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The WSJ on the latest revelations (paywalled version) in the neverending RussiaGate Saga:
Quoting the most relevant parts:
Yet the source of some of the most critical allegations in that dossier and how they reached Mr. Steele have remained a mystery.
A Wall Street Journal investigation provides an answer: a 40-year-old Russian public-relations executive named Olga Galkina fed notes to a friend and former schoolmate who worked for Mr. Steele. The Journal relied on interviews, law-enforcement records, declassified documents and the identification of Ms. Galkina by a former top U.S. national security official.
In 2016, Ms. Galkina was working in Cyprus at an affiliate of XBT Holding SA, a web-services company best known for its Webzilla internet hosting unit. XBT is owned by Russian internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev.
That summer, she received a request from an employee of Mr. Steele to help unearth potentially compromising information on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump ’s links to Russia, according to people familiar with the matter. Ms. Galkina was friends with the employee, Igor Danchenko, since their school days in Perm, a Russian provincial city near the Ural mountains.
Olga Galkina’s Facebook profile is still up. She has something of a “reputation” in Moscow hack circles.
Oh shit, I KNOW the girl WSJ just named as the source of Steele dossier. (And yeah, she’s probably made the whole thing up)
— Roman Volobuev (@romanvolobuev) October 29, 2020
Having grown up and finished university in Perm, Olga Galkina moved to Moscow in the early 2000s, where she worked as a parliamentary correspondent for state news agency RIA, after which she became a PR director for the governor of Saratov oblast and the Vice-Mayor of Saratov, and a smattering of other PR and media jobs.
She moved to Cyprus in the mid-2010s, where she continued doing various PR work for Russian entities.
While contributing to the dossier, the people familiar with the matter said, Ms. Galkina was in a messy dispute with her employer, Webzilla’s parent company.
Relations soured to the point where her manager went to authorities in the Cypriot city of Limassol in November of that year and filed a statement with police. According to the statement, which was reviewed by the Journal, Ms. Galkina was chronically showing up late to work, sometimes appearing drunk.
The manager told police that an acquaintance of Ms. Galkina had told him he would face deep trouble, including possible death, unless he paid €10,000 ($11,740) in compensation, according to the statement, which was confirmed by a Cypriot official and a person who attended its recording. Because the manager never filed a formal complaint, the matter was dropped, the official said.
In November 2016, Ms. Galkina was fired. Weeks later, she implicated Webzilla and Mr. Gubarev in the hacking, according to people familiar with the matter.
This is even more “powerful” than the infamous Trump Tower meeting with the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was at least was an energetic lawyer and grifter in local Moscow region politics.
Alcoholic Olga was basically just a disgruntled worker taking out her anger on a former employer through an old schoolmate paid for by the British spy Christopher Steele paid for by Fusion GPS paid for by the DNC itself.
Mr. Danchenko told the FBI that the task was “outside the normal scope of work and it wasn’t completely comfortable” for him. To find such information on Mr. Trump, he turned to his “social circle” in Russia, according to declassified FBI notes of the meeting.
Mr. Danchenko told the FBI that a school friend, referred to in heavily redacted FBI notes as “Source 3,” had provided him with information for Mr. Steele “across a wide range of topics,” and stood as the dossier’s most important contributor. The former high-ranking U.S. national-security official told The Wall Street Journal that the source in question was Ms. Galkina.
Slapstick as all of this is, it nonetheless dominated the American political agenda for the entirety of Trump’s term, earnestly and fervently believed in by the vast majority of both Democrats and the American elites:
… torpedoing any hopes of a reset in US-Russian relations, creating a founding pillar of America’s Woke religion (with Russia playing the role of saboteurs in the USSR and Putler as the embodiment of Satan in this world), and perhaps ultimately dooming Trump’s Presidency (it’s not as if this latest news is going to change any minds; much like previous cardinal disruptions to the narrative, it’s not trending anywhere on Twitter or Reddit).
Then again, perhaps it is just as well that this happened. Might be a good idea to keep one’s distance from a country whose new religion is being written by the likes of Fentanyl Floyd and Alcoholic Olga.
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Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Based and vodka pilled, in true traditional Russian way.
The mainstream approval of BLM will disappear if Biden wins. Biden will create some mostly superficial program to assist the black population. The overarching political narrative will be healing the divide. All Republicans will jump ship. Anyone still supporting BLM will be considered a divisive useful idiot for Putler. George Floyd will be forgotten.
If the DNC manages to steal the election, there are huge risks for Russia. The biggest is the Biden family’s personal financial interest in Burisma and Ukraine. They have the arrogance to attempt a military solution to “Liberate Crimea”. Call it Maiden v2.0.
In the much more likely scenario. Trump will win. Ongoing investigations into FISA abuse, Hunter Biden’s dealings with China, etc. will discredit the RussiaGate narrative. This will open the door to the reset hopes that tried to surface in 2016/17.
Both Putin and Trump are troubled by Erdogan’s provocative actions in Syria and the Eastern Med. This is a strong opening to create visible cooperation. The Fake Stream Media will have great difficulty twisting such a deal into a negative story.
PEACE 😇
Well, well.
The Vice Mayor of Saratov and the Governor were the same person, Dimitry Ayatskov. Someone shot the previous Vice Mayor to ensure the post was vacant. The previous Governor made way shortly after. She was building him up PR wise because Yelstin wanted Ayatskov to succeed him. After Yeltsin introduced Ayatskov to Clinton as “the next president of Russia” a few US journalists made the pilgrimage to Saratov to do background interviews. Ayatskov did get some special access to Presidential information for a while. I knew Ayatskov’s referent (a sort of SPAD/Researcher). Like most women who worked for Ayatskov she developed an alcohol problem followed by a nervous breakdown.
They took their revenge when Putin offered Ayatskov the consolation prize of Ambassador to Belarus. At a private dinner to celebrate, Ayatskov made a speech in which he described his objective as incorporating Belarus into Russia so Putin could continue as President of a new Union State. Somehow, this speech was widely distributed to the media the very next morning and Ayatskov never made it to Minsk. I would bet that Galkina’s time in Cyprus started with mafiosi from Saratov who sent girls to the Lebanon as bellydancers (actual belly dancers and bar girls rather than prostitutes).
Ayatskov himself was a clown. There was a big gang, mostly Tatar behind him. I will guess that her PR career in Cyprus with the mafiosi was promoting anti Putin material.
The city of Balakovo in Saratov province was also the operations centre for the one DDoS attack proven to have come from Russia about the time Ayatskov was finally fading. I dounbt that she was involved but she would have been privy to discussion about it. So she would have had considerable material available with which to make plausible things up.
Just when one thinks this Russiagate hoax can not get any dumber or absurd we are presented new levels of stupidity. Perhaps Einstein was correct…
You grossly underestimate lugenpresse. There is no lie they would not stoop to, no matter how implausible and nonsensical. Compared to lugenpresse, Soviet Pravda was remarkably honest.
What is the probability that she is a lesbian? (I don’t know how to interpret Russian signs)
Lesbian is a mental disorder, like schizophrenia, a person cannot be held responsible for. A liar is a moral flaw a person is 100% responsible for.
I once knew a teenage girl that I suspect was biologically a liar, or, at least, that she had a great biological propensity to lie. She was very stupid (not that all stupid people are liars), but I felt that she had trouble understanding that people could easily see through her lies, and that was part of the reason that she lied. She was seemingly also what people call a "compulsive thief." She was being raised by her grandmother, which suggests that her mother/parents had some mental disorder.
Not to propose that everything is biology, or that we shouldn't socially ostracize liars. But I think that some people are naturally more honest or less honest than others. For instance, I would suppose that gypsies probably aren't the most trustworthy people, and that might be something more than just culture.
I’m not so sure.
I once knew a teenage girl that I suspect was biologically a liar, or, at least, that she had a great biological propensity to lie. She was very stupid (not that all stupid people are liars), but I felt that she had trouble understanding that people could easily see through her lies, and that was part of the reason that she lied. She was seemingly also what people call a “compulsive thief.” She was being raised by her grandmother, which suggests that her mother/parents had some mental disorder.
Not to propose that everything is biology, or that we shouldn’t socially ostracize liars. But I think that some people are naturally more honest or less honest than others. For instance, I would suppose that gypsies probably aren’t the most trustworthy people, and that might be something more than just culture.
Stuff for an interesting spy novel. Might even be written after a Biden win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdistan_(novel)
“Stuff for an interesting spy novel.” – Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. I found it funny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdistan_(novel)
Lots of smart people believe in it.
And they won’t be shaken in their beliefs.
The future of American political aesthetics.
No change in the substance though.
Q-Anon party versus Russia-gate party.
The future of American political aesthetics.
No change in the substance though.
From Clown Reality to Borat Reality.
My favorite Russiagate story was when a senior official notified the FBI it was bogus.
The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.
Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.
… She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”
To be fair, the Russiagate was not as bad or as insane as the Covidgate, and still many people fell and are still falling for this ludicrous global hoax.
It is unlikely that the Woke-cultists will keep their distance from us. They are just getting going, Olga and Floyd, Hunter and Greta, the lunatics are on the loose. By the way, what the f…k happened to Greta? Why isn’t she campaigning for Biden?
https://twitter.com/gretathunberg/status/1314900271332458496Replies: @AnonFromTN, @Beckow
Writer tries to describes Perm like they both are from a small village.
If Perm was in Sweden, it would be the largest city in the country. If Perm was in France, it would be the second largest city of the country. If Perm was in UK, it would the equal second largest city in the country. Even if Perm was in the USA, it would be the 9th largest city in the country.
Yes, Perm is a large city with the population of ~1 million. However, if this girl went to school with that guy, the size of the city does not matter. What’s more, if they went to the same school in Soviet times, they must have lived fairly close to each other.
Oh well, she does…
https://twitter.com/gretathunberg/status/1314900271332458496Replies: @AnonFromTN, @Beckow
Makes perfect sense. Corrupt senile walking dead is a natural choice of mentally disturbed people.
My time in Saratov is material for many novels.
https://twitter.com/gretathunberg/status/1314900271332458496Replies: @AnonFromTN, @Beckow
Wow, we have a real Komsomol harridan here. From ‘I never‘ to ‘get everyone to vote…‘ is only a tiny step for her. But good to see that she hasn’t been deep sixed yet, we need the entertainment…
The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.
Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.
… She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”Replies: @Beckow
Sure, they would like you to think that, those sneaky commies. But the men of FBI fortunately knew better…
Look at that face, she’s not just dis-grunted, she’s an incel!