A Third Tie between Trump World and Alexander Smirnov
Before I point to a report on third known link between Alexander Smirnov — the FBI informant whose allegedly false claims about Joe Biden were laundered through a process Bill Barr set up for Rudy Giuliani in 2020 — and Donald Trump, let me lay out several details that are important to assessing the import of such ties.
- Smirnov was admonished on the limits of permission to engage in Otherwise Illegal Activities on at least five occasions, including on August 7, 2020. That’s what the FBI does before they pre-approve you committing a crime because they want to learn about the other people committing crimes involved. For any given sketchy business someone reports Smirnov to have engaged in, there’s a distinct possibility he was engaging in it because the FBI was interested in the other people engaged in the business.
- Smirnov’s ties to Russian spies go through at least one other intelligence service — probably Israel. But, at least for the last six months, he has been hanging out on the megayachts of Russian Oligarchs, almost certainly in Dubai, where, according to him, he was part of a plan to end the Ukraine war and elect Donald Trump.
- One unanswered question that will be key to understanding how Smirnov attempted to frame Joe Biden is to identify how MAGAt US Attorney for Pittsburgh Scott Brady came to chase an otherwise unremarkable earlier Smirnov informant report mentioning Hunter Biden in passing. Given that Brady’s project catered to Rudy, any link involving Rudy as well would be significant.
- But we may not discover that unless something dramatic happens, because David Weiss has no business overseeing this investigation, as he’s a direct witness to the involvement of Brady and Bill Barr. Indeed, as Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell recently pointed out, Weiss has misrepresented his involvement in the Smirnov lead, going back to 2020, and by chasing this lead and extending the prosecution of Hunter Biden, he is effectively doing Russia’s bidding.
We already know of two ties between Trump world and Smirnov. His cousin, Linor Shefer, has ties to Trump through a Miami Real Estate developer.
Shefer, a 38-year-old Israeli-American, was a former contestant on the Israeli version of reality show Big Brother, and in 2014 won the Moscow beauty pageant ‘Miss Jewish Star’.
According to her LinkedIn page, she has been an ‘Inhouse Consultant’ for Dezer Development in Miami, Florida since 2022.
Dezer partnered with Trump’s organization to develop the $600 million Trump Grande Ocean Resort and Residences and $900 million Trump Towers. The company is run by Gil Dezer, and founded by his Israeli-American billionaire father Michael, who is a Trump donor.
And Smirnov has ties to Sam Kislin, who not only has long-standing ties to Rudy and Trump, but who came under some scrutiny during the 2019 impeachment.
Around 2021, on the beach at a private club in Boca Raton, Smirnov pitched Kislin on founding a company together that would market electric-car batteries and capture federal subsidies, Kislin said.
Smirnov told him he also could use his FBI ties to help him unfreeze more than $21 million in infrastructure bonds that belonged to Kislin but which Ukrainian authorities deemed had been issued illegally, embroiling Kislin in a corruption probe, Kislin said.
Kislin had for years been seeking to unfreeze the funds, traveling to Ukraine and meeting with officials there. His travel there coincided with efforts by Giuliani and his associates to push the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden, and in 2019, Kislin was subpoenaed by House impeachment investigators who were looking into those efforts. Kislin’s lawyer said he didn’t have relevant information, and he didn’t ultimately testify.
Smirnov set his fee for recovering Kislin’s $21 million at $1 million, according to Kislin, who said he paid Smirnov $224,000—partially as an advance and partially as an investment in the car-battery company, incorporated in Nevada in May 2021 as Quantum Force.
After a little over a year, Quantum Force dissolved and registered by the same name in a different state—this time without Smirnov listed in the corporate records.
When a solution to Kislin’s problem in Ukraine failed to materialize, Kislin said he deduced that Smirnov had taken him for a ride.
The Guardian points to a third — one through another of the sketchy businesses with which Smirnov worked, which includes a Middle East real estate tie:
Back in 2020, Smirnov was paid $600,000 by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT), prosecutors said. That same year, Smirnov began lying to the FBI about the Bidens, according to the indictment.
ETT’s CEO is the American Christopher Condon, who is also one of three shareholders in ETT Investment Holding Limited in London. Other shareholders in the UK include Pakistani American investor Shahal Khan and Farooq Arjomand, a former chairman and current board member of Damac Properties in Dubai who is also listed as an adviser on ETT’s American website.
[snip]
The exact business model of Texas-based ETT is murky. Its mission statement reads in part: “ETT set up the chess board to bring in top notch executives from those sectors to help implement its vision of love and social impact to improve the quality of human existence through the application of ‘new age’ technologies.”
The current CEO, Condon, is a California man who has been involved in several civil lawsuits, including a civil Rico case in 2010 that he won on appeal. Condon’s official biography says he is “a former professional tennis player, financial advisor, and currently is an entrepreneur focused on social-impact projects, public-private partnerships, and creating smart communities that benefit both individuals and governments”.
Condon, Arjomand and Khan registered ETT Investment Holding Limited in the UK on 6 March 2020. Khan, an investor who purchased the Plaza Hotel in 2018, and Arjomand have ties to Donald Trump through Trump associates and Damac, a major Middle East developer that has partnered with Trump for a decade. Arjomand, Khan and Condon owned 34%, 33% and 33% of ETT Investment Holding Limited respectively, according to UK business filings. No other information on the UK company is readily available.
The WSJ story — the same one that focused on Kislin — already laid out some sketchy aspects of Smirnov’s ties to ETT, and states that the relationship began in 2019.
Smirnov helped another company—Texas-based Economic Transformation Technologies, a software platform focused on “sovereign economic performance”—solicit investors starting around 2019, former associates said.
Smirnov was aware of concerns among investors and employees about some of the company’s practices, one of the associates said. The company was failing to pay some of its bills and several of its employees despite spending lavishly on travel and maintaining its exorbitant rent in the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, former associates and investors said.
Still, Smirnov brought in investors to meet with the company’s chairman, Christopher Condon, and other company executives—among them Kislin, who didn’t ultimately invest. Condon described Smirnov to associates as a “Russian friend of ours” who was skilled at fundraising, a former associate said.
It described that Condon knew of Smirnov’s FBI ties.
Smirnov’s FBI connections often came up in conversation as he hawked his services. Condon, the ETT chairman, also told people that Smirnov had “friends” in the FBI and described him as his protector who could help shield him from investigations, former associates said. Condon’s lawyer said Condon didn’t know the extent of Smirnov’s FBI involvement, and Condon denied describing Smirnov as a protector.
There are a lot more details of the Trump ties of Khan and Arjomand in the Guardian piece. What’s not included in there is the date in 2020 that ETT paid Smirnov. Particularly given Condon’s other sketchy ties, if that payment was anywhere close to August 2020, when we know Smirnov was given permission to engage in otherwise illegal activity, it may be his business ties were done with the knowledge and permission of the FBI.
Of course, the people with whom he engaged in OIA could well have a link to Scott Brady’s discovery of Smirnov. That’s why it is so problematic that Weiss, a witness, is leading this investigation.
In a status hearing for Hunter Biden yesterday (at which his gun trial was tentatively scheduled for the first two weeks of June), prosecutor Derek Hines suggested the Smirnov trial is still set to go starting on April 23, in spite of a recent CIPA filing. Also yesterday, Judge Otis Wright denied Smirnov’s bid to be released to San Francisco to receive glaucoma care.
Update: Fixed spelling of Shefer’s first name.
Update: CBS has a story describing a past complaint that Smirnov is a fraudster and a liar. Again, it’s hard to distinguish, without knowing more, whether for the FBI, that was the point.
Smirnov surfaced as a key secret witness in a sweeping racketeering case in California in 2015. In that case, the Justice Department brought charges against 33 defendants with ties to Armenian organized crime groups. Among the charges were money laundering, health care fraud and even a murder-for-hire.
Smirnov’s information contributed to the case against a married couple, Tigran Sarkisyan and his wife Hripsime Khachatryan, charged with conspiring with others to use fake identities to collect tax reimbursements from the federal government. The couple eventually pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering in May 2017. In a 2018 sentencing memorandum, the couple’s lawyers flatly accused Smirnov of deceit.
“The [Confidential Human Source] was known to the United States as a liar and fraudster,” the sentencing brief states.
A footnote in the document states that the government was provided with the notes of their private investigator’s interview with a close associate of Smirnov who repeatedly called him a “liar.”
[snip]
Benincasa believes federal prosecutors realized they had a problem. According to Benincasa, the prosecutors had originally indicated they would be seeking a 10-year sentence as part of any plea deal. But after the lawsuit was filed, the government softened its position. Benincasa said he believes prosecutors wanted to avoid seeing Smirnov deposed in the civil case and possibly have his identity as an informant exposed. In the end prosecutors asked for 21 months, an unusually sharp reduction from the original 10 years that Benincasa says they were seeking. The judge ultimately sentenced the couple to 15 months.
When it says: “Dezer partnered with Trump’s organization to develop the $600 million Trump Grande Ocean Resort and Residences and $900 million Trump Towers”, is that another instance of Trump licensing his “brand” and not getting more involved beyond peddling the Trump influence?
Possibly adding 2 + 2 and getting 5 here, but your first bullet point about Smirnov getting Bureau permission to crime because FBI was interested in his potential partners stayed in my mind all the way through this post. Which led me to wonder: could the FBI have had a bead on Trump in 2020?
Not that the emoluments clause means anything anymore, but it does not appear that Trump disentangled himself from any of these murky dealings, foreign and domestic–none of which he disclosed while campaigning. The guy had more potential blackmail openings than he could probably count.
Not a chance. I mean, this is the period when Barr is frantically killing every investigation into Trump.
Was this around the same time that McGonigal was shielding Trump and Rudy?
There’s no evidence McGonigal shielded Trump and Rudy.
Maybe it was Dumbledore.
Barr probably did make it clear all the way down the chain(s) that Trump was off-limits. What I was wondering about was an FBI field office (not DC, obviously) or subset of agents who might have hung on to a shred of independence. Unlikely these agents (if they existed) would be running Smirnov, true, but impossible?
The vertiginous thing in this farce is that a paid FBI informant told an FBI agent that the POTUS took a bribe. This conversation should have set off a six alarm fire to confirm the story from an obviously shady character.
Wray should have had that 1023 the next day after it was written and everything should have been confirmed immediately. Instead, he let this charade build and build into an impeachment inquiry.
Trump is a white collar Whitey Bulger. Theres a well founded assertion that Trump is a confidential informant going back to the late 70s/80s for the FBI. Everyone around him was connected to international organized crime or flat out intelligence outlets. https://gregolear.substack.com/p/tinker-tailor-mobster-trump
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Saw the Guardian headline this morning and was hoping Marcy was on it.
As I’ve stated here several times, I’m finishing a years-long animated documentary about my unlikely run-in with the Trump/Flynn/Russia cabal. Dr. Wheeler’s work has been indispensable in helping me and my motley team’s understanding of the tsunami of raw sewage that is the force of Donald Trump.
One question that still pervades though is how much we can/should read into the regional origins of some of these bad actors. Repeatedly, the bad guys seem to be centered or coming from Russia, Saudi Arabia and now Israel. Stateside, they almost always have deep roots in Florida or Texas. However, it seems to me that vast wealth renders inconsequential traditional concepts of borders. More and more it looks like we are looking an international crime syndicate at work. One that has pulled into its alliance right wing evangelicals, right wing Israelis and a whole army of stupid and shallow morons of all nationalities who are just in it for the money. Whenever we zoom in on these foot soldiers it’s like listening in on the skeletons in Army of Darkness. They’re just cowardly and hollow and dumb. But there is an army of them.
As far as I know Israeli citizenship is fairly easy to obtain and so a good deal of Russian mobsters and ne’er do wells are operating out of Israel and many, many of them are tied to Netanyahu. But stating that Israel itself is corrupt is like stating the US is corrupt. People inside are fighting Bibi. People here are fighting Trump. Is that the same paradigm with Saudi Arabia? India?
Other than Russia it seems like the mob morons have hold of a party in every single nation.
I welcome criticism and education,
Nexus between Florida, Texas and Putinism may be the mission outreach that ALL of the national mainline and otherwise Protestant churches in America undertook in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Also the oil industry and oil industry politicians. Ministers, rich donors, all their entourage would take trip after trip over years. Rich Americans poured money into Russian construction companies to build big churches competing with other rich Americans. All the big business people back to Clinton that would go over there to “teach the free market” and their groups running around in the Russian Babylon of the 1990’s and 2000’s.
Russia was a “free” country just ready to hear about how great it is to have oranges every day, but Putin never dismantled the Soviet collection apparatus, and so I think he made himself powerful in Western societies, throughout Europe, the GOP, some Democrats too I’d imagine, with a decades long program of collecting kompromat in every possible instance on all of these dopes, every single one of them. You never know what could be useful. Some could some day be turned crooked, but that used car dealer, game show host or youth minister might be a Congressperson, radio DJ or President some day. The power of a “kompromat center” of such enormity would be to create a power capital with vertical lines of authority to draw kompromat into itself internationally and direct change in other countries.
I just think a seedy story of compromise, though largely secret, is more apt and all-too-human than Reagan’s party just up and decided Russia is okay to destroy Ukraine and commit genocide there.
The Republican Party has not been the party of Reagan, let alone Nixon or Eisenhower, for quite some time. And for nearly ten years, it’s been the party of Donny Trump.
Reagan was the biggest phony who ever lived and Gingrich was every bit the fascist propagandist of anyone in FSB, but here is the Ukraine War with the Red Dawn esprit de corps of Zelensky. They are manning the Abrams and Bradleys of every Tom Clancy kid’s dreams. It’s the Russians! But the GOP is holding this up? It’s not the GOP. That doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s MAGA, and MAGA is a social engineering project of Putin, a conical organization of crooks and dopes he and Trump are installing as one of our major parties which can operate in a coordinated way through pressure points beneath a compromised President. That’s my dismal theory of the situation after spending years here from Russiagate onwards. Alternatively, there are five or six oligarchical power centers, which intersect in a networked way and are coordinating to transform the United States into an autocracy. Otherwise, I cannot attribute the insurrection and related conspiracies.
The GOP does exist. But it is Maga and a wholly-owmed [sic] subsidiary of Donald Trump.
Much as I disliked Reagan, he played a huge role in confronting the Soviet Union and giving Gorbachev the room for reforms, eventually collapse. Perhaps the biggest success of my lifetime. A shame ppl are trying to throw it away. Appreciate Marcy’s efforts to hold on to that progress.
Just a little correction. Israeli citizenship is not easy to get for a non-Jew. They send people with work visas who had children born in Israel back to the originating country with their Israeli born children. Netanyahu calls migrant workers infiltrators.
Jews get citizenship through the Aliyah process.
“easy” could be passive aggressive word choice but it was unintentional. I meant what you referred to–the Aliyah process–though I didn’t know that’s what it was called. I’ve read various accounts of Russians taking advantage of this process. Some of those accounts related to organized crime and–in some cases–not totally proper documentation.
From 2018, wondering what is the current situation:
“Birth tourism brings Russian baby boom to Miami…Social media is full of Russian women boasting about coming to America to give birth, sometimes staying at Trump properties.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna836121
The Daily Mail got Smirnov’s cousin’s name wrong. It’s Linor.
TY
BREAKING NEWS!
MTG adds Peter Navarro to her Conjugal Visits Tour!
Dams…that means she’s coming to Miami. Oh well…good chance an alligator or croc – we have both – might eat her.
Brandon Straka should lend Navarro his Capital Riot Cage for these last days before martyrdom as a prisoner of the deep state. He can lay down on a lounge chair in a bath robe, and Marjorie can come and pray over him.
Does Dr Pete count as a Jan6 “hostage”?
It is odd about the timing of the payment because according to Florida corporation search records, the company had to be reinstated every year from 2019 -2020 and then again in 2022. https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResultDetail?inquirytype=EntityName&directionType=Initial&searchNameOrder=ECONOMICTRANSFORMATIONTECHNOLO%20P140000428302&aggregateId=domp-p14000042830-2610c3d2-b698-4315-a88a-07bbe4c36a6f&searchTerm=Economic%20transformation%20technologies&listNameOrder=ECONOMICTRANSFORMATIONTECHNOLO%20P140000428302
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Re: Sam Kislin — from way back in 1999:
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/fbi-tracked-alleged-russian-mob-ties-of-giuliani-campaign-supporter/
As a side note, I just wanted to say thank you for Marcy’s note on Xitter today that pointed out that Hunter Biden’s impending gun charges trial will last two weeks, which is longer than the time he owned the weapon in question!
I suspect Lowell is fitting all this new information into place for his next filing. I wonder how this is all going to go over with the judge.
Judge Cannon, or the patrons advising her, came up with an inelegant solution to Trump’s MTD his Florida case. His motion that the Espionage Act was void for vagueness was premature, but could be brought up late, or addressed by the jury, when Cannon instructs it at the end of his case.
There are still five pending Trump motions Cannon hasn’t dealt with yet. Nor has she set a trial date. She’s throwing sand and monkey wrenches into the gearworks.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/14/trump-classified-documents-case-florida
I’m to the point where I feel motions like that should be denied with as much prejudice as the laws allow.
I’ve mentioned previously, but I think its worth noting again a couple of Rudy’s comments that pertain to Smirnov.
2/4/20: Joe had Poroshenko fired because “the big guy who owned the company [Zlochevsky] bribed you back in 2014”; said awkwardly like he was trying to insert the words into the conversation, but wrong application is noted.
Episode 82- Rudy Giuliani One Tough Podcast with Bo Dietl
10/14/20: “…[Hunter and Joe Biden’s activities just published by NY Post] all amounts to numerous federal crimes … been covered up for 2 and a half years. The Justice Department in the person of the United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York had this evidence back in October November 2019, or he had some of this evidence brought to him by a well-respected lawyer [former AR USA Bud Cummins] on behalf of 4 or 5 Ukrainians, he chose not to investigate it… Also, I delivered these facts or many of them in an outline to the State Department in early mid 2020, March 2020, ignored, no one investigated. I delivered these facts at the request [January 2020?] of the the Attorney General [Barr] to the United States Attorney in a district that I’m not allowed to identify [Brady?]. He’s interviewed one witness [Smirnov?], really a meaningless witness and done nothing. And the hard drive at the core of this was delivered to the FBI at or about the same time [12/9/19], and the FBI has conducted no, zero, investigation of it. Very, very similar…”
https://youtu.be/RZasrHQeKiY
Rudy Giuliani’s EXCLUSIVE Reaction
Interestingly, Rudy also says “2 and a half years”, like he’s been on this since Biden made the Poroshenko comments in January 2018. Interesting, because for the first 6 months, I see a lot of mentions by RT and something called Zero Hedge about the comments, but not much else. I don’t see much else in that time period.
Like, when did Rudy (or someone else he is aware of) start on this behind-the-scenes campaign to get the Bidens investigated over Burisma and the Shokin firing?
Zero Hedge is reputed by some to be a Russian mouthpiece – echoing RT material would be in line with that accusation. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge#Political_views
Zero Hedge got on my radar in an odd way. I follow another investigative reporter (Mary Fricker), who covers the repo market at https://repowatch.org/ . While repo itself is kinda wild and woolly, the most concerning part of it is rehypothecation of repo collateral. Rehypothecation is a real world fnord – most people see it and can’t hold onto the word or idea for more than a few minutes. But (at least a few years ago), the two places that would show up when I searched for rehypothecation were Ms. Fricker’s site (for good reasons) and Zero Hedge (G*d only knows why, but perhaps for its fnord-like effect).
This is a murky, bottomless stew pot of Putin/Russian, trump/Russian, Israeli and Arabian political interests commingled with international criminality with loads of colorful, creepy figures. trump seizing on politics as a springboard for enormous financial gain (Kushner $2B tip) and Putin seizing on trump as a useful fool to reconstruct USSR Lite. The deeper they dig the more connections they’ll find. (RUDY’s electronic devices are the motherlode.) Russian oligarchs and Russian/Ukrainian Jews seem to be Putin’s nursery for hatching these political cum criminal schemes. trump’s 2 big RE name deals in Florida with these characters screams “money laundering” to me. What a tangled web.
Murky is right. What is a combination advance commission/investment? What percentage of the venture does that buy?
On an off-topic note, I saw a lot of anguish (including from Eric Holder) on the socials about the SDNY doc dump on the Trump election interference trial involving hush money. I was at first alarmed, but then I saw someone say that this was engineered by Trump’s defense. Apparently they started badgering SDNY very late in the process for a lot more discovery and this was the result. Bragg was willing to grant up to 30 days delay, but he’s still ready to go right now.
I don’t see this in the few mainstream sources I see, like WaPo. It seems like that would be pertinent to the situation if true.
EDIT: Aaaaaand Marcy posted about this on the front page while I was typing. Silly me!
Thanks for this comment. NYT’s article yesterday didn’t frame it that way at all, unsurprisingly.
You should feel good about this, boloboffin, following the same lead that Marcy was following :-)