Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who fell ill on a flight to Moscow in late August, has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of orchestrating his assassination, the UK Guardian reported Thursday.
Navalny argued that only Putin could have authorized the use of the nerve agent novichok, a regular fixture of Russian political killings. German doctors found traces of novichok in Navalny’s system while treating him for his illness after the opposition leader’s team arranged for his departure from Russia.
Navalny, Russia’s foremost anti-Putin opposition figure, spent 32 days in Berlin’s Charite hospital after allegedly ingesting the Russian nerve agent on his flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Russian doctors initially treated Navalny in a Siberian hospital and were hesitant to move him to Germany for better care, despite the urgings of European governments.
In his first interview since his release from the hospital, Navalny told the German newspaper Der Spiegel that Putin must have ordered his assassination, saying, “I assert that Putin was behind the crime, and I have no other explanation for what happened.”
Navalny said that only Putin could have given final approval for the use of novichok in any operation, insisting, “Only three people can give orders to put into action ‘active measures’ and use novichok. Those who know Russian states of affairs also know: FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, foreign intelligence service head Sergey Naryshkin and the director of GRU cannot make such a decision without Putin’s orders.”
Speaker of the Russian Duma Vyacheslav Volodin responded to the interview by claiming the poisoning was a Western intelligence operation and that Navalny had Putin to thank for his survival, according to the Guardian.
“Putin saved his life. If what happened to him was a specially directed operation by Western security services then this accusation fits with the logic. He was saved by everyone, from the pilots and doctors to the president,” he said.
The Kremlin vociferously denied Navalny’s accusations. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described them as “insulting and unacceptable.” He went on to accuse Navalny of cooperating with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent, is believed to have been developed by Russia during the Cold War. It famously failed to kill former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal in 2018 in another instance widely considered an attempted assassination by the Putin regime. The German government announced in early September it had obtained “unequivocal proof” that Navalny had ingested novichok, a claim the Russians denied.
Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, responded to the novichok announcement via Twitter, saying, “To poison Navalny with Novichok in 2020 would be exactly the same as leaving an autograph at a crime scene, like this one.” The image attached showed Vladimir Putin’s signature.
The Russian government claims third parties are able to replicate novichok and use it in “false-flag” operations with the aim of discrediting the Kremlin. Outside of Russia, the chemical agent was produced in a Soviet-era lab in Uzbekistan, but the government reached a deal to dismantle it with U.S. assistance in 1999, the New York Times reported.
Though initially unwilling to investigate the alleged poisoning, the Russian government announced in early September that Russian police were doing so, attempting to build a “timeline of events” leading up to Navalny’s flight; they still dismissed the German allegations of novichok poisoning.
The Russian government continues to deny any involvement in the incident. Last month, Peskov claimed the Navalny team’s story included “absurd inconsistencies” in the allegations surrounding the affair, specifically pointing to the absence of the bottle through which Navalny supposedly ingested the novichok.
“We cannot explain this, because this bottle, if it ever existed, had been taken somewhere in Germany or elsewhere. This means that an object that could serve as evidence of poisoning has been shipped away. This is yet another question: why and so on,” Peskov claimed.
Why Trump was
never investigated as a Russian agent
David Cay Johnston
Donald Trump never was investigated to determine if he is a
Russian agent or asset according to an explosive book published Tuesday by a
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter.
In Trump v. The
United States,
Michael S. Schmidt reports Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team was
barred from investigating whether Trump, who has many known connections to
Russian criminals and who says he trusts Putin over American intelligence
agencies, was a Russian agent.
Mueller's team was allowed to look into obstruction of justice
by Trump, Schmidt writes in the e-book that went on sale today. Team Mueller
found numerous examples but was barred by Justice Department policy from
indicting the president.
The Mueller team tried, unsuccessfully, to get Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein to allow a counterintelligence investigation into
Trump's Kremlin dealings. Rosenstein refused, Schmidt reports.
A counterintelligence investigation into Trump as a possible
Russian agent was ordered in spring 2017 by Andrew G. McCabe when he was acting
FBI director.
McCabe told 60 Minutes that he ordered an
investigation in May 2017 into whether Trump "had been working on behalf
of Russia against American interests." He also said he feared that without
his written formal record in FBI files the case would be made to disappear.
FBI shut down
The FBI counterintelligence investigation was shut down before
any substantial inquiry was made, Schmidt reports.
These and many more stunning revelations, along with new
evidence indicating that Trump is a continuing threat to American national
security, are based on extensive interviews with those involved and more than a
thousand pages of government documents that reporter Schmidt says no one else
outside of the government has read.
The book raises serious questions about how and why Rosenstein,
as deputy attorney general, shielded Trump. Why did Rosenstein not want law
enforcement and counterintelligence officials to know the full extent of
Trump's relationship with Russians, especially Russian President Vladimir
Putin?
It is a question Schmidt does not answer. If there is a
non-nefarious answer it may that human vulnerability was the cause. Rosenstein
had long experience as a federal prosecutor, little as a counterintelligence
lawyer.
Russian money
Moscow has courted Trump since at least 1987 and Trump has done
numerous deals with Russian oligarchs that make no sense in business terms but
make perfect sense when viewed as money laundering and payoffs.
Russian money is suspected to be behind the massive loans which
Deutsche Bank made to Trump when no other major bank would do business with
him. Deutsche Bank has been fined more than $622 million for laundering money
for Russians.
Schmidt paints a portrait of a president with no understanding
of or regard for our Constitution, federal laws or limits on his authority, a
portrait consistent with my own Trump books. Schmidt shows that in the Oval
Office Trump often took the side of Russia against American interests.
Trump insensitivity
"Trump had a profound insensitivity to how his actions
would be perceived," Schmidt writes, "and was often indifferent to
law or precedent."
Candidate Trump said he didn't
trust American
intelligence agencies.
As president, standing next to Putin in Helsinki in 2018, he
declared that he takes Putin at his word.
One day later, in a formal White House statement, Trump walked back
his remarks,
though I and many other Trump watchers took that as only one of his many
attempts to muddy clear waters so people would be unsure about his conduct.
Trump has made clear he believes there is nothing wrong with
conspiring with a hostile foreign power if it helps keep him in office. In June
this year, Trump told ABC News, in a lengthy interview, that he
would accept help from foreign governments such as the Kremlin in the current
election.
Accepting election help of any kind from any foreign government
or person is a criminal offense.
Author's background
Reporter Schmidt has solid credentials. He has broken numerous
stories that relied on law enforcement, political and intelligence sources.
While Team Trump denounced many of those stories when they broke, the reporting
held up as future events unfolded.
In 2016, Schmidt broke the story that Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton used a personal email account for official business (as did several of
her predecessors).
He won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that James Comey, the FBI
director Trump fired in 2017, created contemporaneous memos of his one-on-one
meetings with Trump. Comey's memos include the story of Trump demanding a
pledge of personal loyalty, which Comey refused.
Schmidt also shared in a Pulitzer Prize for exposing sexual
predator Harvey Weinstein and broke major stories about sexual harassment and
secret financial settlements with victims that resulted in Bill O'Reilly losing
his job as a Fox News host.
The revelations in Schmidt's book completely recast the 418-page
Mueller report and destroy Trump's already noxious claims that the Mueller
report vindicated him. It also helps explain the mendacious declaration by
Attorney General William P. Barr in March 2019 that the Mueller report cleared
Trump. Barr also wrote a four-page memo that turned out to be
highly misleading, guiding people away from understanding the serious
wrongdoing Mueller's team uncovered, especially in obstructing justice.
A question never asked
A significant theme of the Schmidt book is that investigators
were not only blocked from investigating whether Trump is disloyal to America,
but that at times the Mueller investigators didn't ask the right questions of
witnesses.
One example involves John Kelly, the retired general who became
Trump's second White House chief of staff.
The president asked Kelly to pledge personal loyalty to Trump,
Schmidt reveals. Kelly said he would be loyal to our Constitution, pretty much
what Comey also said, Schmidt writes.
Mueller's team never learned of this, Schmidt writes, because
they didn't ask.
That such an obvious question – were you asked to pledge
personal loyalty to Donald Trump the way FBI Director Comey was? – was not
posed raises questions about what else within the restricted purview of the
Mueller team also was missed.
Did Team Mueller ask Rosenstein, whose actions shielded Trump,
whether he was asked for a pledge of personal loyalty? Who else was asked to
pledge personal loyalty, something we expect of dictators but never in American
presidents? Who did pledge to Trump? Who refused? We don't know.
These are questions that should now be pursued by the House
Intelligence Committee, which you can be sure will inquire about many things in
the Schmidt book.
Kremlin interests
There was reason aplenty for the FBI to open a
counterintelligence investigation of Trump and those around him, extraordinary
as that would be.
One reason was the retention of Michael Flynn, another retired
general, after Trump was warned by Sally Yates, who briefly served as acting
attorney general, that he was subject to blackmail and unfit to know sensitive
secrets. Trump then fired Yates, a career federal prosecutor with a
distinguished record.
Another concern involved the Trump campaign enthusiastically
accepting a written offer of help from the Kremlin in June 2016. For the next
13 months, Trump's oldest son Don Jr., who received the emailed offer, lied and
denied. He said, falsely, that no help was ever offered or provided by Moscow.
Why did Don Jr. lie then and, when The New York
Times got the emails forcing
his hand, did he mischaracterize their nature?
The emails resulted, just days later, in a Trump Tower
meeting of
Kremlin agents, at least one with deep ties to Russian intelligence agencies,
and Don Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign manager Paul Manafort.
The Mueller Team never was able to learn exactly what happened in part because
Don Jr.'s lawyers indicated that the president's son would assert his Fifth
Amendment right to avoid testifying because he might incriminate himself.
Just the fact that Manafort, now a convicted felon, was paid 10s
of millions of dollars by a Kremlin-friendly Ukraine leader and that Manafort
managed the Trump campaign for free at a time when he was in serious financial
trouble, would have justified a major FBI counterintelligence investigation
into Trump and his campaign.
McGahn role
Schmidt devotes a lot of words to Don McGahn, who as White House
counsel was there to serve the Office of the President, not the man himself.
McGahn, either directly or through intermediaries, appears to be a key Schmidt
source.
Schmidt writes that McGahn apparently knows a secret that could
"drive Trump from the White House." McGahn is trying to avoid
testifying before Congress about what went on behind closed doors at the White
House.
McGahn, Schmidt writes, was "one of the few Trump advisers…
who regularly stood up to the president, telling him when his ideas were
harebrained and screaming back at him when he unloaded nasty digs on senior
staff."
Schmidt says what was missing from the Mueller report about
Trump and Russia sparked his interest. He writes that people who have seen the
full report – the public version is heavily redacted – told him there is
nothing about Trump's possible allegiance to Russia or other improper
associations. That knowledge made Schmidt even more curious about the lack of a
counterintelligence investigation when there was abundant reason to undertake
one.
The Trump attacks on McCabe, Comey's deputy at the FBI, raise
questions about what the White House knew and when about McCabe initiating an
intelligence inquiry. That is an issue sure to be investigated by the House
Intelligence Committee led by Rep. Adam Schiff of California.
Before he himself was fired, Attorney General Jeff Sessions
fired McCabe two
days short of eligibility for a full pension. That was seen by many as a sign
that anyone in government who crossed Trump was fair game and crossing Trump
could be costly. It came out later that McCabe also had ordered a criminal
investigation into whether Sessions
lied during
his Senate confirmation hearing, which may also have influenced Sessions in
such a petty action of firing McCabe on a day that would deny him his full
pension.
Getting rid of McCabe and dirtying him up in public on specious
grounds takes on new significance with the publication of the Schmidt book.
Only by neutralizing McCabe, removing him and discrediting him could Trump
evade the greatest risk he faced — a counterintelligence investigation into his
Russian dealings.
The truncated FBI investigation needs to be resumed
unimpeded immediately.