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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Seagrove who wrote (1065828)	4/18/2018 10:39:40 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577194

Sean Hannity’s former director helped launch a pro-Kremlin propaganda network “Tsargrad” — and fell in love with Putin #Russia t.co Julia Davis? @JuliaDavisNews Sean Hannity’s former director helped launch a pro-Kremlin propaganda network — and fell in love with Putin TRAVIS GETTYS 17 APR 2018 AT 14:06 ET Jack Harnick (YouTube) One of Sean Hannity’s former directors — who claims an instrumental role in developing Fox News — moved to Russia to help a sanctioned oligarch start up a right-wing TV network. Jack Hanick, whose now-deleted LinkedIn profile shows he began working for Fox News three months before its first broadcast aired in October 1996, left the network in August 2011 and helped launch the Orthodox Christian network Tsargrad TV three year later. The religious network’s founder, Konstantin Malofeev, is a Kremlin-connected oligarch who’s been under U.S. sanctions since 2014 for financing pro-Russian separatist rebels in Crimea. “Throughout the Ukraine crisis, Mr. Malofeev, [now 43], has emerged as a key figure linking the pro-Russia forces on the ground in Ukraine and the political establishment in Moscow,” reported the Financial Times. Despite the sanctions, Hannity’s former director Hanick — who has since been acceptedinto the Russian Orthodox Church with his family — to help launch the network. “The nod to Fox is not accidental,” Financial Times reported in 2015. “To get Tsargrad TV up and running, Malofeev hired Jack Hanick, one of Fox News’s founding producers, whom he met when they were both speakers at a Moscow conference on morality in the media.” The former Fox News founding employee was immediately impressed by the oligarch. “‘They put us all in the room and I thought, another speaker, great,'” Hanick told the newspaper. “’He seemed like a very humble guy. I had no idea he had a lot of power or political pull. I’m still not sure what he has.’” Malofeev has leveraged his faith and conservative values to accumulate substantial personal wealth as founder of private equity firm Marshall Capital Partners, and he made much of that money as an investor in the Russian telecoms giant Rostelecom. He paid back favors to the Kremlin by making Tsargrad TV an overt supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his “nationalist” policies — and Hanick played an instrumental role. Hanick became an outspoken supporter of Putin, traveled to a 2013 event in Moscow with other American anti-LGBT activists to praise Russia’s ban on gay “propaganda” — which he later blamed for a breakdown in relations between the U.S. and the Kremlin. “Russians understand that the U.S. has not fought a war on its soil since the civil war,” Hanick warned in a 2015 column for the Observer. “If new hostilities start, Russia will not let the war be a proxy war where the U.S. supplies weapons and advisors and lets others do the ‘boots on the ground’ combat. Russia will take the war to the U.S.” Hanick left Tsargrad TV — which has featured InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and was the only Russian TV network to cover Trump adviser Carter Pages’ 2016 speech in Moscow — about three years ago but continued working as a consultant to the media company. The former Fox News executive was invited to celebrate Trump’s 2016 election in Moscow by Kremlin propagandist Konstantin Rykov — who boasted on Facebook that he helped recruit the “Apprentice” star in 2012 to run for president as part of an “insane” plan to reshape the global order. Hanick can be seen celebrating Trump’s election in a video of the event, where he praises Russia for embracing the Christian values he says the U.S. has abandoned. “America has been founded on Christian principles, and now America is moving away from Christianity, so it’s losing its moral core, fiber that set it right for centuries,” Hanick says in video from the event. “Now Russia, on the other hand, has been embracing orthodox Christian. This has been a major change. Russia is moving toward Christianity, the U.S. is moving away from Christianity. Even though (Hillary) Clinton professes to be a Christian, all of her policies are moving away from those positions.” rawstory.com Scott Stedman? @ScottMStedman Feb 26 Tsargrad’s existence oddly coincided with Trump’s run and recently shut down. They reported on Trump almost every day and covered Carter Page’s Moscow speech in full. Tsargrad had Leonid Reshetnikov on screen a ton. He is the “former” Russian spy whose think tank drew up the plans to sway the 2016 US election. It’s a bizarre situation all around. Hanick’s entire goal seems to be spread his Christian values, all while working with a terrorism financier. Malofeev even attended Hanick’s reception into the Russian Orthodox Church. Hanick attended @rykov’s 2016 election night party. He denounced the US for moving away from Judeo-Christian values, while praising Trump and Putin’s Russia. The video is surreal: A bunch of Russian's trashing the United States and then an American speaking English. Hanick: The United States is "losing its moral accord and fiber.."

To: James Seagrove who wrote (1065828)	4/18/2018 10:47:37 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577194

Good Grief. From the 70s thru the 90s, the bosses of Russian Organized crime in the US ran their crime families from an office in Michael Cohen's Uncle's social club >>>https://t.co/aRsNAgZggG via @TPM Good Grief. Cohen’s World Gets Mobbier The Closer I Look By Josh Marshall \| April 17, 2018 5:34 pm Yana Paskova/Getty Images North America In today’s podcast, we look into the background of Michael Cohen. TPM first reported last year that Cohen was actually a childhood friend of Felix Sater, whose father was himself a reputed capo in the Mogilevich organized crime syndicate, said to be Russia’s largest and most dangerous. Filling out this picture of how Cohen fell into this milieu we’ve always been focused on the fact that Cohen’s uncle, Morton Levine, owned and ran a Brooklyn social club, El Caribe, which was a well-known meeting spot for members of Italian and Russian organized crime families in the 1970s and 1980s. (Levine, a medical doctor has never been charged with a crime.) But now it turns out there’s a bit more to this story. I came across this in a January AP article about Boris Nayfeld, one-time organized crime boss in Brooklyn who now wants to go home to Russia to start a new life. Nayfeld is 70 and he just finished his latest prison sentence. The whole story is a bit low energy and a sad sack in a nonetheless menacing and predatory way. According to published reports, in the 70s and early 80s, the boss of the Russian mob in New York (and for practical purposes the whole U.S) was a man named Evsei Agron. Things ended badly for Agron when was gunned down in a mob hit in 1985. After Agron was assassinated, his organization was taken over by under-boss Marat Balagula. Authorities believed Balagula was behind Agron’s killing. But he was never charged with the crime. Balagula ran things until 1991 when he was convicted of gasoline bootlegging. Nayfeld had been the bodyguard and enforcer for both Agron and Balagula, one would say more successfully in the latter case than the former. He took over the organization when Balagula went to prison. What I didn’t realize until now is that both Agron and his successor Balagula ran their operations out of an office in the El Caribe social club. So the El Caribe wasn’t just a mob hangout. From the 70s through the 90s at least, the bosses of the Russian mafia in the U.S. literally ran their crime organization out of the El Caribe. So Michael Cohen’s uncle Morton Levine’s social club was the headquarters of Russian organized crime in the U.S. That’s quite something. The AP article includes another detail. According to Levine, who is apparently still alive, all his nieces and nephews owned shares of the El Caribe and still do. Levine told the AP that Michael Cohen owned his stake in the club until Donald Trump was elected President when he “gave up his stake.” That was probably wise! It was also very recent. One of the abiding questions about Cohen is how he became so deeply enmeshed in the Ukrainian and Russian emigre communities from such an early age and moved so early into businesses heavily infiltrated by organized crime. He married a Ukrainian immigrant whose father got him into the taxi business and himself had at least one conviction for money laundering. Cohen was raised in the Five Towns area of Long Island, not far from Brighton Beach as the crow flies – just across Jamaica Bay – but worlds away culturally. The El Caribe seems like the logical locus which brought Cohen into this world. talkingpointsmemo.com Message 31573749