Alex Constantine - October 4, 2021
By Alex Constantine
In a "Counter-Intelligence" podcast interview, Scott Steadman, founder of the "Forensic News" site (forensicnews.net) discussed his investigation of Psy Group. Steadman found that the Israeli front for veteran Mossad and Russian operatives "ran disinformation campaigns strikingly similar to those of the Russians in countries around the world."
For instance, "Psy Group, in 2017, went after two anti-corruption activists in Ukraine, and these two activists are incredible people. They fight against corruption in Ukraine and pretty much the entire world. They have an organization called ANTAC [Anti-Corruption Action Center]. They ran an aanti-corruption campaign in Ukraine in 2017. But Psy Group [launched] a video campaign aginst them."
The Ukraine psyop spun false financial fraud allegations: "they had YouTube videos made smearing these people -- saying that they are corrupt, that they accept money from the American embassy, and launder this money, etcetera."
The ANTAC activists were "the same group that is popping up with the whole Ukraine/DNC collusion garbage." This would be the same set of distorted allegations that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been peddling in the right-wing media bubble for months, culminating in the Hunter Biden debacle on Fox News and the front pages of the New York Post in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
"One of the people I interviewed," per Steadman, "a politician named Lutsenko [Yuriy Lutsenko, a former prosecutor in Ukraine] was the one who made the public aware of the existence of payments from the prime minister of Ukraine, [Viktor] Yanukovich, to Manafort. And that led to Manafort's resignation" from the 2016 Trump campaign.
"So [Lutsenko] is getting smeared [in early 2020] every day now" by rhe right-wing propaganda machine in the US.
Supposedly, "there was this big Ukraine/Hillary Clinton conspiracy to hurt the Trump campaign. The idea was to get Manafort out [of prison]." Lutsenko's allies "were attacked by Psy Group. And there [are] all sorts of interesting threads to pull on." To wit: "why is this Israeli company targeting Ukrainian anti-corruption people?
Steadman found Psy Group's operations in Ukraine a "crazy story" riddled with false IDs, "people traveling to Cyprus and ... this woman ... a business woman from one of these East European countries ... and she was basically [hired] by Psy Group. She didn't know that it was Psy Group that reached out to her. They said, 'we're a new consulting company looking for professionals to join our team.'
The woman performed tasks for Psy Group, unaware of the true nature of the company. A year later, she learned it was Psy Group that assigned her to all the dirty work to discredit ANTAC activists.
"She didn't do this on her own," Steadman says. "She, like, created the videos. ... She was totally a pawn for Psy Group to do their dirty bidding. ... It's incredible."
Psy Group pitched the Trump campaign to try to influence the 2020 elections (see the previous entry), and "there is evidence it went through. There was this $2-million payment that we don't know about, from a Trump liaison to the CEO of Psy Group.
"And I've been told that Erik Prince was involved in all of this. He was with the Trump people at the [Trump Tower] meeting with Psy Group. He knows all of the people involved.
"I've been told ... that there is an investigation in DC right now into Erik Prince. We know that Mueller spun off a bunch of cases, and we know that Prince lied a bunch of times in his testimony about Psy Group. ... It's not even a question that he committed a crime. It's just a question of what [the federal attorneys] in DC are investigating. I mean, it could be anything from the Psy Group interference in 2016 to Blackwater financial stuff. We'll see where that leads. I tend to believe that what Psy Group did in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 ... as it relates to Trump, is a very on-going storyline that Mueller didn't cover because it [wasn't] in his purview. He couldn't prove that it was coordinating with Russia.
"Rosenstein said, 'you can look into manafort's finances,' all of that. But as it got closer to the end, Mueller was looking into Psy Group. We don't know whose decision it was to not include that [Psy Group] in the report. For all we know, that could have been a directive from Rosenstein saying, ;hey, don't look into this, don't put this into your report.'
Steadman suspects that Mueller's findings on Psy Group were suppressed by the Sessions/Barr DoJ: "There is not one mention of Psy Group in the Mueller Report, and we know that he investigated it for months."
Chronic Fox News viewers have made the name Hunter Biden a buzzword dripping with libel and ridicule. But the allegations repeated ad nauseum by Fox do not withstand scrutiny. Yes, Hunter Biden is under scrutiny by the DOJ for his tax filings. He has said so. But so is Donald Trump for reasons much more serious. In both cases, guilt or innocence has not been determined. Fox News hammered away for months at Hunter Biden's "Chinese business partner." Bit the "partner" isn't even Chinese -- he has a Hong Kong ID card, and though his electric power company serves China, it is also based in Hong Kong. As USA Today reported after fact-checking, "claims about the younger Biden remain unfounded." Some of the charges in the Fox reporting are completely erroneous. Others are innocuous and feed on class envy, eg. his salary while sitting on the board of Burisma. Board directors are well compensated. And Biden wasn't the only American director of Burisma. Fox singled Biden out for obvious partisan reasons. Many of the claims emanating from Murdoch's Russian-fueled disinformation factories are no more than hyperbolic innuendo with no more substance than Trump's Big Lie.
FILLING IN THE GAPS IN THE MUELLER REPORT, PART EIGHT: Collusion Redux - Erik Prince and the Seychelles Russian Backchannel Meeting