Leaked emails show Anders Aslund, the Atlantic Council’s Russia-basher in chief, tried to solicit funds from Russian billionaires
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 2, 2020
Internal Atlantic Council emails reveal the NATO-connected ‘think tank’ aggressively schmoozed the obscenely wealthy owners of Russia’s Alfa Bank, in order to secure a slice of their vast riches.
The communications have been released publicly as a result of the ongoing defamation case brought against Fusion GPS and its founder and chief Glenn Simpson in a Washington, DC court, by Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan, the owners of Alfa Bank. The three allege false allegations against them in the ‘Trump-Russia dossier’, produced for Fusion GPS by former MI6 operative Christopher Steele, damaged their reputation.
The now-notorious and utterly discredited dossier alleged they and the bank maintained a covert communications channel with Donald Trump, and moreover delivered “large amounts of illicit cash” to Vladimir Putin when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s.
In July, the trio were awarded damages in a separate action brought against Orbis Intelligence, Steele’s private espionage firm, in London after Judge Mark Warby ruled the dossier’s allegations were “inaccurate or misleading” and the former spy had failed to take reasonable steps to verify the claims.
‘We got nothing’
In May 2016, coincidentally around the same time the Democratic National Committee hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump, the Atlantic Council caught wind of the fact Alfa Bank’s owners wished to give away the entirety of their fortunes to charitable causes while alive, and saw a prime opportunity for grift.
Writing to the think tank’s top executives, Council ‘senior fellow’ Anders Aslund lustily noted their intention, and respective net worth of Fridman ($15 billion) and Aven ($5 billion).
“This could open an opportunity. To date Fridman has been extremely stingy,” Aslund stated rapaciously. “Rich Burt represents both Fridman and Aven quite intensely. I shall tentatively have dinner with Aven in Moscow Sunday night so I might be able to ask him what he wants. As you remember, we hosted him here in November and got nothing.”
That the November 2015 event left the Council empty-handed was undoubtedly a crushing disappointment for Aslund, given he went to great lengths to be highly accommodating to Aven, letting him pick the time and format of his Council talk, the number of attendees, and more.
“Our preference would be a lunch talk, but please indicate what time that suits you. Do you want a private off the-record meeting with 20-24 people or a bigger public meeting? The choice is yours,” he wrote to Aven.
Aslund added chummily that whenever the billionaire had spare time in Washington, he and his wife Anna were “always happy” to see him. However, there were some organizational problems.
In an email to Council higher-ups, Aslund’s colleague Alison Perry suggests Aven wished to invite “former Russian propaganda minister” Mikhail Lesin to the meeting, to which Aslund initially agreed. However, the Council subsequently learned Lesin was under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for money laundering, and was forced to “find a polite way” of letting Aven know Lesin was no longer welcome.
The volte face was presumably begrudging in extremis, given Lesin’s purportedly immense wealth – five properties in California alone allegedly owned by companies affiliated with his family were worth a combined US$28 million. In a bizarre twist, the day after the Council event, he was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room. Authorities concluded he died of blunt-force trauma to the head, induced by falling due to acute alcohol intoxication.
‘Nothing must be reported’
Fast forward to October 15, 2017, and Aslund’s gold-digging scheme was in full swing – he wrote to Council staff stating invitations for a “small, private, off-the-record breakfast” on October 26 with Fridman and Aven needed to be sent to a number of powerful individuals.
Proposed attendees included representatives of the US State Department, National Security Council, Treasury, Congress, Senate, and other influential government-funded think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation, and others. The senior fellow was keen to stress no journalists should be invited.
Aslund’s long-running effort to curry favor with Alfa Bank’s owners is highly ironic given his vociferous promotion of the Steele dossier, which in June 2017 he dubbed “outstanding intelligence.”
In February the next year, he wrote an essay for the Council stating the “reasons to believe Steele are multiple and overwhelming,” and slamming the refusal of the mainstream media to publicize the dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign due to the unverifiable nature of most of its contents.
Claiming news outlets had “confused the profession of journalism with that of prosecution,” Aslund also expressed contempt for the philosophy that “if not everything is proven correct, nothing must be reported” – a rather troubling indictment, given the Council’s ‘anti-fake news’ partnership with Facebook, and claims to be “on the front lines of disinformation.”
“The US media missed the greatest scandal of the 2016 election campaign because they were so stuck in medieval liturgy it rendered them incapable of reporting the truth… The question is not whether the Kremlin helped Trump win the election but whether it can be proved in court and whether it is punishable according to all too arcane US law, which could not even sentence Al Capone for anything but tax evasion,” he fulminated.
Strikingly, the essay has since been “retracted and removed” from the organization’s website.
What claims in the dossier can be verified have since been proven to be total fiction, its contents drunken tittle-tattle provided to Steele by Brookings Institute staffer Igor Danchenko. In interviews with the FBI in February 2017, he expressed dismay this gossip had been used to secure surveillance warrants against individuals connected to the Trump campaign.
Nonetheless, Aslund still views the dossier as “largely credible,” and has even praised the “excellent” and “knowledgeable” Danchenko, who somewhat amazingly was a student of his at Georgetown University.
‘Corrupt politically exposed persons’
Aslund’s fundraising activities are doubly ironic given in 2019 he authored ‘Russia’s Crony Capitalism’, a book documenting the country’s alleged descent from a “market economy to kleptocracy.”
In March this year, he predicted this shift would contribute to Russia’s economic collapse in the very near future. It was at least the fourth occasion Aslund has foretold the country’s impending and unstoppable implosion, having previously – and incorrectly – done so in 1999, 2001, and 2014.
All along, his willingness to personally profit from the very financial activities he condemns has endured untrammeled. In June 2018, Aslund was appointed to the supervisory board of Ukrainian state railway Ukrzaliznytsia – he resigned in September this year.
In explaining his decision, he claimed he was exposed to “excessive” legal risks by not being provided directors’ and officers’ liability insurance, and said many of the board’s decisions hadn’t been implemented by Ukrzaliznytsia’s management.
Principled enough, but there was also the small issue of directors not having been paid since April. Or, at least, not paid enough – earlier this year, President Volodymyr Zelensky capped salaries of public employees as well as members of management and supervisory boards of state-owned companies at 10 times the official minimum salary, about $1,700 a month, from April 1 to the end of quarantine.
In a statement to Interfax, Aslund moaned that while presented as a temporary emergency measure, “it might persist” even longer, an obviously horrifying and unacceptable prospect for the closeted kleptocrat.
“Members of parliament attack foreign members of supervisory boards of state-owned Ukrainian companies for being foreigners and having been paid too much, but we have been paid nothing since April,” he raged bitterly.
The month after his supervisory board appointment, BuzzFeed revealed Aslund was paid to write a paper alleging financial institutions in Latvia, long-lambasted as lairs of criminality and corruption, had made tremendous strides in enforcing anti-money laundering statutes – by the very banks involved. It was commissioned by Sally Painter, a lobbyist for Baltic banks and member of the Council’s board of directors.
The organizations that lined Aslund’s pockets included a subsidiary of ABLV Bank, which at the time was attempting to secure permission to establish an office in the US. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful, as the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network concluded ABLV was a bank of “primary money laundering concern.”
“ABLV executives, shareholders, and employees have institutionalized money laundering… Management permits the bank and its employees to orchestrate and engage in money laundering schemes; solicits high risk shell company activity that enables the bank and its customers to launder funds; maintains inadequate controls over high-risk shell company accounts; and seeks to obstruct enforcement of Latvian anti-money laundering rules in order to protect these business practices,” the Treasury ruled.
Some of this illicit activity, the Treasury alleged, involved transactions for parties involved in North Korea’s procurement and export of ballistic missiles, and money laundering for “corrupt politically exposed persons.” ABLV was accused of funneling billions of dollars “in public corruption and asset-stripping proceeds through shell company accounts,” and failing to mitigate risks stemming from these accounts, “which involved large-scale illicit activity connected to Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine.”
Shortly after the Treasury’s findings were made public, ABLV was forced to close – but Aslund told BuzzFeed he stood by his report, as it was “factually correct.”
The paper was presented at a private Council event in October 2017, the same month he was arranging that “small, private, off-the-record breakfast” with Alfa Bank’s owners.
It was convened despite Aslund’s research not being an official Council publication, and the think tank claiming it was written and published without its input. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no reference to the report or the event can be found on the Council’s website.
Snouts in trough
The email tranche indicates Aslund wasn’t the only Council apparatchik determined to get the think tank’s proverbial mitts in the Alfa Bank till.
In July 2015, Council chief executive Fred Kempe emailed Petr Aven about a fully-fledged partnership between the Council and Letter One, an Alfa Bank affiliate, and suggested there was “a larger role” for him to personally play at the Council.
All the Council’s approaches to Alfa Bank were allegedly unsuccessful, but there’s no shortage of dubious institutions and individuals all too willing to lavishly bankroll the think tank. Its donors currently include the US embassies of UAE and Bahrain, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, defense giant Raytheon, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), and the US State Department.
From 2006 – 2016, the Council’s annual revenue leaped tenfold, from $2 million to $21 million – a period in which, concurrently and not coincidentally, corporate and state budgets typically reserved for lobbying firms were increasingly directed to think tanks.
Its board of directors comprises well-connected US government veterans Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Michael Hayden, David Petraeus, and many others. The emails related to Alfa Bank also name Council officials Richard Burt, Daniel Fried, John Herbst and Richard Morningstar, all previously US ambassadors to European and/or Eurasian countries.
Such close ties to the US national security state unquestionably allow for very effective, well-targeted lobbying on behalf of its bankrollers indeed. Except Alfa Bank refused to bite.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @Kit Klarenberg
BLM’s lesson in how ‘trained Marxism’ really works, leader rakes in millions while chapters get nothing

Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC, December 1, 2020. © REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 4, 2020
While the Black Lives Matter Global Network, led by ‘trained Marxist’ Patrisse Cullors, embraced the windfall of donations following the George Floyd protests across America, local chapters say they were left holding the bag.
It was through the hard work of “radical black organizers” engaging in a “protracted struggle for our lives against police terrorism” that Black Lives Matter attracted millions of dollars in contributions this year, yet the BLMGN only recently invited selected chapters to apply for a $500,000 grant, ten chapters from across the US said in a statement this week.
“This is not the equity and financial accountability we deserve,” they declared.
The Global Network is “not accountable to local communities” and chapters, and due to its lack of support their work “continues to be erased,” Black Lives Matter DC said in a twitter thread. The newly announced BLM political action committee (PAC) and Grassroots entities were set up without the chapter approval – or even knowledge. “[All] of these events occurred without democracy,” the chapters said.
This state of affairs isn’t exactly new. Between July 2017 and June 2019, the Global Network had spent $4.5 million on consultants, travel and salaries while giving only $328,000 to local chapters, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation. What’s new is that BLM fundraising went stratospheric in May this year, as riots over the death of George Floyd in Minnesota spread across the nation – and even globally.
BLMGN raked in millions using ActBlue, the fundraising platform serving the Democratic party, and while legions of fact-checkers insisted that none of that funding spilled over to the DNC or any campaigns, the Democrats admitted they also had a record fundraising haul paralleling the Floyd riots.
As the African-American activists gave the party a piggyback ride yet again, the very least they could have got out of the deal was some cash for their trouble. Not only did the BLM chapters not get that, they also bore the brunt of the backlash against rioting, arson, and property destruction inflicted by the riots on their own communities. It was a win-win for the self-styled leadership, lose-lose for the actual footsoldiers on the ground.
What Black Lives Matter chapters don’t understand is that the system they’ve embraced is working exactly as intended. They may have forgotten, and the mainstream media certainly hates reminding anyone, that Cullors boasted in a 2015 interview that she and BLMGN co-founder Alicia Garza were “trained Marxists.”
“We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk,” Cullors told Jared Ball of The Real News Network.
Having been trained in Marxism myself many years ago, in a country that’s no longer around, I recall all too well how in “scientific socialism” everyone is supposed to contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. What happens in practice, however, is that this incentivizes the needs to grow – and abilities to diminish.
That’s even before the people in charge – who already believe they are “more equal than others” by the virtue of that, as George Orwell put it in ‘Animal Farm’ – decide that their needs are near-infinite. And since there’s a finite amount of wealth to be re-distributed, that means the needs of the many must amount to nearly nil. When the two inevitabilities converge… well, you get the picture.
Therefore, it is only right and proper that the activists on the ground get nothing while the leaders such as Cullors, or the Democrats piggybacking on the movement, get to laugh all the way to the bank. Complain all you want, but this is part and parcel of the ideology you signed up for.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Betting other people’s money on green
Climate Discussion Nexus | December 2, 2020
With pandemic lockdowns crushing the private sector, it’s obviously time to launch an ambitious redesign of our economy. Or so they tell us. And “they” are not just the architects of the Great Reset whose plans, we noted last week, offer a strange mix of cosmic ambition and predictable futility. But “they” also includes those who keep insisting, against all evidence, that there are vast commercial opportunities in this new economy. If that were true it would mean we don’t need sweeping government intervention, just the same old profit motive and efficient capital markets. Unfortunately neither profits nor efficient capital markets seem to enter the picture. Yahoo! Finance just noted that “The chief executive officers of eight Canadian pension funds, collectively representing about $1.6 trillion in assets under management, are calling for a green recovery from the COVID-19 economic slump.” But every single one of those massive funds is… a government agency gambling with other people’s money. Every one.
We’re talking state capitalism not the private kind because the CEOs who signed the letter in question run “AIMCo, BCI, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, CPP Investments, HOOPP, OMERS, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and PSP Investments.” All stuffed with public-sector money and insulated by government guarantees from the cost of any failed investment in magic beans. Unlike, say, taxpayers.
In case some of those pension funds are not familiar to you, HOOPP is the “Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP)” whose website boasts that “As one of Canada’s largest defined benefit pension plans, we are dedicated to providing retirement security to more than 380,000 healthcare workers in Ontario.” As for AIMCo, aka “Alberta Investment Management Corporation”, its website touts first “New Commitments to Diversity & Inclusion” then “Investors Collaborate on Climate Change Mitigation”. Not return on equity. So you’re not astonished to learn from their 2019 Annual Report that they call themselves “Alberta’s investment manager” and that their shareholder, in the singular, is… “the Government of Alberta”. Or that they are “a non-profit, crown corporation responsible for investing on behalf of most of Alberta’s public sector employees and, through the Heritage Fund, on behalf of all Albertans.”
Shall we continue? Let’s. Sure enough, BCI is the “British Columbia Investment Management Corporation” aka “The Investment Manager of Choice for British Columbia’s Public Sector”. Obviously the Caisse de depot is a branch of the Quebec government. It claims its clients are “41 depositor groups. Most are pension plans and public and parapublic insurance plans which, together, pay out benefits to more than two million Quebecers each year.” But of course its real client is the government of Quebec, which appoints the Board of Directors and mandates the Caisse to generate money for the government’s pension plans “while at the same time contributing to Quebec’s economic development” in, you understand, an independent manner.
Where are we? Ah yes, CPP Investments, whose name speaks for itself, though we might add that it is “one of the world’s largest investors in private equity”. So it is not your grandfather’s capitalism we’re seeing here.
Then there’s OMERS, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, a branch of the Ontario government that, Wikipedia notes, “has become one of the largest institutional investors in Canada”. And as its own website notes, it runs a “defined benefit pension plan” so if the market returns aren’t there, well, the government will come to the rescue with however many billions are needed.
We don’t have to tell you that the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is another of these parastatal behemoths. But we should mention that PSP Investments is… yes… the “Public Sector Pension Investment Board”, a branch of the federal government that is also “one of Canada’s largest pension investment managers” and once again oversees defined-benefit plans.
We dwell on the “defined-benefit” aspect here because it is vital to understand that these outfits are free to gamble with other people’s money for two vital reasons. First, by law their beneficiaries get paid whether the investments work out or not. And second and related, they are free from the sort of scrutiny normal investment firms face from clients concerned about losing their savings if the fund bets heavily on trendy exotic ideas because their clients are not those whose pensions they manage but governments that can just raise taxes, borrow against other people’s assets or, for the federal government, print the stuff to make up for any failure to find a pot of gold at the end of the green rainbow.
This consideration deserves emphasis because when you hear “institutional investors” you might well be inclined to think, well, if sober money managers taking care of Canadians’ hard-won savings are into this stuff it must not be trendy or exotic. Green must be blue chip. But no. It’s just more of the public-sector song and dance you pay for whether you like it or not.
Except for one nasty thing: The bigger they are the harder they fall. Especially now, with public sector balance sheets a soggy red mess, if one or more of these major holders of often badly underfunded public-sector pension assets should bet the wind farm on something that goes thud, as alternative energy generally does, it may not be possible for the government or governments in question to find the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars needed to make up the losses. (The CPP, the Chief Actuary of Canada has said, must earn a real rate of return of 4% for 75 years to cover projected payouts. Good luck with that mate. And as Andrew Coyne has been tireless in exposing, what was once a small outfit pursuing a “Wealthy Barber” plan of passive investment with 164 employees and administrative costs of $118 million has since 2006 become a bloated behemoth whose 1,661-strong host of managers costing $3.3 billion a year pursue risky ventures around the world. So they’re riding the gravy train even if we’re not.)
There is this meme out there that big companies are extra-right-wing entities that send lavish cheques to deniers and oppose regulation. But it’s not true. Like GM, which just switched from Trump’s position on California’s strict new emissions to Biden’s, many are smooth operators convinced they can game the system. They may find, as carmakers in Europe are already finding, that feeding the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last is just exactly as bad an idea as it sounds. But in any case private companies no longer dominate financial markets. Public and parapublic entities do.
As a result, the only meaningful shareholder revolt possible here is that of citizens. And just imagine trying to make OMERS’ investment strategy a key election issue. But it matters, because that CEOs’ letter is full of trendy verbiage like “The pandemic and other tragic events of 2020 have revealed pre-existing business strengths and shortcomings with respect to social inequity, including systemic racism and environmental threats.” And so all your chips, as a taxpayer and as a retired or even current public employee, are on the notion that a Great Reset is a fiscal winner.
Masterminds of 2019 Coup in Bolivia Denounced
teleSUR | December 2, 2020
The former deputy of the governing Movement towards Socialism (MAS) Lidia Patty presented on Monday a lawsuit before the Prosecutor’s Office of the city of La Paz (administrative capital) against the leader of the political group Creemos, Luis Fernando Camacho, and his father José Luis, for alleged crimes of “conspiracy” and “destabilization” after the victory of former president Evo Morales in the elections of November 2019.
The complaint also accuses the former commanders of the Bolivian Armed Forces, Williams Kaliman, and the police, Yuri Calderón, of having committed the crimes of “terrorism, sedition and conspiracy,” for which they have requested their immediate arrest given the danger of their escape from the Andean country.
“We have filed a lawsuit with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, together with my lawyer, and this is important because no one is doing any follow-up because they are free, calm and have destabilized our country economically and politically, Camacho and his father,” Patty told reporters.
According to the complaint, after the November 2019 elections, the accused’s acts caused a “social commotion” in the country that resulted in Morales’ resignation. She also portrayed Camacho and his father as some of the “masterminds” of the coup, who negotiated and paid high military officials to destabilize the democratically elected government.
The former Parliament member also repudiated that the ex-military had “deliberated and suggested” to Morales his resignation, thus violating the Bolivian Constitution. Furthermore, she explained that the former president, who no longer had the Armed Forces command, was forced to withdraw from power because of “the risk of losing his life” and the fear that the Bolivian people “would be massacred.”
Morales resigned as President of Bolivia on November 10, 2019, amid a coup d’état orchestrated against him by the opposition backed by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States. He first traveled to Mexico and then to Argentina, where he was granted political asylum status.
Morales returned to his country on November 9 after Luis Arce, the candidate of his political formation, the MAS, won the first round of the Bolivian presidential elections last October with more than 55 % of the votes.
A global team of experts has found 10 FATAL FLAWS in the main test for Covid and is demanding it’s urgently axed
By Peter Andrews | RT | December 1, 2020
A peer review of the paper on which most Covid testing is based has comprehensively debunked the science behind it, finding major flaws. They conclude it’s utterly unsuitable as a means for diagnosis – and the fall-out is immense.
Last week, I reported on a landmark ruling from Portugal, where a court had ruled against a governmental health authority that had illegally confined four people to a hotel this summer. They had done so because one of the people had tested positive for Covid in a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test – but the court had found the test fundamentally flawed and basically inadmissible.
Now the PCR testing supremacy under which we all now live has received another crushing blow. A peer review from a group of 22 international experts has found 10 “major flaws” in the main protocol for such tests. The report systematically dismantles the original study, called the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for applying the PCR technique to detecting Covid.
The Corman-Drosten paper was published on January, 23, 2020, just a day after being submitted, which would make any peer review process that took place possibly the shortest in history. What is important about it is that the protocol it describes is used in around 70 percent of Covid kits worldwide. It’s cheap, fast – and absolutely useless.
The 10 deadly sins
Among the fatal flaws that totally invalidate the PCR testing protocol are that the test:
- is non-specific, due to erroneous primer design
- is enormously variable
- cannot discriminate between the whole virus and viral fragments
- has no positive or negative controls
- has no standard operating procedure
- does not seem to have been properly peer reviewed
Oh dear. One wonders whether anything at all was correct in the paper. But wait – it gets worse. As has been noted previously, no threshold for positivity was ever identified. This is why labs have been running 40 cycles, almost guaranteeing a large number of false positives – up to 97 percent, according to some studies.
The cherry on top, though, is that among the authors of the original paper themselves, at least four have severe conflicts of interest. Two of them are members of the editorial board of Eurosurveillance, the sinisterly named journal that published the paper. And at least three of them are on the payroll of the first companies to perform PCR testing!
Heroes we deserve
The 22 members of the consortium that has challenged this shoddy science deserve huge credit. The scientists, from Europe, the USA, and Japan, comprise senior molecular geneticists, biochemists, immunologists, and microbiologists, with many decades of experience between them.
They have issued a demand to Eurosurveillance to retract the Corman-Drosten paper, writing: “Considering the scientific and methodological blemishes presented here, we are confident that the editorial board of Eurosurveillance has no other choice but to retract the publication.’’ Talk about putting the pressure on.
It is difficult to overstate the implications of this revelation. Every single thing about the Covid orthodoxy relies on ‘case numbers’, which are largely the results of the now widespread PCR tests. If their results are essentially meaningless, then everything we are being told – and ordered to do by increasingly dictatorial governments – is likely to be incorrect. For instance, one of the authors of the review is Dr Mike Yeadon, who asserts that, in the UK, there is no ‘second wave’ and that the pandemic has been over since June. Having seen the PCR tests so unambiguously debunked, it is hard to see any evidence to the contrary.
The house of cards collapses
Why was this paper rushed to publication in January, despite clearly not meeting proper standards? Why did none of the checks and balances that are meant to prevent bad science dictating public policy kick into action? And why did it take so long for anyone in the scientific community to challenge its faulty methodology? These questions lead to dark ruminations, which I will save for another day.
Even more pressing is the question of what is going to be done about this now. The people responsible for writing and publishing the paper have to be held accountable. But also, all PCR testing based on the Corman-Drosten protocol should be stopped with immediate effect. All those who are so-called current ‘Covid cases’, diagnosed based on that protocol, should be told they no longer have to isolate. All present and previous Covid deaths, cases, and ‘infection rates’ should be subject to a massive retroactive inquiry. And lockdowns, shutdowns, and other restrictions should be urgently reviewed and relaxed.
Because this latest blow to PCR testing raises the probability that we are not enduring a killer virus pandemic, but a false positive pseudo-epidemic. And one on which we are destroying our economies, wrecking people’s livelihoods and causing more deaths than Covid-19 will ever claim.
Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.
Johns Hopkins study explodes COVID death hoax; it’s re-labeling on a grand scale
By Jon Rappoport | November 30, 2020
“This patient who died had an ordinary heart attack.”
“Not anymore. We’re repackaging it as COVID.”
Don’t blink. Johns Hopkins may delete or retract their analysis at any moment. Their author’s study is devastating. Too hot to handle.
UPDATE: Yes, I wrote that opener a few hours before Johns Hopkins stepped in and DID retract the article. Boom. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Hopkins claims the article has been used to spread misinformation about the pandemic, and contains factual errors. CDC is cited as one correct source of facts. Hmm.
Regardless, here is my article, finished before the Johns Hopkins retraction. Since then, I’ve only polished it a bit in several places, for clarity:
Months ago, I told you this, in a number of articles: The overwhelming percentage of people who are “dying from the virus” are actually dying from traditional diseases.
These people have been relabeled and repackaged as “COVID-19.”
It has nothing to do with “the virus.”
A new analysis from Johns Hopkins confirms this in spades.
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter article, in a student publication, is headlined, “A closer look at US deaths due to COVID-19.” It lays out the case made by “Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Hopkins.”
As you keep reading, keep this in mind: If the so-called increase in mortality from COVID is offset, almost exactly, by a decrease in deaths from all other major diseases…
Indicating that the so-called COVID deaths are nothing more than an exercise in re-labeling, then…
You can say there is a new coronavirus, but it’s even less harmful than flu, because virtually everybody recovers…
Or you can say the whole story of a new coronavirus is a fake narrative. There is no new virus.
My readers know I’ve been offering much evidence for the latter conclusion.
Here are key quotes from the Johns Hopkins News-Letter article:
“These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”
“This comes as a shock to many people. How is it that the data lie so far from our perception?”
“When Briand looked at the 2020 data during that seasonal period, COVID-19-related deaths exceeded deaths from heart diseases. This was highly unusual since heart disease has always prevailed as the leading cause of deaths. However, when taking a closer look at the death numbers, she noted something strange. As Briand compared the number of deaths per cause during that period in 2020 to [deaths per cause in] 2018, she noticed that instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Even more surprising, as seen in the graph below, this sudden decline in deaths is observed for all other causes.”
“This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly, as depicted in the table below, the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19. This suggests, according to Briand, that the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. Briand believes that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be [may have been] recategorized as being due to COVID-19.”
“The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.”
“’All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,’ Briand concluded.”
“’If [the COVID-19 death toll] was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification [re-labeling],’ Briand replied.”
“In other words, the effect of COVID-19 on deaths in the U.S. is considered problematic only when it increases the total number of deaths or the true death burden by a significant amount in addition to the expected deaths by other causes. Since the crude number of total deaths by all causes before and after COVID-19 [was first announced] has stayed the same, one can hardly say, in Briand’s view, that COVID-19 deaths are concerning.”
Of course, there is some mealy-mouthed backtracking in the article. The virus is deadly and the pandemic is real, etc. But the data are the data.
The whole COVID operation is a hoax.
If I thought other honest researchers would investigate and re-calculate the Hopkins analysis, I would say, let’s see what they come up with. But based on my experience, there will be, at best, a brief flurry of articles in the press about this extraordinary finding, and then the scientific and press denizens will move on, as if nothing happened. That is their way. They briefly expose a scandal and then they slither off to cover up the scandal.
The other possibility is: Hopkins will retract the analysis, claiming it was flawed. That is the other strategy the low-crawling creatures sometimes deploy.
So there you have it.
Hoax. Con. Fake.
As I keep reporting, the virus (never proven to exist) is the cover story for the true phase-one goal: destruction of the economy.
If the virus were real, if it were attacking people left and right, the all-cause mortality numbers would be through the roof.
But they aren’t.
“I have a great idea, Bill. Let’s declare a fake pandemic. We’ll report all sorts of high death numbers. But really, we’ll just be subtracting numbers from other traditional diseases that cause deaths, and we’ll add those numbers to our fake pandemic.”
“Sounds great, Tony. Can you pull it off? I mean, it’s pretty obvious.”
“Sure, we can pull it off. And if some journalist with a mainstream reputation or an institution suddenly develops a brief infection of ETHICS, we’ll call their work a mistake or a lapse in judgment.”
“You mean an institution like the World Health Organization or Johns Hopkins?”
“Right. We’ll say the institution didn’t issue the study, it was just one of their people, a lone researcher. And if necessary, the institution, under pressure, will back off. But that’s assuming anyone noticed the study in the first place. Normally, these ‘revelations’ surface for a moment and then sink like a stone. No one cares. A pandemic is a money waterfall. The beneficiaries won’t sacrifice their bottom lines, or their reputations…”
Of course, people can rise up and raise holy hell.
SOURCES:
[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iO0K75EZAF8dkNDkDmM3L4zNNY0X-Xw5/view
Will Inquiries Into the Bidens’ Alleged Pay-to-Play Scheme Continue if Joe Occupies Oval Office?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 26.11.2020
The election controversy has completely eclipsed the Hunter Biden story, which made the rounds on social media last month. Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel has explained what will happen to the Senate probe into the Bidens’ alleged “pay-to-play” schemes and other inquiries into dynastic political families should Joe Biden take office.
Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) have made it clear that they will continue probing foreign deals struck by ex-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the US Congress regardless of who is sworn into office as the US president in January 2021.
“I’m not going to turn a blind eye”, Johnson, the incoming chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told The Hill. “I’m very confident there are probably more financial transactions that will probably be revealed”.
The Republican senators, who earlier released a report on the Biden family’s questionable business dealings and potential conflicts of interest involving Hunter Biden’s foreign associates and his father’s political influence, revealed further details about the Bidens’ financial operations with overseas companies on 18 November.
Will the GOP Continue Digging Into Hunter Biden?
The fate of the Senate investigation into the Bidens is hanging in the balance given the upcoming Georgia runoffs on 5 January 2021, which will determine the fate of the upper chamber, according to Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel.
“The Senate investigation will likely continue only if Republicans retain control of that body”, he says. “At present, Republicans hold 50 seats, while Democrats and allied independents hold 48 seats. Should Democrats pick up both remaining runoff races, then the Senate would be tied, 50 to 50. If Biden and Harris are inaugurated, then Harris would break any tie vote and hand effective control of the Senate to Democrats, in which event resources to continue full-fledged investigations into Biden family corruption and crimes certainly would be cut off.”
The GOP senators’ new report is partly based on evidence provided by Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden who came forward in October alleging the ex-vice president’s participation in his son’s business schemes. Having agreed to cooperate with the Senate Homeland Security Committee in October, Bobulinski revealed that he had been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding Hunter’s role in Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Still, Ortel expresses scepticism with regard to the potential probe, suggesting that “the odds are minuscule that the Senate or House of Representatives will continue to probe the Bobulinski allegations and matters related to longstanding, extensive Biden family corruption, and vulnerabilities to foreign influences” if Biden wins the Oval Office.
“The mainstream press worldwide is also not likely to further required investigations into claims that seem far more significant than any claims made and pursued against Donald Trump and his allies”, the Wall Street analyst believes.
Biden & Clinton Charities: ‘Trading Money for Influence’
Meanwhile, conservative US media outlets have shed light on yet another potentially damaging episode for the Biden family and its non-profit The Biden Cancer Initiative, founded in 2017 by ex-Vice President Joe Biden and his wife. According to IRS files, the charity gave out no grants in its first two years, but spent millions of dollars “on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired”, as the New York Post reported on 14 November. In 2019, the non-profit entity abruptly suspended its operations after Joe Biden joined the presidential race. The story was initially reported by the Washington Free Beacon in June 2020.
“As we see from the glacial pace at which massive charity fraud and corruption involving ‘charities’ close to Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton may be conducted, shocking defects in many Biden ‘charities’ seem to be overlooked by the IRS and by the Justice Department”, Ortel says. “It almost seems that dynastic political families are allowed to trade money for influence through leaky tax-exempt organisations, as an informal perquisite of office.”
Ortel, who has been looking into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for the past several years, has repeatedly drawn attention to a supposed cover-up of the charity’s financial and organisational discrepancies by the FBI, DOJ, and IRS for decades.
At the same time, the very same government agencies are eager to go after conservative entities and Republican politicians, the analyst notes, citing a crackdown against the NRA earlier this year and charities operated by the Trump family.
MSM Will Continue to Lose Market Share & Influence
The US mainstream media has remained largely silent about the Bidens’ charity controversy, the September Senate report detailing the Bidens’ questionable financial transactions, as well as about a hard drive allegedly originating from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Much in the same vein, the MSM shied away from shedding light on the new research released by Grassley and Johnson last week.
This trend is likely to continue, according to Ortel, who believes that “it will fall to alternative media to pick up the charge”.
“Increasingly, individuals get news and information through search engines and via social media, rather than through traditional media that long has been all for unregulated globalism, for Democrats, and against conservative economic and political thinking”, he says.
To illustrate his point, the analyst draws attention to “the crushing drop in audience across Fox News shows since 3 November 2020 over their horrid reporting and ‘analysis'” and suggests it “shows how fast the viewing public does react”. He predicts that “very quickly, steep declines in viewership for Fox, and across traditional media likely will accelerate declines in all-important advertising revenue”.
“Mainstream media continues to lose market share and influence, though its anchors and pundits believe they remain super important and relevant, incorrectly”, he concludes.
The fascist neo-left and the Trump Factor
By Ghassan Kadi for the Saker Blog | November 21, 2020
Nearly three weeks after the American elections, Americans and the world in general, are still none-the-wiser; not knowing who really won and if the votes have all been legitimate or otherwise.
And the man who is supposedly trying to make America respectable again, yes, Joe Biden, started his ‘tenure’ ironically by presenting his own disrespect by breaking the law and declaring himself as ‘president elect’ and establishing an illegal entity in the name of the ‘Office of President-Elect’.
There are serious accusations that allege that dead people have voted, that boxes of late illegal ballots (all voting for Biden) suddenly appeared from no-where, that the Dominion machines have been deliberately rigged in a manner that favoured Biden, that ballot observers from the Trump camp were not allowed to scrutineer, and much more.
Whilst all of the above points are considered allegations from the legal point of view, the Democrat camp should not be concerned at all if it has nothing to hide. If anything, if it is serious about restoring America’s respect in the eyes of the world, it should encourage transparency and investigations that prove without a single speck of doubt that they are all false. But that same camp that refused the legitimate results of a Trump win four years ago and then fabricated stories like Russiagate and others, is now urging the whole world to believe that the alleged Biden win is legitimate and that there was no interference.
Apart from allegations, what each of us knows for fact is that the media, especially social media, especially Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in restricting and censoring posts and comments that favour Trump. At the same time, they implemented a blackout relating to the serious allegations of corruption about Biden and his family. If this is not interference in the election results, then what is?
Given the reach and power of social media, and given that most people are not interested in fact-finding, Facebook and Twitter have been engaged in a deliberate campaign of choosing what they allowed to be published and preventing others based on and only on their political views vis-à-vis the American elections.
Once the dust settles one way or the other, if there is any justice left in this world, social media personnel who have forged and implemented those policies must face trial.
What is most ironic about this whole new world that is everything but brave, is that the filthy rich and corrupt are cloaking themselves with the attire of the Left. There is really nothing left of the original Left in today’s Left.
Many, if not most of today’s ”Lefties” are inclined towards the current version of the political Left without really discerning that much has changed since the days of Castro and Guevara.
Today’s Left does not represent the working class.
Today’s Left is not concerned with achieving social justice.
Today’s Left is not concerned with ending capitalism and feudalism.
Today’s Neo-Left, is the consortium of globalists who own sweat shops in developing countries. They are the war-mongers, the arms dealers, the foot soldiers of thought police and they insist that your six-year-old children and grandchildren must learn about subjects like gender fluidity instead of learning history.
The devolution of the former political Left has been taking place for at least three decades, since the collapse of the USSR perhaps and the emergence of the so-called ‘New World Order’. But the 2016 Trump election has fast-tracked the process. George Soros who has an axe to grind with Communism became overnight the principle benefactor of most post-USSR Left movements. For better or for worse, it was as if he wanted to make sure that he contained the Left in a manner that deviates it from its original ideology. But he is not alone, and he is probably not doing this only because of political conviction. His ‘bigger’ partners, whether he is aware of their presence or not, have got a much bigger fish to fry; the fish of global control.
But is globalism what it appears to mean or is it a new form of hegemony? Let us not get into this herein. This will be the subject of the next article. Enough to say that what seems to surface from the actions and agendas of globalists is that they are adamant about destroying Western values; including democracy.
When my wife and I were in Russia on the 70th Anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany, we were in total awe watching the Eternal Regiment on Nevski Prospect in St. Petersburg. Men and women proudly, silently and dignifiedly marching carrying photos of family members who perished fighting the Nazi malice. What was most amazing was seeing young boys and girls giving flowers to the elderly as a mark of respect. This is because students in Russia study history. The young generations must never take for granted the privileges they have. If they do not understand and respect the sacrifices of their forebears, they will never be able to realize what their own obligations are for today and the future. Many Americans do not know what the 4th of July stands for any more than they know how many States there are in the Union. Children growing up in the West have no idea, no idea at all, how and why they live in affluent countries with public services and government-financed welfare.
And when the million man/woman march was over many hours after it started, we could not see a single empty drink can dumped on the street, not even cigarette butts. And then we remembered that a few days earlier when we were in Moscow admiring among other things, the subway/metro stations, we did not witness any evidence of vandalism or graffiti either on the carriages or in the stations.
A far cry from what we see in the West, because to be proud of who one is has become taboo in the West; courtesy the neo-Left and their henchmen.
Personally, I used to feel concerned of what the armed Right-wing Evangelicals might do if they have it their way. But despite their heavy public display of weapons, I didn’t see any evidence to show that they have taken to the streets for the purpose destroying shops and looting. In saying this, and I am not saying that the pro-Trump militias are incapable of perpetrating organized violence, but recently thus far they haven’t. If anything, with all the BLM-associated violence and the attacks Trump supporters have recently faced, the armed conservatives have thus far displayed a huge degree of self-control and abidance by the rules of the law. They argue that their presence is to protect private and public property, and evidence seems to stack up in their favour.
On the other hand, and despite the bias of mainstream media, videos have emerged showing BLM supporters not only looting, but also terrorizing those who disagree with them and refuse to put their fist up in show of support.
Today’s Neo-Left activists are the ones using Nazi tactics; not the other way around. They are the controlled opposition and the foot soldiers of the thought-police; and these are undeniable facts. If anything, the Trump factor has enhanced their exposure.
And if you resurrect Guevara and catapult him into today’s political world without giving him a crash refresher course, he would not know which side of the political divide is which. If anything, he may think that it is the other way around.
In the event of a Biden win that Trump’s supporters may see as unfair, they may be driven to become violent, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have seen serious and concerning rowdy violent behaviour from the Left that makes me now feel that I am more fearful of organizations such as Extinction Rebellion than I am from the armed Evangelicals.
When the late and great Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech, he did not dream of a day when angry mobs would use the excuse of human rights in order to loot and pillage, gang attack supporters of their political opponents, and break the law and Constitution.
And when John Lennon sang ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’, he was hoping that one day political leaders would take heed and start putting their hearts before what they can achieve militarily.
Among other things, the thing with Trump is that he is/was not a politician. What drove him from being a profiteering tycoon to a man who wants to end American wars in the world is not something I can explain or understand. Clearly though, even if he is merely running America as a corporation, he must realize that it is not in America’s interests to be constantly engaged in expensive wars that do not have any benefit for America itself. If this is pragmatism from a profit-and-loss business perspective, then I don’t have any problems with this. I want to see American troops pulling out of conflict regions in the world. They have no business in Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and my beloved Syria to name a few places.
The thing about Trump is that he is not even a typical die-hard Republican. The archetypal Republicans are not a bunch of ‘nice guys’ either. How can anyone forget the legacy of the GOP? How can we forget George W Bush’s war on Iraq and his lies about the alleged Iraqi WMD’s? And what about his gang of infamous neo-cons; Perle, and Wolfowitz; not to forget Cheney, McCain, and many more from the gung-ho Republican Right that invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, killed at least a million civilians and only ended up creating more problems than the ones they claimed they needed to resolve?
Whether Trump wins or loses the legal battle against what looks like a huge body of evidence of electoral fraud at different levels, between now and January the 20th 2021, unlike what the social media brainwashers want people to think and believe, he is not a ‘presidential candidate’, he remains to be the President of the United States of America and he remains to be the Commander in Chief.
To this effect, in as much as the POTUS is domestically building up a huge legal case against the alleged win of Biden, he equally seems to be preparing for the worst-case scenario on international matters. He is working on the contingencies of losing by seemingly making serious efforts into ending wars and the presence of American troops overseas. May he be successful doing this if he is true to his word.
But Mr. President, if you really want to clean up the slate as much as possible in case you lose the legal battle against the corrupt who serve the Deep State, you must then remember that partial withdrawals do not end wars. A drawdown is not a withdrawal. Stand by your promise and let history festoon you as the man who ended all of America’s wars overseas. For even if you leave one soldier, yes Mr. President, one single American soldier on the soil of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or any other place on earth where his presence is not legitimately requested by the people of that land, then you will be remembered in history as the man who faked withdrawals of American troops; and you despise fake actions Mr. President, don’t you?
Last but not least Mr. President, you must at least stop the oil theft from Syria, repeal the Caesar Act, and pardon Assange.
Assange, Mr. President, is the victim of your enemies. His ‘crime’ was to expose the dirty works of Hillary. How can you not drop all charges against him?
And Mr. President, should you win the legal battle and prove that your opponents have cheated the public, you MUST then clean up the swamp with an iron fist and a high pressure hose. Zuckerberg, the Clintons, the Bidens, CNN, as well as officials that helped fabricate stories about you. The whole gamut of filthy lying manipulators must face justice and the next four years will be a case of now or never.
The electoral issues are something for the American legal system to decide; provided that the system continues to have the power to reach a decision that is lawful and not dictated by the party machine of the Democrats, their cohorts and henchmen with Facebook, Twitter and Google being on the top of the list.
Martin Luther King Jr. would now be saying I’m having a nightmare, I am having a nightmare because in the name of social justice, in my name, protestors are attacked, shops are looted and elections are getting rigged.
The failings of the Neo-Left do not mean that the neo-Right, Trumpism, is always or even necessarily sometimes right by default. What is pertinent is that the choice between the former and traditional Right and Left has now morphed into a choice of discerning right from wrong, and it is the Neo-Left activists who are behaving like Fascists, courtesy the Trump factor.
WHO Officially Counsels Against Prescribing Gilead’s Remdesivir To Treat COVID-19
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/19/2020
The world mostly forgot about remdesivir it seems, after the badly over-hyped medication developed initially by Gilead Sciences to treat ebola failed to show any efficacy in severely ill patients according to a massive WHO study.
While the FDA nevertheless approved the medication, arguing the data had shown it had proven modestly effective in treating mild to moderate cases of the virus, the WHO had already made up its mind. And on Thursday evening, the WHO officially recommended that doctors shouldn’t prescribe the drug to treat patients suffering from COVID-19.
This, despite all those assurances from Dr. Fauci that the drug, which prior to COVID had been a major money loser for Gilead, would revolutionize care related to the virus.
Remdesivir was among the cocktail of medications delivered to President Trump, though the president largely credited his recovery to the antibody medication developed by Regeneron.
The recommendation is a so-called living guideline, which means it could be changed based on the fast-moving research. The WHO attributed its decision to four different studies involving more than 7,000 patients.
“The antiviral drug remdesivir is not suggested for patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19, regardless of how severely ill they are, because there is currently no evidence that it improves survival or the need for ventilation,” an expert panel of the WHO wrote in the British Medical Journal on Friday.
The WHO is also moving to suspend remdesivir from its prequalification list, something that will effectively make it impossible for developing countries to obtain the (apparently useless) antiviral.
Gilead has so far refused to accept data showing remdesivir has little benefit for COVID patients. The company has already booked $873 million in remdesivir sales last quarter, and warned investors that Q4 could be a flop if remdesivir flops.
It’s a shame, really: back in the spring, Gilead published every scrap of news about remdesivir, and practically every time they were rewarded with a pop not only in Gilead’s shares, but in the broader market. Sure enough, Gilead shares took a hit on the news, sliding nearly 2%.
US security agency accused of spying on European private companies
By Lucas Leiroz | November 18, 2020
A new cyber espionage scandal involving American intelligence agencies is being revealed – this time in Europe. Government ministries and Danish private companies were targets of US espionage, according to a recent report by an anonymous informer. The US National Security Agency (NSA) appears to have used top-secret schemes to allegedly spy Danish and other Scandinavian ministries and private companies. Details of such activities were revealed in a recent Danish Radio’s article, in which the alleged anonymous informer is referred to as an agent of the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE). Operations would have started around 2015.
Among many points, the report denounced illegal activities promoted by American intelligence in collaboration with various sectors of Danish intelligence itself, which were conspiring against the interests of their own country by extracting information from Danish internet cables and passing it on to external agents. Among several other illegal operations, the report also revealed the espionage against the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Economy of Denmark, as well as neighboring and allied countries, such as Norway and Sweden, indicating that the limit of such activities is much higher than mere surveillance over Denmark, expanding across a major part of the European continent. According to information contained in the report, the NSA obtained access to fiber optic cables and a data center on the island of Amager, south of Copenhagen. From then on, data traffic from the Netherlands, Norway, France and Germany, and political institutions in Denmark were constantly monitored, remaining under full surveillance by US agents.
In addition, it was mentioned that the NSA wanted to obtain more information about the activities of private companies in the defense and military industry, especially Terma, a major Danish company based in Aarhus that stands out internationally in the aerospace industry. According to information in the report, the US interest would have arisen from the moment that the Danish State decided to buy multibillion-dollar fighters to replace its F-16 fleet. At the beginning of the negotiations, Terma and the Swedish company Saab were competing for a prominent position before the Danish government, but after many debates and long controversies the government’s choice was to purchase a new fleet of dozens of American F-35 fighters. Apparently, constant surveillance and data stealing were key points for Washington to take advantage of European companies during the negotiations.
The anonymous informant said he had tried to warn of the dangers of espionage on several previous occasions, but was only successful when he turned to the Danish Defense Intelligence Service supervisor, whom he accused of having failed to follow or investigate the various espionage reports. On a later occasion, the current Danish defense minister, Trine Bramsen, announced the resignation of five high-ranking agents of the national secret service. So far, the information is not clear due to all the precautions that encompass such issues, but everything indicates that the dismissals occurred due to the spying allegations – however, these were carried out at a late time, indicating a long delay in acting against the internal sabotage.
In fact, espionage against European private companies is absolutely harmful to the interests of these nations, being an activity as dangerous as the espionage of official government agencies – which has also been occurring frequently. The authorities that were supposed to guarantee the security of Danish companies helped to undermine the country’s interests as they were ineffective in combating data theft schemes and enabled, among other things, commercial advantages for Washington in negotiations that prioritized the Danish private market. Still, it is necessary to take into account that during the leak of confidential information by anonymous informants it is very common that only a portion of the real information is revealed, exposing an “outer layer” of the content, but preserving the silence about more compromising data. This leads us to speculate to what extent American espionage is actually at work in Europe – certainly, the information contained in the anonymous informant’s report is only a small part of what is actually known on the subject.
The case has already begun to generate outrage in neighboring countries. Norwegian lawmaker Freddy Ovstegard said he believes Norway is also being spied on by the US, considering that this is a common practice of Washington with its own allied countries. The tendency is for these reactions to spread more and more and for a wave of aversion to Washington and its surveillance and espionage policies to grow across the European continent. A possible scenario is the gradual separation between the US and the EU, considering that the issue directly affects the interests of multibillionaire private companies, going far beyond the relations between states. If such companies fail to cooperate with the governments of their own countries and start selling military equipment to enemy nations, the result will be absolutely catastrophic – Europeans will certainly try to avoid this.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.


