First of all, felicitations to France on the 236th anniversary of Bastille Day, which has a few more hours to play out here in Southern California.
Second of all, a few choice topics for a badly-needed Ready Room update.
April-May 2014 and alleged $5 million bribes to Bidens
This is a quick update on a Bidens-Burisma matter reported at TOC back in March 2022. I won’t rehash the whole history here; it’s all in the original article (scroll down toward the end for the gist).
The basic outline is that in March 2014, Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky tried to move $23 million out of a UK account he had established the previous year with the French global bank BNP Paribas. The French bank was under investigation for money-laundering and sanctions violations by the U.S. DOJ in the Southern District of New York at the time, but the probe seemed to move at a glacial pace, and BNP was actually allowed to make banking transactions with sanctioned Iranian correspondents (as well as Ukrainian entities under suspicion of corruption) during the investigation.
Within a month after BNP Paribas reported Zlochevsky’s proposed $23 million withdrawal to the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO), however, the U.S. DOJ suddenly sprang into action and started turning the screws on BNP.
A few citations from my March 2022 piece show the timeline. BNP reported the Zlochevsky withdrawal, initiated 11 March 2014, to the SFO on or about 22 March.
By mid-April the SFO process was in full swing. “The SFO investigator, Richard Gould, filed statements with the court on 14 and 16 April; the 16 April filing sought a court order to freeze the funds in Zlochevsky’s account on suspicion that he was laundering money. The order was granted.”
Hunter Biden was added to the board of Burisma on 18 April 2014. The slow-rolled DOJ probe of BNP took off like a rocket at the same time.
Then: “[B]y 30 April 2014, BNP’s rapidly worsening expectations about a settlement [with DOJ] were that the bank might be on the hook for a sum ‘far in excess’ of $1.1 billion.” The $1.1 billion sum had been a projected settlement amount back in sleepy February 2014.
In May 2014, the UK SFO received a trove of some 6,000 transaction documents it was demanding from BNP Paribas.
In the middle of the bank’s production period for those documents (6-20 May), “by 13 May 2014 [in the U.S.] the talk was of a settlement of at least $3 billion [i.e., BNP with DOJ]. On 30 May the figure had jumped to potentially over $10 billion.”
As the incumbent POTUS might say, “Son of a B.” That bank exposing a Zlochevsky money move was instantly being threatened – by the Obama administration DOJ – with the biggest fine of its kind in history.
And the denouement: “On 23 June 2014, the final tally of $8 to $9 billion [for BNP’s DOJ settlement] was previewed. The plea deal came in a week later at $8.97 billion.” That amount, although a bit less than the potential $10 billion cited a few weeks earlier, was at the time the largest such fine ever imposed.
The purpose for going over this again is to compare it with the whistleblower information recently revealed in the House’s investigation of the Biden family monetary dealings with foreign entities (see here and here as well). The whistleblower came forward due to his/her knowledge of tipping information received in 2020 from an FBI confidential human source (CHS).
The CHS’s information – the information relevant to this present matter – dates to a period running from 2014 to 2016, and concerns bribes of $5 million each, allegedly paid by a Burisma executive (probably Mykola Zlochevsky) to Hunter and Joe Biden.
Initial descriptions of the payments and their context seemed to focus on the period 2015-2016. That appears to be the timeframe when the information came to the CHS’s attention.
But it may not be when the alleged bribes were being discussed and/or were paid.
In an online posting introducing a 28 June 2023 letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) clarified that his committee is requesting relevant bank activity reports going back to April 2014. And that’s not just because Hunter joined the board of Burisma and started receiving compensation that month.
It’s because of this nugget cited in Comer’s postings: the whistleblower (apparently an FBI employee with knowledge of the case and the CHS information) “said they had email correspondence from May 2014 referencing a $5 million payment.”
While it’s not a slam-dunk that this $5 million payment is one of the ones the CHS gave a tip about (as recorded in the 2020 Form FD-1023 summary), it’s quite likely. There haven’t been other-source clues so far about “$5 million payments” relating to Burisma.
It’s also not clear from Comer’s posting whether the $5 million payment actually happened on or before the date of the May 2014 email (whose exact date we don’t have). Whatever mental images people have formed from the reporting so far, we don’t actually have a date for either of the alleged $5 million payments, as far as I can discern.
But: Comer’s focus on the April-May 2014 period dovetails perfectly with the BNP Paribas developments at the same time.
Whether Zlochevsky’s BNP account was involved in the $5 million payments or not, the aggregate information so far strongly bolsters the analysis that DOJ was ramping up threats to BNP at that particular time because Zlochevsky’s transactions were likely to involve the Bidens at the other end – or indeed actually did.
Alert readers will recall that the UK SFO got Zlochevsky’s funds frozen in April 2014. So Zlochevsky wouldn’t have been able to use money from that account to make $5 million payments in April or May 2014.
But as noted in my March 2022 article, the UK suddenly released Zlochevsky’s funds in a suspiciously abrupt, uncommunicative court ruling in December 2014. If the actual alleged payments to the Bidens were made after that, Zlochevsky could have used the money from his BNP Paribas account.
If they were made before that, any connection with that specific account would be more circuitous, and presumably based on Zlochevsky’s trail-covering scheme.
But the sudden release of his funds in December 2014 would still probably be part of a connected sequence of events in which the scales were tipped by the justice systems of both the UK and U.S. to put hooks in a banking giant that was doing business with the Bidens’ pals at Burisma.
Rep. Comer wanted the response from Treasury on the Burisma-related transactions by 12 July 2023; i.e. by Wednesday, two days ago. I haven’t seen an update on that production from Treasury. It will be fascinating to see if Comer does get the information, and what it says.
Trump, Shinzo Abe, Mar-a-Lago, and the continuing silly saga
This is so dumb it would be fun for it to surface for a well-deserved roasting in court. But because it’s asinine, someone will probably think better of doing anything more with it than just leaving it out there to continue figuring in breathless Twitter references.
The mainstream media have been working diligently to come up with seeming instances of Trump exhibiting classified material to uncleared people, especially foreign ones, at Mar-a-Lago. They seem to think they have something in the account of the dinner hosted by Trump for the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in February 2017.
This is something we were aware of at the time. But the media, though critical (without justification), hadn’t been primed to thunder against it as criminal, treasonous behavior at that point. What happened, in a brief summary, is this.
North Korea test-launched a missile during the Trump-Abe dinner. (It was morning, the following day, in the Far East at that point.)
Trump received notification of that event during the dinner. He proceeded to show Mr. Abe the intelligence he had just gotten. Other people in the immediate area may have been able to see what the two were looking at; at a minimum, other dinner guests heard what they were discussing.
Six-odd years later, a great caterwauling has arisen about this interlude.
And now your faithful correspondent is here to lay it to rest.
Japan is a U.S. treaty ally with which we routinely share exactly the intelligence President Trump was looking at. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan at the time, routinely saw the exact same intelligence from the exact same sources through his own national channels.
Not only is there nothing untoward in Trump letting Abe know about the update he’d just received, it would have been improper to not let the prime minister of our treaty ally Japan know about a quiver in the threat environment on Japan’s perimeter at the moment it happened.
Prime Minister Abe might want to dispatch his people to get an update on national alert status and what his own forces were doing. On the other hand, Abe’s traveling staff would have some reluctance to interrupt the dinner at which their VIP was a guest to give him intelligence updates, as if it were a dramatic national security emergency.
Trump did exactly the right thing keeping our treaty ally Abe collegially informed. It was proper defense and security procedure and good statesmanship. We should hope that any U.S. president would do the same. (Reporting at the time quoted Sean Spicer saying Trump and Abe discussed coordination of their respective national statements about the missile launch and that that was the bulk of the chat among them and their aides.)
There was no need to do it in a SCIF, in this case. South Korea always reports North Korean missile launches in open press within moments of the event. Trump’s advisors were well aware of that. The entire attention-paying world is going to know about North Korean missile launches very quickly.
The president and prime minister had no reason to go huddle in a SCIF somewhere to receive this update. It would be public knowledge before they even got to the SCIF. No sources or methods would have been compromised by discussing the launch itself briefly but openly at the dinner table at Mar-a-Lago. The account of the event indicates that’s what happened. The level of disruption of a social dinner was quite appropriate to the nature and gravity of the missile launch.
This is all my informed opinion, of course. The actual arbiter of what was the right thing to do in this situation was the duly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump.
Short stack
Random updates. The first one is about President Biden’s authorization order for up to 3,000 reservists to be called up for duty related to the U.S. posture in Europe vis-à-vis the Ukraine situation.
For the time being, I will just quote some email correspondence I sent on Friday, and add some tweets from Thursday night. The situation – authorizing individual reservists to augment Operation Atlantic Resolve (see below) – is unusual enough to have set off some concern-jangling on Capitol Hill. And the Pentagon did nothing to make the move clearer or more reassuring in a press event Thursday.
But I don’t think this is a move on any rapid timeline (and probably not a move at all) to involve U.S. forces in combat in Ukraine.
The email quote:
With this order Biden is authorizing deployment of up to 3000 reservists who could be used to augment full, deployed units under Operation Atlantic Resolve. The Op (OAR) was initiated in 2014 by Obama as a measure to bolster NATO within the European Deterrence Initiative. The EDI is the US contribution to a NATO augmentation policy that rotates troops to Eastern Europe over and above the baseline maintained there by NATO.
OAR formalized the US response to the original invasion of Ukraine in 2014 as a named contingency operation with a funding line. It went right past everyone in 2022 that our beef-up in Eastern Europe after the Feb 2022 invasion was done under OAR authority and funding.
This authorization is the first one for selected reserve and individual ready reserve augmentation under OAR. It’s also very vaguely worded as to what the reserves would be deployed for. That’s causing suspicion and concern on Capitol Hill. I’m in wait-and-see mode on whether the concern is justified or not. The Pentagon briefing on Thursday took some questions about it, and the briefers said the order won’t expand the US footprint in Eastern Europe.
It’s not clear that means exactly what it sounds like, because the forces deployed for OAR now (about 6000 troops) are deployed as units, not grab-bags of individual reservists. A unit (say, a light company-size unit) doesn’t rotate out and get replaced by 250 individual reservists. The unit has an operational mission; 250 individuals aren’t organized for that. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has explained what the plan is.
That said, we can preview at least that the number of US troops in OAR could go as high as 9000, while there would be no formal addition of operational missions to the beefed-up number. The SELRES and IRR resource pool does NOT include the kind of skill sets that would indicate new combat mission deployments. The reservists could also deploy to support centers in the US (intel, cyber, logistics, etc) as dedicated OAR assets. Some might also go to US and NATO HQ centers in Germany or Italy rather than lower-echelon OAR units. (US Army V Corps is the command unit for OAR, by the way. I think it’s deployed in Lithuania. Have to double check on that.)
We’ll see. Some in Congress are gearing up to press for a fuller explanation on this. The concern obviously is that reservists could be sent to Ukraine in handfuls or onesies; e.g., for “training.”
Some tweets:
Also this past week, the G7 announced “security guarantees” for Ukraine, apparently in lieu of NATO offering specific ones.
I got a number of off-point responses to my somewhat sarcastic, rhetorical question about this.
(The “Psycho killer” allusion is to a song by the Talking Heads from the late 1970s, for any who may not be culturally aware in that regard.)
In the tweet, I wasn’t asking what guarantees the G7 was offering. Some of the Twitter replies tried to outline them in general.
But I was asking why the G7, which is not a security-guarantees body, was committing its members to a list of security guarantees.
This is how you back into stupid wars while you aren’t paying attention: by running around trying to score optics points through organizations that have no business making implicit commitments. The G7 is a consultative body. It’s not an alliance, with provisions and rules for issuing security guarantees. It exists to talk a good game and put out nice pictures of big-league heads of government in full-frontal cooperation. The more specific its “commitments” get, the less they mean.
If that’s a bad thing, it needs to be fixed consciously and with deliberation. Before signing up to let the G7 start standing in for the NATO alliance, everyone needs to agree that’s what’s happening. And if the G7 issues security guarantees, it had better know beforehand where the force to back them up is coming from.
Finally, on the cocaine that tootled around the White House on a supernatural spree of some kind, Daniel Greenfield of FrontPage and the Sultan Knish blog seems to have the final answer.
I found that compelling.
Bonus musing on the still-changing story of the little coke baggie that could.
Feature image: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Felix Garza Jr. (Via Wikimedia Commons)
The Optimistic Conservative 