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In the months before the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Mr. Deripaska turned to a lobbyist with Democratic connections, Adam Waldman, who served in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Waldman earned $40,000 a month to help the oligarch with visa issues, as well as with business matters like aluminum trade talks and an unsuccessful bid to buy European operations from General Motors. Mr. Waldman helped him arrange various trips, including to attend a Wall Street Journal-sponsored summit meeting of top business executives in Washington. He also later arranged meetings between Mr. Deripaska and George Soros, the wealthy Democratic donor, to discuss anticorruption efforts in the mining industry in Guinea, where Rusal is a major player, according to people familiar with the meetings. Hoping to show that he could be useful to the United States, Mr. Deripaska used his connections and resources at one point in a thwarted effort to help Washington win the release of a hostage in Iran. In the weeks before the 2016 election, Mr. Deripaska rebuffed an approach from the F.B.I., which was seeking his help in the early stages of the inquiry into Russian meddling. . .: Andrew Higgins and Kenneth P. Vogel, "Two Capitals, One Russian Oligarch: How Oleg Deripaska Is Trying to Escape U.S. Sanctions" (New York Times, 11/04/2018)

To: nuconvert
The Iranians would have little or no interest in Levinson and would have deported him or traded him for the five Iranian “diplomats” we captured in Kurdistan in 2007. That didn’t happen, would have if the Iranians had him. They don’t.
Levinson testified against (1998) and had been pursuing Sergei Mikhailov, the most powerful Russian mafia boss in the world. Mikhailov is widely known for silencing witnesses and investigators. Mikhailov is deeply involved in cigarette smuggling and counterfeiting in Iran and has many operatives/soldiers there.

Levinson definitely went into harms way when he went to Iran. These Russians are the wrong people to meet and they get even.

7 posted on 1/13/2009, 11:21:31 PM by gandalftb (An appeaser feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last......)
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