US FBI opens office in New Zealand, World News
Patel said in a statement that opening a dedicated law enforcement attache office in Wellington would strengthen and enhance Washington's longstanding co-operation with one of its key partners in the southwestern Pacific.
"Some of the most important global issues of our times are the ones that New Zealand and America work on together — countering the CCP (the Communist Party of China) in the Indo PACOM theatre, countering the narcotics trade, working together against cyber intrusions and ransomware operations and most importantly protecting our respective citizenry," he added in a video released by the US Embassy in Wellington.
The FBI has had a suboffice in New Zealand since 2017 and the two countries work closely on policing issues including child exploitation and organised crime.
New Zealand and the US have been working more closely together amid concerns about China's increasing influence in the Pacific. They are both members of the intelligence sharing partnership known as the Five Eyes, which also includes Australia, Canada and the UK.
New Zealand Defence Minister Judith Collins and Police Minister Mark Mitchell said in a statement that they welcomed the new FBI office, which they said would enhance the safety and security of New Zealanders.
Patel visited New Zealand to open the office and the US Embassy statement said he also visited key government ministers.
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Straits Times
4 days ago
- Straits Times
‘Clinton Plan' e-mails were likely made by Russian spies, new documents show
Evidence that undermines the theory that Mrs Hillary Clinton's campaign conspired to frame US President Trump for colluding with Moscow in the 2016 election has been declassified. WASHINGTON – The Trump-era special counsel who scoured the Russia investigation for wrongdoing gathered evidence that undermines a theory pushed by some Republicans that Mrs Hillary Clinton's campaign conspired to frame Mr Donald Trump for colluding with Moscow in the 2016 election, information declassified on J uly 31 shows. The information, a 29-page annex to the special counsel's 2023 report, reveals that a foundational document for that theory was most likely stitched together by Russian spies. The document is a purported e-mail from July 27, 2016, that said Mrs Clinton had approved a campaign proposal to tie Mr Trump to Russia to distract from the scandal over her use of a private e-mail server. The release of the annex adds new details to the public's understanding of a complex trove of 2016 Russian intelligence reports analysing purported e-mails that Russian hackers stole from Americans. It also shows how the special counsel, Mr John Durham, went to great lengths to try to prove that several of the e-mails were real, only to ultimately conclude otherwise. The declassification is the latest disclosure in recent weeks concerning the Russia investigation. The wave has come as the administration is seeking to change the subject from its broken promise to release files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Even as the releases shed more light on a seismic political period nearly a decade ago, Mr Trump and his allies have wildly overstated what the documents show, accusing former President Barack Obama of 'treason'. The release of the annex was no exception. Mr John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, said in a statement that the materials proved that suspicions of Russian collusion stemmed from 'a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump's presidency'. And Mr Kash Patel, the FBI director, who has a long history of pushing false claims about the Russia investigation, declared on social media that the annex revealed 'evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax'. In reality, the annex shows the opposite, indicating that a key piece of supposed evidence for the claim that Clinton approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia is not credible: Mr Durham concluded that the e-mail from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured. Before the 2020 election, Mr Ratcliffe, as director of national intelligence in Mr Trump's first term, had declassified and released the crux of the July 27 e-mail, even though he acknowledged doubts about its credibility. Officials did 'not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication,' he said. Among some Trump supporters, the message became known as the 'Clinton Plan intelligence,' as Durham put it in his final report. In his report, Durham used the US government's knowledge of the supposed plan, via the Russian memos, to criticize FBI officials involved in the Russia investigation for not being more skeptical when they later received a copy of the Steele dossier and used it to obtain a wiretap order. The dossier, a compendium of Trump-Russia claims compiled by a former British spy, stemmed from a Democratic opposition research effort and was later discredited. 'Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false,' Mr Durham wrote, agents should have been more cautious when approaching material that appeared to have partisan origins. Mr Durham's report also mentioned that Mrs Clinton and others in the campaign dismissed the allegation as ridiculous, positing that it was Russian disinformation. But Mr Durham banished to the annex concrete details he had found that bolstered her campaign's rebuttal, burying until now the conclusion that the e-mail he called the 'Clinton Plan intelligence' was almost certainly a product of Russian disinformation. The annex shows that the person who supposedly sent the July 27 e-mail, Mr Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundations network, told Mr Durham in 2021 that he had never seen the message and did not write it. The network is the philanthropic arm of liberal financier George Soros, who has been made out to be a villain by Russian state media and by some American conservatives. The annex also cited a purported e-mail from July 25, 2016, also attributed to Mr Benardo. Referring to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the message claimed that a Clinton adviser was proposing a plan 'to demonize Putin and Trump,' adding, 'Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.' That message identified the adviser as 'Julie,' while the July 27 one said 'Julia'. An accompanying Russian intelligence memo identified the aide as Ms Julianne Smith, a foreign policy adviser for the Clinton campaign who worked at the Centre for a New American Security. But the trove of Russian files contained two different versions of the July 25 message – one that somehow had an additional sentence. And Mr Benardo denied sending it, telling Mr Durham's team that he did not know who 'Julie' was and would not use a phrase like 'pour more oil into the fire'. Ms Smith informed Mr Durham in 2021 that she had no memory of proposing anything to campaign leadership about attacking Mr Trump over Russia, although she 'recalled conversations with others in the campaign expressing their genuine concerns that the DNC hack was a threat to the electoral system, and that Trump and his advisers appeared to have troubling ties to Russia'. The annex also shows that Mr Durham obtained e-mails from several liberal-leaning think tanks mentioned in the Russian memos and did not find copies of the messages supposedly written by Mr Benardo. The think tanks included the Open Society Foundations, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Centre for a New American Security. But Mr Durham found other 'e-mails, attachments and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage' to those messages. Those included a July 25 email by a Carnegie Endowment cyber expert that contained an extensive passage about Russian hacking that was echoed, verbatim, in the purported July 25 message attributed to Mr Benardo. Mr Durham also obtained text messages from Ms Smith on July 25 showing that she had unsuccessfully tried to determine whether the FBI had opened an investigation into the Democratic National Committee breach, although they did not mention Mr Trump. And he obtained a July 27 e-mail from Ms Smith asking her colleagues at the think tank to sign a bipartisan statement criticising Mr Trump's denunciations of the Nato alliance as reckless and too friendly to Russia. Mr Durham wrote that it would have been logical for someone to conclude that she played a role in efforts by the Clinton campaign to tie Mr Trump to Russia. 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In 2020, as The New York Times has reported, after Mr Durham failed to find evidence of intelligence abuses, he shifted to instead trying to find a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for the fact that Mr Trump's campaign had come under suspicion of colluding with Russia. Mr Durham was never able to prove any Clinton campaign conspiracy to frame Mr Trump by spreading information that it knew to be false about his ties to Russia, but he nevertheless used court filings and his final report to insinuate such suspicions. He brought charges of false statements against two people involved in outside efforts to scrutinise possible ties between Mr Trump and Russia, both of which ended in quick acquittals. NYTIMES
International Business Times
5 days ago
- International Business Times
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AsiaOne
5 days ago
- AsiaOne
US FBI opens office in New Zealand, World News
WELLINGTON — The FBI has opened a standalone office in New Zealand's capital in part to improve the United States and New Zealand's ability to counter China's presence in the Pacific region, FBI Director Kash Patel said on Thursday (July 31). Patel said in a statement that opening a dedicated law enforcement attache office in Wellington would strengthen and enhance Washington's longstanding co-operation with one of its key partners in the southwestern Pacific. "Some of the most important global issues of our times are the ones that New Zealand and America work on together — countering the CCP (the Communist Party of China) in the Indo PACOM theatre, countering the narcotics trade, working together against cyber intrusions and ransomware operations and most importantly protecting our respective citizenry," he added in a video released by the US Embassy in Wellington. The FBI has had a suboffice in New Zealand since 2017 and the two countries work closely on policing issues including child exploitation and organised crime. New Zealand and the US have been working more closely together amid concerns about China's increasing influence in the Pacific. They are both members of the intelligence sharing partnership known as the Five Eyes, which also includes Australia, Canada and the UK. New Zealand Defence Minister Judith Collins and Police Minister Mark Mitchell said in a statement that they welcomed the new FBI office, which they said would enhance the safety and security of New Zealanders. Patel visited New Zealand to open the office and the US Embassy statement said he also visited key government ministers. [[nid:719997]]
