Oleg Deripaska
Oleg V. Deripaska is a Russian aluminum magnate and oligarch. Deripaska is one of seven added to the U.S. sanctions list in 2018 with long-standing ties to Vladimir Putin. Paul Manafort lobbied on Deripaska’s behalf.
Adam Waldman, a Washington DC lawyer and lobbyist is a registered foreign agent for Oleg Deripaska and Sergey Lavrov. In Spring 2017 Waldman offered ranking Democrat Sen. Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee access to Clinton-Steele dossier author Christopher Steele.
Paul Hauser is a British national who reportedly serves as Deripaska’s attorney.
Mueller
In 2009, when Robert Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington. One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe. Deripaska ultimately spent $25 million assembling a private search and rescue team that worked with Iranian contacts under the FBI's watchful eye.
Robyn Gritz, the retired FBI agent who supervised the case in 2009 said"I kept Director Mueller and Deputy Director [John] Pistole informed of the various efforts and operations, and they offered to intervene with State, if necessary."
The FBI had three reasons for choosing Deripaska for a mission worthy of a spy novel. First, his aluminum empire had business in Iran. Second, the FBI wanted a foreigner to fund the operation because spending money in Iran might violate U.S. sanctions and other laws. Third, agents knew Deripaska had been banished since 2006 from the United States by State over reports he had ties to organized crime.[1]
Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department lawyer and longtime ethics watchdog said s "far more significant issue" is whether the earlier FBI operation was even legal:"It's possible the bureau's arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services."[2]
In fall 2009, according to U.S. entry records, Deripaska visited Washington on a rare law enforcement parole visa. And since 2011, he has been granted entry at least eight times on a diplomatic passport, even though he doesn't work for the Russian Foreign Ministry. Former FBI officials confirm they arranged the access.
Manafort
Deripaskaska once hired Paul Manafort as a political adviser and invested money with him in a business venture that went bad. Deripaska sued Manafort.
Mueller’s indictment of Manafort makes no mention of Deripaska, even though prosecutors have evidence that Manafort contemplated inviting his old Russian client for a 2016 Trump campaign briefing.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said Robert Mueller has a conflict of interest because his FBI previously accepted financial help from a Russian that is, at the very least, a witness in the current probe.
“The real question becomes whether it was proper to leave [Deripaska] out of the Manafort indictment, and whether that omission was to avoid the kind of transparency that is really required by the law,” Dershowitz said.
Trump-Russia
- Main article: Trump-Russia collusion hoax
Deripaska also appears to be one of the first Russians the FBI asked for help when it began investigating the now-infamous Fusion GPS "Steele Dossier." Adam Waldman gave a detailed account, some of which U.S. officials confirm separately.
Two months before Donald Trump was elected president, Deripaska was in New York as part of Russia's United Nations delegation when three FBI agents awakened him in his home; at least one agent had worked with Deripaska on the aborted effort to rescue Levinson. During an hour-long visit, the agents posited a theory that Trump's campaign was secretly colluding with Russia to hijack the U.S. election.
"Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious," Waldman said. "So he told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false. 'You are trying to create something out of nothing,' he told them."The agents left though the FBI sought more information in 2017 from the Russian. Waldman declined to say if Deripaska has been in contact with the FBI since Sept, 2016.
The U.S. government in April 2018 imposed sanctions on Deripaska, one of several prominent Russians targeted to punish Vladimir Putin - using the same sort of allegations that the State Department used from 2006 to 2009. Yet, between those two episodes, Deripaska seemed good enough for the FBI to ask him to fund that multimillion-dollar rescue mission. And to seek his help on a sensitive political investigation. And to allow him into the country eight times.
