dagblog - Comments for "Ex-US marine accused of spying in Russia is British citizen"

Read This: "Paul Whelan,

artappraiser — Fri, 24 May 2019 16:42:25 +0000

In reply to Ex-US marine accused of spying in Russia is British citizen

Read This: "Paul Whelan, Accused U.S. Spy Held in Moscow, Says a Russian Investigator Threatened His Life" ⁦⁦@annanemtsova⁩ https://t.co/Le6AUpXq1X
— csdickey (@csdickey) May 24, 2019

from 5 Key Takeaways on

artappraiser — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 18:15:43 +0000

In reply to Ex-US marine accused of spying in Russia is British citizen

from 5 Key Takeaways on Bombshell Charges Against Russian Lawyer Who Offered Don Jr. ‘Dirt’ on Clinton

by Matt Naham @ LawandCrime.com, January 8th

[....] 5) Keep an eye on the Paul Whelan “hostage” situation.

The recent arrest of retired Marine Paul Whelan on spying charges has already been seen as a “retaliatory” move orchestrated by Putin as payback or leverage for the aforementioned Maria Butina.

You may recall that Bill Browder, the financier behind the Magnitsky Act, was accused by Russia of ordering the poisoning and murder of Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky was Browder’s tax adviser.

Browder memorably said that this accusation was “Putin’s ‘fever dream’ response to being caught poisoning the Skripals is accusing me of four murders, including poisoning of Sergei Magnitsky.”

Browder has remained a steadfast Putin critic and recently commented on Whelan’s arrest:

In my opinion, based on what I know, this is a hostage situation. Paul Whelan I believe was taken as a leverage for Vladimir Putin in response to the Maria Butina prosecution in Washington. And Vladimir Putin very much doesn’t want her to talk to U.S. authorities. And he was in a very weak position and he needed to change that negotiating position, and so he looked for a hostage. And I believe that the Paul Whelan arrest fits right into that pattern of behavior.

Indeed, the timing of the Whelan arrest was called into question.

As Law&Crime reported before, Whelan’s Dec. 28 arrest occurred eight days after Russian President Vladmir Putin commented on the U.S. arrest of Maria Butina, who recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.

Putin claimed that Butina was “forced” to admit her guilt and he distanced the Russian government from her, while also claiming he doesn’t abide by the Code of Hammurabi.

“As for the fate of Russian nationals, we do care about them, including the fact that Butina is being forced to admit something over there. I cannot understand what she could possibly have admitted, since she was not following any instructions from the Russian Government or its agencies,” he said. “This is a very sensitive area, and we will not act according to the laws of the Code of Hammurabi here. The law of retaliation states, ‘An eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.’ We need to act very cautiously here, and we need to be real.”

Though Putin denied Russia would act out with an “eye for an eye” mentality, it will be interesting to see if the Veselnitskaya charges escalate an already precarious situation. Whelan faces 10 to 20 years in prison. Veselnitskaya has officially been charged with one count of obstruction of justice, which is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison.

American detained by Russia

artappraiser — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 02:56:02 +0000

In reply to Ex-US marine accused of spying in Russia is British citizen

American detained by Russia was convicted of trying to steal thousands of dollars while deployed to Iraq as a Marine

By Paul Sonne, Amie Ferris-Rotman and Shane Harris @ WashingtonPost.com, Jan. 4, 7:12 PM

The Marine Corps found Paul Whelan, the American citizen detained by Russia on espionage charges, guilty of attempting to steal more than $10,000 worth of currency from the U.S. government while deployed to Iraq in 2006 and bouncing nearly $6,000 worth of checks around the same time, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

The details of the charges against Whelan from a special court-martial two years later, which resulted in his discharge for bad conduct, add to an increasingly complex picture of the 48-year-old former Marine, whom Russian officials have accused of spying. His case grew more perplexing Friday after Ireland became the fourth nation to acknowledge him as a citizen and seek consular access.

Since his arrest last week in Moscow, Whelan has rocketed onto the public radar, drawing international attention to his complex journey from the Marine Corps Reserve to a detention cell in the Russian capital’s notorious Lefortovo Prison. People who served alongside Whelan said he was learning Russian and traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg on vacation during the same deployment in which the Marine Corps accused him of attempted larceny [....]

But wait, there's more. Not 2

artappraiser — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 02:17:39 +0000

In reply to Ex-US marine accused of spying in Russia is British citizen

But wait, there's more. Not 2 but 4, yes 4 cititzenships, 4 passports:

NEW TWIST: Paul Whelan is also an Irish and a Canadian citizen, after an earlier revelation that the American is also a British citizen.

That's 4 (four) passports so far - and counting. Put another way, he's citizen of 2% of UN member countrieshttps://t.co/5WAmHPkv9X
— Georgi Kantchev (@georgikantchev) January 4, 2019