Buzzfeed has just published a huge article which reveals that Felix Sater’s past is a lot more complicated than previously known. And, while it’s still mucho shady, he may not be quite the asshole so many of us thought. Prepare to be astounded.
The Asset: How A Player In The Trump-Russia Scandal Led A Double Life As An American Spy
Felix Sater has been cast as a Russian mafioso, a career criminal, and a key business associate of President Donald Trump — but he spent more than two decades as an intelligence asset who helped the US government track terrorists and mobsters. “Greed is my go-to weapon.”
Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold have managed to uncover a lot more about Sater’s cooperation with the feds, through many, many sources in Intelligence and the DoJ, and Felix Sater himself, who is eager to set the record straight. He’s been pilloried in the press and online — some of it justified — and he wants people to know that he was serving his country. Whilst looking for deals, of course.
Kossack YankInUK published a post on this earlier but it appears to be scrolling into oblivion so i wanted to keep the awareness up. While some of you will be loath to give him the benefit of the doubt — and why should you? — it’s clear that he has done an awful lot for US Law Enforcement and Intelligence. This Buzzfeed article is not to be missed.
But i’ve also got another motive. I posted something last April which examined the allegations that Sater had been a confidential source of the FBI and CIA, and how Trump might be banking on that in order to remain untouchable (if only in his own mind).
Trump's Inoculation? Carter Page, the Russians, the FBI, and Felix Sater
As usual, Trump denies the obvious, even going so far as to suggest that his kids were the ones who were who conducted business with Sater. Trump is a liar and a con man, and we shouldn't expect anything other than this type of prevaricating.
But, what if Trump knew that Sater was an FBI snitch? That would throw a new light on all of this. Because it would suggest that Trump felt he had an ace in the hole—a licence to kill, one might say.
But, are the rumours true? Was Sater informing for the FBI?
In that diary, i quote Josh Marshall, who’d written about this the month earlier.
What The CIA and FBI Knew About Trump Before 2016
The US government went and continues to go to extreme lengths to keep Sater's cooperation and work for the government a secret. Until quite recently, it went to great lengths to keep Sater's conviction itself, and all documents related to it, a secret. It took the extraordinarily rare step of managing the entire adjudication of Sater's crimes in secret, with all documents kept secret. Federal judges even pursued what might reasonably be called a vendetta against two lawyers who used leaked information about Sater's case in lawsuits growing out of a failed Trump building venture, Trump Fort Lauderdale, as well as lawsuits on behalf of victims in the original pump and dump scheme.
The federal government also kept Sater on as a cooperating witness for fully 11 years before finally sentencing him in 2009 for the plea deal in 1998. In a $42 million securities fraud case, Sater received no jail time, was not forced to pay restitution and was fined a mere $25,000. In other words, he walked away from the crime with close to no punishment. The controversy over the government's secrecy in the Sater case, as well as his minimal punishment, got enough attention that it eventually bubbled up from the criminal courts to the governmental and political realm. During her 2015 confirmation hearings, Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked about the propriety of the government's cooperation with Sater, in part because she had been the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where Sater's case was adjudicated.
I also quoted from a complaint filed by DoJ on January 23, 2016, in the case of two Russians who were indicted on espionage charges. Although much of the focus of the complaint was on Carter Page (“Male-1”), there is also an interesting bit about a confidential source (“CS-1”) whom i contend was Felix Sater. The original document can be found here:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. EVGENY BURYAKOV, a/k/a "Zhenya," IGOR SPORYSHEV, and VICTOR PODOBNYY, Defendants. [PDF]
Her’s Josh again, on how it probably wasn’t just us snowflakes who were freaking out about Trump’s uncanny ability to keep moving forward in the election.
It seems quite probable that as Trump moved closer to the presidency in the early months of 2016, alarm bells started to go off in the FBI and the CIA, as the relevance of business partnerships with Sater and reliance on capital out of the former Soviet Union suddenly became dramatically more relevant. Again, as I said, as long as Donald Trump was just Donald Trump this didn't matter that much. There's plenty of dirty money sloshing around the New York real estate world. But when it started to seem plausible that he might become the next President, this would start to be a matter of great concern.
No doubt.
In any case, you can take it to the bank that some of those defense lawyers will be making hay out of this. It won’t be long now before the conspiracy theories fly — that Sater’s communication with Cohen, that they should work with Putin to get Trump elected, was a joint DoJ/CIA operation, run by Jessica Lynch and George Soros.