The Allegedly Murderous Oligarch, the Duped CIA Chief, and the Trumpkin
Who was behind a mysterious fake hearing in the basement of the U.S. Capitol?
BETSY WOODRUFF
03.27.18 5:04 AM ET
On Sept. 25, 2017, a windowless room in the basement of the Capitol Building became the site of one of Washington’s more mysterious recent events.
On hand: an investor who was once unsuccessfully sued for allegedly helping murder his own boss, a former congressman from the Florida panhandle, and a former Trump campaign staffer. One of two Ukrainian media outlets to cover the event is owned by an old associate of Paul Manafort’s—a man who federal prosecutors allege to be an “upper-echelon associate of Russian organized crime.” Oh, and the former director of the CIA was involved.
The former CIA director told The Daily Beast he wouldn’t have gotten involved if he had known what was going on. One of the American lobbyists said the event was used for propaganda. The guy who got sued over his boss’s death? He now takes credit for the whole shebang.
-----------------THE BANK TAKEOVER-----------------
This story starts in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 19, 2014. That’s when a woman named Valeriya Gontareva became the chair of the country’s powerful central bank. Ukrainian politics is rife with corruption, especially by American standards, and is dominated by the country’s powerful oligarchs. As chair of the national bank, Gontareva made a host of changes to the country’s financial system—and some powerful enemies.
One of the biggest changes she oversaw was a government takeover of the country’s biggest commercial bank, Privatbank. The oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky (who The Wall Street Journal once described as “feisty”) co-founded it. When Gontareva presided over the bank’s nationalization, its accounts were missing more than $5 billion, according to the Financial Times, in large part because the bank lent so much money to people with connections to Kolomoisky.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-allegedly-murderous-oligarch-the-duped-cia-chief-and-the-trumpkin