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Here’s the latest domino to fall in the Mueller probe. Sam Patten is a lobbyist who worked with Paul Manafort on various campaigns in Ukraine, and also with Cambridge Analytica on micro targeting operations. He failed to register as a foreign agent, surprise surprise, and plead guilty to that in federal court Friday morning where he also agreed to cooperate with authorities. Further, Patten helped pump foreign money into Trump’s Inaugural fund. The way these dots connect you’ll swear you’re reading a spy novel. Bloomberg:
Patten, who served in the State Department under George W. Bush, headed the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute in the early 2000s. A Russian employee of IRI at the time, Konstantin Kilimnik, went on to work as a fixer for Manafort in Ukraine and is a business partner with Patten. Kilimnik has been indicted in absentia alongside Manafort on obstruction of justice charges.
Kilimnik probably rings a bell. He was purportedly an alumnus of a Russian military intelligence service known as GRU but the FBI determined that his relations with GRU continued through the 2016 election. Kilimnik and Patten formed a consulting firm, Begemot (Russian for “behemoth”) Ventures. One of the things they did was provide consulting services for a “prominent” Ukrainian oligarch who isn’t named in the criminal information on file with the federal court, but the details match those of Opposition Bloc leader Sergei Lyovochkin, who has been previously identified as funding Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine. Patten not only worked for Lyovochkin, he also found time for Cambridge Analytica. Washington Post:
Patten also reportedly worked at the Oregon office of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, on voter targeting in the U.S. 2014 midterm election cycle, according to the Daily Beast, which said he described his work as developing “microtargeting” technologies “adopted by at least one major U.S. presidential candidate.”
In court documents, prosecutors allege that Patten also worked with the two foreigners to help “Foreigner B” make an illegal contribution to Trump’s Inauguration. They said “foreign B” then attended the Inauguration with Patten. Patten also agreed that he misled the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified before the panel in January 2018.
We know what happened with Cambridge Analytica’s micro targeting. It eventually grew to include harvesting data from 50 Million Facebook accounts and Russian troll bots posing as politically enthusiastic neighbors.
As to the unnamed foreigner who attended the inauguration with Patten, bear in mind the gun enthusiast from Siberia, Maria Butina. She started out in a subtle manner as well. She merely wanted her gun group to meet up with your gun group, and then lo and behold, she was charged with conspiracy against the U.S. as a secret agent. So who knows what the Inauguration attendee might be up to?
Curiosity might have killed the cat but naivete is going to kill us if we’re not careful. There is voluminous information pointing to systematic infiltration of American institutions by Russia for quite some time, culminating in influencing the 2016 election. And Russia had the help of the GOP. Major donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer knew what they were doing with Cambridge Analytica and psycho cybernetics, plus Republicans like Ron Johnson and Dana Rohrabacher serve as Russian mouthpieces. People paying attention know these things. People watching Fox News hear an entirely different version of these facts and then they take their disinformation into a voting booth and commit political seppuku.
Patten’s guilty plea today is one more rock on the pile, and it simply puts us one step closer to confirming what we already know: Vladimir Putin had a lot of his denizens infiltrating the American political scene, culminating in his piece de resistance, the election of Donald Trump.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/31/1792420/-Manafort-Ally-Linked-To-Cambridge-Analytica-and-Russian-Intelligence-Pleads-Guilty#comment_71201473
