A new John Solomon article today, based on an interview with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, is essentially confirming a May 2018 article where it was presumed that Oleg had hired Christopher Steele at the same time Steele was working with Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS to write the Trump dossier. Here’s the interview:
The report on the FBI contacting Oleg Deripaska in September 2016 for help to structure a narrative of Russian involvement in the Trump Campaign via Paul Manafort has some ramifications.
♦In 2009 the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, requested the assistance of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in an operation to retrieve former FBI officer and CIA resource Robert Levinson who was captured in Iran two years earlier. The agent assigned to engage Deripaska was Andrew McCabe; the primary FBI need was financing and operational support. Deripaska spent around $25 million and would have succeeded except the U.S. State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton, backed out.
♦In September of 2016 Andrew McCabe is now Deputy Director of the FBI, when two FBI agents approached Deripaska in New York – again asking for his help. This time the FBI request was for Deripaska to outline Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort as a tool of the Kremlin. Deripaska once hired Manafort as a political adviser and invested money with him in a business venture that went bad. Deripaska sued Manafort, alleging he stole money. However, according to the 2018 article, despite Deripaska’s disposition toward Manafort he viewed the request as absurd. He laughed the FBI away, telling them: “You are trying to create something out of nothing.”
Was the DOJ/FBI trying to use Deripaska to frame candidate Donald Trump? Was this part of their 2016 insurance policy?
John Solomon reports that Deripaska wanted to testify to congress in 2017, without any immunity request, but was rebuked. Who blocked his testimony?
(…) Did Robert Mueller omit any mention of Oleg Deripaska from his 2017 Manafort indictment purposefully? Was Deripaska’s denial of any information about Manafort actually Brady material that Mueller and Weissmann intentionally kept from Manafort’s defense team? And/or was Robert Mueller hoping to hide his prior professional work relationship with Deripaska?” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 7/02/2019)