Russian metals tycoon Deripaska sues U.S. over sanctions

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska sued the United States on Friday, alleging that it had overstepped its legal bounds in imposing sanctions on him and made him the "latest victim" in the U.S. probe into Moscow's alleged election interference.

In what legal experts called a long shot attempt, Deripaska asked a federal court in Washington to block the U.S. Treasury Department from using the "devastating power" of such sanctions, which he claims were arbitrarily applied to him last April and violated his right to due process under the U.S. Constitution.

Deripaska, his lawsuit says, has been unfairly swept up in a "general hysteria" based on unfounded allegations about him spread by members of U.S. Congress and others, set against the backdrop of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

A Treasury spokesman declined to comment on a litigation matter and referred Reuters to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

Washington dropped the sanctions on Deripaska's two main companies, Rusal, the world's largest aluminum producer outside China, and its parent En+ Group, in January after an intense lobbying campaign in which the oligarch agreed to relinquish control over his corporate empire. But Deripaska himself remains blacklisted.

Deripaska, who secured a spot among Russia's elite group of oligarchs after prevailing in the "aluminum wars" of the 1990s, said the sanctions rendered him a pariah, shunned by business partners and banks, and had erased four-fifths of his net worth.

2013 - New York Times

A Disappearing Spy, and a Scandal at the C.I.A.

Since his disappearance in March 2007, United States officials have publicly insisted that Mr. Levinson went to Iran as a private investigator working a cigarette smuggling case. In fact he was also a contractor for the C.I.A. As the real purpose of his mission became known within the government, it led to a scandal within the C.I.A. in which three agency officials lost their jobs, for, in effect, using Mr. Levinson as part of an unauthorized spying operation.

Mr. Deripaska said he would put up millions to fund the venture, but he insisted that his role be kept secret. However, word that big money was in play made its way to Iran. Suddenly, a man with family connections to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that he could engineer Mr. Levinson’s release for a hefty price. F.B.I. officials were so confident about the plan that they told Mrs. Levinson to stay by the phone for a call from her husband. It never came.

Mr. Deripaska, who was scheduled to meet in 2009 with bankers in the United States, wanted to collect on his end of the deal. The State Department, after two heated meetings with Justice Department officials, refused to issue him a visa, according to government officials. The F.B.I., hoping to keep him in the game, made an end-run around State Department officials and issued him a visa under a special program, allowing him to enter the country twice.

Feb 2016

Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson — with Russian oligarch in background

Emails in 2016 between former British spy Christopher Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr suggest Steele was deeply concerned about the legal status of a Putin-linked Russian oligarch, and at times seemed to be advocating on the oligarch's behalf, in the same time period Steele worked on collecting the Russia-related allegations against Donald Trump that came to be known as the Trump dossier.

The emails show Steele and Ohr were in frequent contact, that they intermingled talk about Steele's research and the oligarch's affairs, and that Glenn Simpson, head of the dirt-digging group Fusion GPS that hired Steele to compile the dossier, was also part of the ongoing conversation.

Steele emailed again on Feb . 8 to alert Ohr that "our old friend OD apparently has been granted another official visa to come to the US later this month." Steele wrote

Sept 2016

3 FBI agents awakened Deripaska in his home

Two months before 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,” the lawyer 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, sources tell me. Waldman declined to say if Deripaska has been in contact with the FBI since Sept, 2016.

March 16 2017 - Oleg Deripaska OP-ED

The Ever-Changing ‘Russia Narrative’ is False Public Manipulation

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.

When you owe the world $18 trillion, the only way to get them to “pay 2 percent for defense” is to manufacture a boogeyman. Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy observed: “There is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people.”

March 17 2017 Mueller appointment

Mueller may have a conflict — and it leads directly to a Russian oligarch

But there’s one episode even Mueller’s former law enforcement comrades — and independent ethicists — acknowledge raises legitimate legal issues and a possible conflict of interest in his overseeing the Russia election probe.

Deripaska should be a major witness concerning the Manafort charges but Robert Mueller purposefully left him out.

In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg 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.

One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirmed.

Deripaska can be connected by one degree to every actor in this play!

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