rich was that nation’s largest trader of aluminum and oil on a spot basis.
“He made a complete mint off of Russia,” says Klebnikov.
A former foreign-trade minister told the author that Rich instructed the robber-baron elite how to skirt the law by doing secret deals through shell companies and the like.
“Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment, and who made billions off these schemes themselves,” Klebnikov charges.
There were allegations at the time in the Russian press and elsewhere that Rich was aiding and abetting capital flight from the country, but he was never charged.
A widely read 1999 article in the foreign-policy journal The National Interest, written by ex-CIA officer and National Security Council staffer Fritz W. Ermarth, noted that, as far back as 1985, the KGB was engaged in the massive transfer of assets abroad via commodities trading through front companies.
“The program evolved into . . . avenues for squirreling away funds for the safe retirement or political comeback of embattled communist leaders,” Ermarth writes.
If Rich had anything to do with this, then he would have had a key role in making the world safe for nuclear-armed communist tyrants who were America’s greatest enemies.
Can U.S. intelligence files from the era establish a link between Rich and the transferred KGB billions? Congress should find out.
Rich’s profitable relationship with the Russians ended in 1993, when the monster he helped create turned on him. The Russian swindlers became so good at Rich’s game that they muscled him out of the action.
“Applying the lessons they learned from Marc Rich, they bankrupted Russia,” Klebnikov alleges. “As a result, you have a ruined economy, bankrupt government, and an impoverished population.”
https://nypost.com/2001/02/15/how-marc-helped-plunder-russia/

Why did Russia go wrong? How did Russians get such a warped conception of capitalism? Westerners pondering this mystery may find some answers by looking at the people who taught Russian businessmen what it means to be a capitalist.
One of their first and most important modern role models was Marc Rich. The fugitive American commodities trader -- most recently of Clinton pardon fame -- traded Soviet oil and aluminum for years. But he really hit his stride after 1989, when the Soviet Union began falling apart and corrupt Communist Party bosses and unscrupulous young traders from the Communist Youth League began staking their claims to Russia's most valuable assets.
Russian officials, including former trade minister Oleg Davydov, have asserted to me that Mr. Rich's companies set a bad example of how to set up shell companies in obscure offshore tax havens, how to open Swiss bank accounts, how to buy Russian commodities at the domestic price (5% or 10% of the world market price) and resell them abroad at a huge profit. Mr. Rich's commodity business boomed: In the early 1990s, he sold billions of dollars of Russian oil, and thanks to his purchase of Russian aluminum, he came to control a third of the world spot market of this metal.
The corruption of Russia's new business class stems from much more than one person's influence, of course. The deeper problem is that the Russians have long had a completely perverted understanding of capitalism and the West. Indeed, news of the Marc Rich pardon was received with little surprise in Russia. I suspect that the tycoons see this is as just a routine example of the corruption rampant in America.
Over the past decade, whenever I asked Russian tycoons why their market was so penetrated by organized crime, they always argued that capitalism in the United States had been violent and lawless initially too. Many Russian businessmen related to some fantasy image of modern America, too. In 1993, having heard that a dozen bank presidents had been assassinated in the mob war raging in Moscow, I asked the head of Aeroflot Bank if he was nervous being a banker. "Why should I be?" he replied. "There is nothing unusual in this. Bank managers get killed in the West all the time."
Such references can come from the most sophisticated people; even Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russian privatization. "During the formation of capitalism in the United States, there was a phenomenal amount of killing, bloodshed and lawlessness," Mr. Chubais pontificated to me.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB983485205728127273



Торгуя российскими природными ресурсами вроде алюминия, трудно было избежать связей с организованной преступностью. Неудивительна поэтому прямая цепочка от Рича к раввину Гринвальду, его представителю в Нью-Йорке и покровителю "красной мафии" в лице Марата Балагулы и Шабтая Калмановича.

Always in search of new financing, Kalmanovitch made numerous trips to the United States. "Kalmanovitch wanted to import whiskey and oil into Sierra Leone and open a beer factory," said a New York businessman who invested in several of Kalmanovitch's ventures after being introduced to him by Greenwald at a New York kosher restaurant. "Greenwald made the introductions and spoke well of him."
While in New York, Kalmanovitch also looked up several old aquaintances from the Soviet Union -- including 42-year-old Marat Balagula, who is known to Brooklyn's Russian Jewish emigre community as the "Big Man" or the "Georgian" and to police authorities as the boss of the Russian Jewish mob. Balagula was convicted two years ago in Philadelphia for masterminding a massive credit-card scam. He failed to show up at his sentencing in November 1986 and is still at large.
Kalmanovitch and Balagula hatched several business schemes together, including one to import gasoline to Sierra Leone through Liat. Balaguala and his partner Fema Najinsky went to Arthur Tarricone of Tarricone Oil Co. in Yonkers. Tarricone, who declined to be interviewed, financed the gasoline deal against a $500,000 personal guarantee put up by Najinsky and Balagula, according to two businessmen who were involved. The gasoline was then brokered through the Spanish office of Marc Rich -- the billionaire American commodities trader wanted in the U.S. on tax evasion and fraud charges -- by Greenwald, who is an agent for Rich in New York.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/05/08/did-a-mystery-tycoon-double-cross-israel/699da8c4-59be-45ef-b45e-dc6c122f536f/

С какой стороны ни подойти, трагедии нашего времени неизбежно возвращаются к вопросу о коррупции и борьбе между международной преступностью и властью закона.



По традиции в Госдепе каждый год (9 июля) отмечали годовщину убийствa Павла Хлебникова.

"In marking the anniversary of the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov, we remain deeply concerned about violence against journalists, impunity for such crimes, and increasing threats to the right to freedom of expression in the Russian Federation.
Paul was dedicated to building the institution of independent media. His courageous work to expose corruption in Russia cost him his life. Twelve years later the perpetrators of the crime have not been brought to justice, and those who seek to shine a light on abuses of power in Russia often find their voices silenced by censorship, repressive legislation, or violence."
https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2016/07/259484.htm

При Трампе в 2017 для удобства объединили Хлебникова и Наталью Эстемирову

"Today, we mark with sadness the eighth anniversary of the murder of human rights defender and journalist Natalya Estemirova and the thirteenth anniversary of the murder of American journalist and editor Paul Klebnikov, both killed in Russia."
https://www.state.gov/honoring-the-memory-of-journalists-natalya-estemirova-and-paul-klebnikov/

В 2018 годовщину убийства Эстемировой (15 июля) перенесли во времени, поскольку на неё пришлась встреча с Путиным в Хельсинки.

"This week, we remember Russian human rights defender and Novaya Gazeta journalist Natalya Estemirova and Forbes journalist and editor, Paul Klebnikov, an American citizen."
https://www.state.gov/honoring-journalists-murdered-in-russia-estemirova-and-klebnikov/

В 2019 традиция прекратилась.

My preface to this report takes only a few minutes to read, and makes the case I learned in a Foreign Service childhood - kleptocracy incubates evil, and evil is dangerous to America, and America should never enable it. https://t.co/eT3H7YeWIz
- Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) January 14, 2021

Оглядываясь назад на президентство Трампа, следует отметить, насколько тесно его накрывала тень Рашагейта.

Неутомимая атака Трампа на СМИ и запуск байки про "deep state" пришлись на середину февраля 2017 и были прямо связаны с появлением сообщений в New York Times и CNN: "members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election".

Запуск культа QAnon, ныне серьезной террористической угрозы, пришелся на конец октября 2017 и был прямо связан с вынесением первых обвинений в расследовании Мюллера.

Трамп легко мог бы увеличить свою популярность среди избирателей, если бы сдвинулся влево от малопопулярной республиканской политики, но он не мог этого сделать, потому что ему была нужна поддержка республиканцев в Конгрессе для защиты от российского расследования. Самые активные защитники получили за это награды.



Но феномен трампизма и трампутинизма не сводится к одному Трампу и его коррупции и не может быть понят без более длинного и глубокого взгляда на историю.

Развить такой взгляд в прошедшем году мне помогли десять прицельных исторических экскурсий:

• ноябрь 1945
• июль 1948
• январь 1949
• июнь 1963
• декабрь 1987
• март 1988
• октябрь 1992
• сентябрь 1999
• январь 2013
• март 2015