Hersh says the CIA estimates at least $400 million was embezzled last year in funds earmarked for diesel payments
Not exactly news. All “foreign aid” is skimmed. It is expected in return for complying with foreign aid requirements. For example-Allowing US military bases and using the “aid” money to buy from US arms manufacturers. Everyone’s a winner.
On Wednesday, Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report on Substack that alleged the CIA was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of US aid.
The report said the Ukrainian government has been using US taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military. Hersh said Zelensky “has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.”
Hersh said according to one estimate by CIA analysts, at least $400 million in funds were embezzled last year. Sources told Hersh that Ukrainian officials are also “competing” to set up front companies for export contracts to private arms dealers around the world.
The issue of corruption was raised during a meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Zelensky in January. An intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting told Hersh that Burns delivered a stunning message to Zelensky.
Hersh wrote: “The senior generals and government officialsin Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because ‘he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.’”
During the meeting, Burns presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior government officials whose corruption was known to the CIA.
Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said Wednesday that the satire outlet, podcaster Tim Pool, and Minds, Inc. filed a lawsuit against California’s attorney general, alleging a new law regulating social media companies violates the First Amendment.
In a Substack post, Dillon wrote that the plaintiffs filed the complaint against California attorney general Rob Bonta to stop state officials from enforcing AB 587, a new law that took effect this year that requires social media companies to file quarterly reports detailing content moderation policies with the Attorney General’s Office.
Such content moderation policies include several speech categories the state could label as misinformation/disinformation, extremism/radicalization, and hate speech. Failing to file reports could lead to the state imposing fines for non-compliance.
According to the lawsuit, AB 587 was “written with the express intent to discourage expression” of constitutionally protected viewpoints and failed the vagueness doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires criminal laws to state explicitly and definitely what conduct is punishable.
So no wonder the impression is solidified that the U.S. Army Command in Europe (EUCOM) got their “intel” from open sources, and is absolutely clueless on how many weapons, how much equipment and how many people the Ukrainians actually have.
And that explains what’s going on in Artemovsk – with the Russians taking all the time in the world to calibrate their strategic defense, and after the orderly abandon of Kherson, lure the Ukrainians into a non-stop slaughterhouse. Martyanov qualifies U.S./NATO incompetence to see it coming as “stupefying.”
The leaked intel might be advantageous to Russia were this not to be misdirection: and the possibility is quite real, Pepe Escobar writes.
The script reads like a spoof straight out of legendary Mad magazine 1960’s cartoon “Spy vs. Spy”: Secret Pentagon Documents Fall in the Hands of Malign Russia. Well, actually in the hands of millions accessing Twitter and Telegram.
So here, at face value, we have a major leak essentially detailing Pentagon planning for the next stage of the NATO vs. Russia proxy war in Ukraine: the interminably debated Spring “counter-offensive” that may, or may not, start in mid-April, as well as war plans shared with FVEY – the Five Eyes.
The leaked intel might – and the operative word is “might” – be advantageous to Russia were this not to be misdirection: and the possibility is quite real.
The inestimable Ray McGovern, who knows one or two things about the CIA, noted whether the Pentagon is “falsifying kill-ratio to gild Easter lilies in Kyiv? Recent leak of an apparently official NATO document shows 71,500 Ukrainians KIA and only 16,000 to 17,500 Russians, a far cry from earlier Pentagon ‘estimates’. All sounds so Vietnam-déjà vu!”
So this may be Vietnam all over again – never count on the Pentagon learning from their mistakes – but could be something way more alarming, according to a top Beltway intel source, retired: “Our interpretation of this breach is that intel sources in the United States have released critical intel data in order to avoid a nuclear war with Russia.”
As it stands, the only certainty is that the spin war has gone berserk. So the leaker may have been a – disgruntled – U.S. insider. No, wait: the whole thing may be fake, as the Pentagon insists. In spin speak, that would be an attempt to “spread false information that could harm the U.S.”.
Tweaked or not, the “secret” Pentagon comparative war dead ratio between Russians and Ukrainians still does not make sense. The numbers appear to reflect Bakhmut/Artemovsk casualties, where Russian casualty ratios were highest. Yet reliable on the ground Russian military correspondents assure the ratio is really 10 to 1, with the Russians employing the snail technique combined with a formidable artillery mincing machine.
“Stupefying” incompetence
The undisputable conclusion out of the – real or fake – Pentagon leaks is that the U.S. is in a state of war against Russia. And that is serious enough.
Washington has been feeding information non-stop on command posts, ammunition depots and key nodes in the Russian military lines. It’s such real-time intel that has allowed Kiev to target Russian forces, kill senior generals and force ammunition depots to be moved farther from the Russian front lines.
Anything Pentagon/NATO stenographers say about Kiev playing the proverbial “decisive role” in planning and executing these strikes is a lie. The U.S. exercizes total, absolute control of the Ukraine war on a central command basis. Including from that “secret” underground bunker near Lviv which recently received a business card from Mr. Khinzal and has gone to meet its maker – along with over 200 NATO high-level operatives.
Fake or not fake, we also have confirmation that the Pentagon has direct access to communications of the Russian Ministry of Defense. And that the Americans listen to everyone and his neighbor: the sweaty T-shirt actor in Kiev, all the Five Eyes allies, and the Mossad.
As for the notion that Kiev has changed its counter-offensive “military plans” because of the Pentagon leaks, everyone should feel free to control the pitch of their roaring laughter.
The Russian non-response response to all this hoopla could be seen as a classic of misdirection. Responding to the U.S. de facto engaged in an undeclared war against Russia, much hotter than Hybrid, President Putin said that Russia is interested in “peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and establishing a balance of interests” given their status as the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.
“Virtually every individual who has committed or supported evil has had a clear conscience,” Prager said. “Peoples’ feelings and behavior produce their conscience — their conscience doesn’t produce their feelings and behavior.”
“Everyone has heard the expression: let your conscience be your guide,” Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU, noted. But Prager argues that accepting that aphorism does more harm than good.
Prager argued that throughout most of Western history, the consensus view was that the conscience was not a sufficient guide and that God and instruction in a system of religious values were required for people to behave morally. Prager said that the idea that the conscience is all people need to act morally is a peculiarity and product of modern secular society.
Prager compared this notion to the idea that gender is a social construct, as well as the notion that all cultures are of equal value and that equal treatment for all people was a form of racism.
“None of these beliefs is more irrational than that the conscience is all you need, that it can replace God, the Bible, and Judeo-Christian values as a producer of moral behavior.”
Prager noted that people are exceptionally good at rationalizing their own actions and intuitions and have been known to justify everything from murder to torture to genocide on moral grounds.
McCaul says war over Taiwan will be about controlling microchips — err, I mean, democracy and freedom.
Nearly as funny as McCaul’s hasty self-correction was Todd’s suggestion that US militarism and wars for oil in the middle east was something that was limited to “the sixties, seventies and eighties.”
Too much interesting stuff happening in the life of the empire to cover in just one article today, so we’re doing a three-in-one wrap-up.
McCaul says war over Taiwan will be about controlling microchips — err, I mean, democracy and freedom.
Republican congressman Michael McCaul made a very interesting admission during a Sunday interview on MSNBC, which he hastily had to walk back after the host pointed out the implications of what he was saying.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the virulent China hawk McCaul to “make the basic case” for why Americans should be willing to go to war over Taiwan, and McCaul responded by saying it was about controlling the manufacturing of microchips. When Todd pointed out that this sounded a lot like justifications that have been made for US wars and militarism to control global oil supplies, McCaul hastily corrected himself and said that protecting Taiwan is actually about “democracy and freedom”.
“Make the basic case for why Americans not only should care about what happens in Taiwan but should be willing to spill American blood and treasure to defend Taiwan,” Todd said.
McCaul responded by talking about deterrence and protecting international trade, then said, “I think more important is that TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] manufactures 90 percent of the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips. If China invades and either owns or breaks up, we’re in a world of hurt globally.”
“Congressman, that almost sounds like the case that would be made in the sixties, seventies and eighties for why America was spending so much money and military resources in the middle east,” Todd responded. “Oil was so important for the economy. Is this sort of the 21st century version of that?”
“You know, I personally think it is about democracy and freedom. And we need to stand up for that, like we’re doing in Ukraine,” said McCaul, visibly uncomfortable.
Thomas Sowell said it best when he averred: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of making decisions that by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no penalty for being wrong.” He, too, is herein channeling the invisible hand.
Hint: don’t bet against the invisible hand. It is a losing proposition.
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is certainly the most wondrous, astounding and marvelous concept in all of economics, and there are quite a few doozies in the dismal science. I go further than that. The invisible hand ranks as high or higher, in terms of pure beauty, than even the smile of a baby, the music of Mozart or the most beautiful sunset that ever took place. In terms of what it means for our potential prosperity, it has no upper bounds whatsoever.
Bastiat perched himself on the top of the Eifel Tower, looked down at the people scurrying around far down below him, and marveled at the fact that Paris got fed, without any central direction at all. This was in invisible hand (that is, free enterprise) at work; you can’t see this “hand,” but you can discern its effects.
We all marvel at the teamwork of the championship basketball team, the winner of the eight-person shell in the regatta, a 100-member orchestra playing 64th notes without a hair’s breath of discord. But this pales into total insignificance compared to the teamwork made at least potentially possible by the invisible hand; all eight billion of us cooperating producing goods and services and thus fighting poverty. These other accomplishments have a coach, a coxswain or a conductor; in contrast, when the human race bans protectionism and regulation, the invisible hand will take over without any central direction at all. If that is not a miracle, then nothing is (Adam Smith thought that the invisible hand was God’s hand). If that does not at least slightly shake up the atheists of the world, then nothing will.
The “crimes” under the RICO statute are essentially fictitious, created to enable federal authorities to avoid the state courts in which accused “mobsters” traditionally had been prosecuted. Because reputed “mob” figures were being acquitted in state courts—often in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt—the government created a new set of “derivative crimes,” a class of offenses that by definition are derived from other criminal acts.
One unique aspect of Trump’s case is that state prosecutors are deriving their charges from federal criminal statutes instead of the other way around, but the particulars of this case are especially troubling, given the politics involved and the fact that Trump was never charged with breaking federal campaign law, much less convicted of it. In order for Bragg to gain a conviction, jurors will have to conclude that Trump broke federal law, something that they are not legally entitled to do, given that lawbreaking never was demonstrated in federal court. To put it another way, New York jurors are being asked to declare Trump guilty of a crime for which he never was charged.
When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office:
were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses…Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under…hadn’t been charged as crimes before…We’re looking to find the next areas of conduct that meets any sort of statutory definition of what criminal conduct is.
At that time, federal prosecutors were going after people like investment banker Michael Milken, but even they would have stopped at indicting a former president. That day is gone, however, and today we have Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg following what John Cassidy of The New Yorker calls a “novel effort” to combine both state and federal laws to create what clearly is a bill of attainder to convict Donald Trump of a crime. Even if the courts rule against Trump and permit the charges to stand—and it is certain that Trump and Bragg will litigate the charges all the way to the Supreme Court themselves—that does not change the fact that Bragg has cobbled a number of statutes together to create something the U.S. Constitution forbids: a bill of attainder.
Although the indictment is still sealed at this writing, the gist of the charges is as follows: (A) Donald Trump, who was running for president, authorized payment of $130,000 to a woman known as Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an affair between them, with Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen making the payments; (B) he listed the payments as a campaign finance expense and Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign fraud; (C) the Trump Company reimbursed Cohen for the payments and claimed them as a legal expense.
Bragg is alleging that Trump approved these payments while breaking federal campaign law, which makes them a felony (under New York law, simply falsifying business records is a misdemeanor). Writes attorney and New York Times columnist David French:
So how can Trump be prosecuted? If Bragg can prove that, contrary to New York State law, Trump falsified records when the “intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof,” he can prove that Trump committed a felony, and a felony not only carries stiffer penalties; it has a five-year statute of limitations.
He continues:
But what is the other crime that can convert a charge of records falsification to a felony? Most likely prosecutors will rely on an allegation of violating federal campaign finance law, specifically the claim that the hush money payments to Daniels were illegal campaign contributions. But this is also not a simple case to make: The prosecution may claim that state campaign finance laws apply to Trump, and his payments thus violated New York law, but remember we’re talking about a presidential election. A federal statute expressly states that the relevant campaign finance laws “supersede and pre-empt any provision of state law with respect to election to federal office.” This law represents a formidable barrier to prosecuting Trump under state campaign finance laws, and there is no obvious path around it.
This is a problem because during the infamous “Russiagate” investigations, special prosecutors looked at this situation and concluded that the facts were too sketchy to charge Trump with breaking federal campaign laws. However, Bragg will be calling for a state jury to conclude that Trump actually did break federal law—something a state jury should not be doing. Because Trump was never charged with breaking campaign laws, there is now no legal way to claim he broke them.
Bragg’s entire case hinges upon this point, which is why French—who clearly despises Trump and would rejoice if he were convicted of something—advised against bringing state criminal charges in the first place. He writes:
It’s no wonder that even Bragg’s aggressive former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz was concerned that the Daniels case was, as The New York Times reported, “too risky under New York law.” A Reuters article described the legal theories supporting a prosecution for the Daniels payments as “untested.” A January New York Times story also accurately called the theories “largely untested.”
While one can condemn Trump for the reckless behavior that brought about this situation in the first place, I would argue that Bragg’s behavior is much more reckless, given that he is cobbling state and federal statutes together to target a political figure roundly hated by the Democrats. Bragg is using criminal law for political purposes, and while such actions have a sorry history going back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s hounding of critics of the New Deal, including former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, they have no place under the rule of law.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (unlike The New York Times editorial board, which prattled on about Trump “not being above the law”) recognized the greater danger of unleashing what it called a “Pandora’s box” that has “political ramifications that are unpredictable and probably destructive.” This indictment, unfortunately, is politically popular with Democrats (and some never-Trump Republicans), and the usual brakes that accompany political processes have been discarded in the hopes that the Great Orange Whale will see the inside of a prison cell.
While Trump and his supporters will rightly argue that Bragg is manipulating the law in a special way to go after one person, this case highlights greater abuses of the law attributable to what Candice E. Jackson and I labeled almost twenty years ago as “derivative crimes.” Under a “derivative crime” regime, which makes up the bulk of federal criminal statutes, a “crime” such as “racketeering” is not defined as a specific act, but rather is derived from other actions that may either be actual crimes or acts that someone might call criminal but do not break any laws.
For example, Jackson and I described the RICO statutes in our 2004 Independent Review paper:
The “crimes” under the RICO statute are essentially fictitious, created to enable federal authorities to avoid the state courts in which accused “mobsters” traditionally had been prosecuted. Because reputed “mob” figures were being acquitted in state courts—often in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt—the government created a new set of “derivative crimes,” a class of offenses that by definition are derived from other criminal acts.
One does not “racketeer” anyone. Instead, the government permits federal prosecutors to present evidence of lawbreaking elsewhere, but the defendants are not charged with those crimes (such as extortion, murder, and robbery). Instead, they are charged with racketeering, which is derived from those other alleged actions. With derivative crimes, federal prosecutors were able to win cases against alleged organized crime figures such as John Gotti, who was convicted in federal court of…racketeering.
While the U.S. Constitution forbids passage of bills of attainder, clever prosecutors find other ways of implementing them by piecing together various statutes to form criminal charges that are specifically aimed at one person.
Pepe Escobar
MCViewPoint 