Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Trump's incoming nat'l security adviser partnered with a fellow who sold biotech secrets to KGB spy

By Meteor Blades
Friday Dec 23, 2016 · 11:15 AM EST

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, was the 18th chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s version of the Central Intelligence Agency. President Obama fired this noted Islamophobe two years ago over policy differences, if you take his word for it, and for ineffectiveness, butting heads with superiors and trying to end-run them if you accept how they see things.

Nobody seems to doubt Flynn’s military skills. But since Trump started officially taking his advice, there’s been considerable disapproving talk about the full nature of the retired general’s alleged connections to Vladimir Putin, with several of those critiques coming from rightist sources, including Politico and the hilariously named Accuracy in Media.

In part, the criticism emerges from Flynn’s views that the United States and Russia should be partners in fighting terrorism and his appearance December 10 last year at the gala 10th anniversary party for the Kremlin-funded news network once known as Russia Today, but rebranded as RT. Having given a foreign policy talk earlier in the day as part of the RT anniversary events, at the gala’s dinner party Flynn sat at the right hand of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As David Kocieniewski and Peter Robison at Bloomberg report today, Flynn also partnered in 2016
with a controversial technology company co-run by a man once convicted of trying to sell stolen biotech material to the Russian KGB espionage agency.

Subu Kota, who pleaded guilty in 1996 to selling the material to an FBI agent posing as a Russian spy, is one of two board directors at the company, Boston-based Brainwave Science. During years of federal court proceedings, prosecutors presented evidence they said showed that between 1985 and 1990 Kota met repeatedly with a KGB agent and was part of a spy ring that made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling U.S. missile defense technology to Russian spies. Kota denied being part of a spy ring, reached a plea agreement in the biotech case and admitted to selling a sketch of a military helicopter to his co-defendant, who was later convicted of being a KGB operative.

Read more
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/23/1613949/-Trump-s-incoming-nat-l-security-adviser-partnered-with-a-fellow-who-sold-biotech-secrets-to-KGB-spy

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