Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, with strong ties to Putin, pens op-ed for Daily Caller s

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The ever-changing “Russia narrative” in American politics is today’s “Wag the Dog” scenario. Technology and the disintegration of evidence-based journalism permit a surprisingly small number of individuals to destroy bilateral or multilateral relations. Their motivation in shifting from an inconvenient reality into their desired reality is power and military-industrial commercial interests. What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born. President Theodore Roosevelt once cautioned: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task.” The distractions no longer can mask these “unholy alliances.” The wife of a central architect of the Department of Justice’s “Russia narrative” secretly worked for the dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted — according to his own congressional admissions — to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, to attack Russia and to “embarrass” me and cause trouble for the company I founded. This inconvenient disclosure necessitated a new story line. Former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and CNN commentator Donna Brazile attacked the memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on television as “the weaponization of classified information.” It is ironic that someone who once ran the organization that allegedly rigged the primary nomination process and who was fired from CNN for allegedly rigging a presidential debate is now producing “Russian-rigging” stories.

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The distractions no longer can mask these “unholy alliances.” The wife of a central architect of the Department of Justice’s “Russia narrative” secretly worked for the dossier-peddling Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted — according to his own congressional admissions — to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, to attack Russia and to “embarrass” me and cause trouble for the company I founded. This inconvenient disclosure necessitated a new story line. Former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and CNN commentator Donna Brazile attacked the memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on television as “the weaponization of classified information.” It is ironic that someone who once ran the organization that allegedly rigged the primary nomination process and who was fired from CNN for allegedly rigging a presidential debate is now producing “Russian-rigging” stories. Yet on March 16, 2017, Daniel Jones — himself a team member of Fusion GPS, self-described former FBI agent and, as we now know from the media, an ex-Feinstein staffer — met with my lawyer, Adam Waldman, and described Fusion as a “shadow media organization helping the government,” funded by a “group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros.” My lawyer testified these facts to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov. 3. Mr. Soros is, not coincidentally, also the funder of two “ethics watchdog” NGOs (Democracy 21 and CREW) attacking Rep. Nunes’ committee memo. A former Obama State Department official, Nuland, has been recently outed as another shadow player, reviewing and disseminating Fusion’s dossier, and reportedly, hundreds of other dossiers over a period of years. “Deep State-proud loyalists” apparently was a Freudian slip, not a joke. Invented narratives — not “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but rather just from a couple of people, cloaked in the very same hypocritical rhetoric of “freedom” and “democracy” that those are actively undermining — impede internationally shared efforts on the world’s most pressing, real issues, like global health, climate change and the future of energy.

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All the people on this Magnitsky list —Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Suleiman Kerimov—have huge international operations. They have big equity investments abroad. They have Western investors investing in their operations in Russia. And everything now grinds to a halt, William Browder said, adding that "the main beneficiaries of this whole thing are international law firms that are now crawling all over all of these companies and all of their counterparties. Everybody’s quickly trying to figure out how to not be in violation of U.S. Treasury sanctions."

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