This isn’t your average American history lesson.
What if I told you that the New York City mob never disappeared? What if it was just replaced with a variant, and it’s alive and well in the Republican Party today?
In the later half of the 1980s, U.S. District Attorney Rudy Giuliani… Yeah, that guy... managed to convict the heads of all five of New York City’s Italian mob, and it decimated their criminal empires. But contrary to popular belief, it didn’t end organized crime in the city.
It opened the playing field for Brighton Beach’s Russian mafia to move in, and Rudy Giuliani covered it up.
In 1988, Giuliani’s office opened an investigation into Donald Trump for using two Trump Tower apartments for money laundering. They knew Trump was guilty of the crime; a Russian mafia member was caught using Trump Tower for money laundering a couple years before this.
But Giuliani’s office dropped the case, and Trump promised to help fund his campaign for New York City mayor in return.
Everything I share with you in this email has been widely reported on over the years. We KNOW Donald Trump is a criminal. But not enough Americans know what happened to the criminals around him.
You’re not going to like the answer.
In October 1995, President Bill Clinton addressed the United Nations with a warning and a plan. The warning was this: transnational crime rings – transnational meaning operating in multiple countries – had become so powerful and so organized that they were a national security threat.
Clinton said “These forces jeopardize the global trend toward peace and freedom, undermine fragile new democracies, sap the strength from developing countries, and threaten our efforts to build a safer, more prosperous world.
Clinton had a plan to sanction any country that aided transnational organized crime groups – countries like Russia and China – unless those countries adopted strict anti-money-laundering measures.
The FBI was already cracking down on transnational organized crime. Just four months before this, they’d concluded a years-long search for a man named Vyacheslav Ivankov, who they called “the Godfather of the Russian mob in America.” (Guess where they found him hiding… Ready?... Trump Tower.)
But as the Clinton administration and the FBI worked to tackle the problem of organized crime, Rudy Giuliani exacerbated it.
Increased access to methadone in the ‘90s brought new hope for families impacted by drug addiction. Across the country, recovering addicts were getting off the streets and re-entering the workforce. In New York City alone, an estimated 34,000 Americans were in recovery thanks to methadone.
Unfortunately for some, this made life more difficult for drug traffickers. So in 1998, Rudy Giuliani took efforts to ban all methadone programs in NYC. Giuliani wasn’t just cutting deals with criminals any more; he was supporting them.
It was later revealed by the FBI that a major donor to Giuliani’s campaign and one of his top advisers was actually a member of Vyacheslov Ivankov’s crime org.
If you have questions, don’t worry. I had questions, too.
Like why was Rudy Giuliani, a known collaborator of the Russian mafia, free to make all those trips to Ukraine to look for dirt on Hunter Biden? Why did he have a license to practice law when he was challenging the 2020 election with bogus lawsuits?
There’s a simple answer: 9/11 happened, and all U.S. law enforcement resources were directed towards the war on terror.
Ten years later, in 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller tried to pull focus back to organized crime. But, he warned, the mafia had transformed.
“They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he told New York’s Citizens Crime Commission. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals… And in some cases, these organizations [operate as publicly] as Fortune 500 companies.”
“These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government.”
Six months later, President Obama signed an executive order freezing all assets of international criminals. He said it was part of a larger strategy to protect national security.
That year, Obama’s FBI warned that the same crime org that had operated out of Trump Tower and that had bought its way into Rudy Giuliani’s administration was the greatest single threat to U.S. democracy.
Mueller put the head of that org, Semion Mogilevich, at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
In 2016, Mogilevich was removed from the list, Donald Trump won the election, and those of us paying attention had to ask ourselves: did organized crime just take the White House?
It’s no wonder the Republican Party is willing to risk World War III to let Putin take Ukraine.
They let the only known Russian mafia associate reality TV star run for president, infiltrate our government, weaken our democracy for his own profit, play cheerleader to dictators and autocrats, and sabotage their entire party.
This is basically the guy we elected in 2016, and they want to re-elect him this year.
Your next congressman,
Jerrad Christian
Democrat for OH-12
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