Left: Former RNC Chair Reince Priebus. Middle: Hamilton Trading Group co-founder and CIA legend Jack “The Cowboy” Platt. Right: his friend ex-KGB officer Gennady Vasilenko, a Hamilton Trading Group operative

Why did the Republican National Committee hide the real reason for payments to Virginia-based Hamilton Trading Group for 11 months, which the CIA front company now says were made for secret reports on Hillary Clinton?

The RNC’s payments began on May 4th — coincidentally the same day an Alfa Bank email server began communicating with Trump — and ended in mid-August of last year.

Then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus has become current President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff after being “credited with building the ground game” that helped Donald Trump win the election, and because of his long relationship with GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Politico’s new report uncovered the link between highly unusual RNC payments to longtime CIA contractor Hamilton as being beyond “building security” as stated in the first payment:

As the general election was taking shape last summer, the Republican National Committee initiated a series of payments to a low-profile firm started by retired CIA officers that worked closely with an ex-Russian spy. RNC officials and the president and co-founder of Hamilton Trading Group, an ex-CIA officer named Ben Wickham, insisted the payments, which eventually totaled $41,500, had nothing to do with Russia.

They employ former CIA personnel and an ex-KGB Counterintelligence Officer with an unusually high profile past for a spy, described in more detail below.

Politico’s report confirms that the RNC’s money specifically hired a former Russian spy who spent his career in the KGB’s 2nd Directorate for konttrazvedki or foreign counterintelligence, to dig dirt on Hillary Clinton.

That is not politics as usual:

That work was handled by a former KGB agent named Gennady Vasilenko, a Cold War adversary-turned-friend of Wickham’s co-founder, Jack Platt, a retired CIA officer who passed away in January. [more on that below] Instead, they initially claimed the payments were entirely for an assessment by Hamilton Trading Group of building security concerns at the RNC’s Capitol Hill headquarters. But RNC officials now acknowledge that most of the cash — $34,100 — went toward intelligence-style reports that sought to prove conflicts of interest between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and her family’s foundation.

Oddly, Hamilton Trading Group told Politico that a pair of reports were the subject of the contract.

The firm produced two dossiers that tried to make the case that Clinton intervened in Bulgaria and Israel, respectively, on behalf of energy companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation, according to people briefed on the reports.

A key early allegation from Christopher Steele’s infamous Trump-Russia Dossier, alleged that Russia controlled a secret dossier on Clinton’s affairs. Logically, there is a chance Hamilton’s real role was to retrieve that information from Moscow by using Vasilenko’s contacts.

What Hamilton Trading Group says it did do for the money is underwhelming and screams misdirection.

Surely, the RNC wasn’t paying top dollar just for a report on Hillary Clinton and Bulgaria.

Anyone with Google could’ve found this earlier Greenpeace report about Clinton’s unseemly role as a fracking salesperson in Europe.

It was last updated just over three weeks before Hamilton was paid.

Gas prices dove in 2014, right around the same time that Russia invaded Crimea and Ukraine.

Mother Jones reported in 2014 that the Obama Administration deployed strategy to counter Russia in the energy space which was designed to make America’s petrochemical industry happy, and lower prices at the pump for Americans.

It worked.

The Obama Administration sent Hillary Clinton out to promote laissez faire fracking, as part of a geopolitical strategy to lower the price of oil & gas and diversify the sources of energy production at the same time:

Under [Clinton’s] leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe — part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation.

While that kind of information is unpopular with progressive Democrats, ultimately, it was long known and failed to provoke outrage in Florida, New York or California where Clinton’s victories locked up her party’s presidential nomination.

The Clintons in Israel?

Conservative journal The National Review has alleged improper Israeli ties to the Clinton Foundation since 2015.

Nothing has come of the story.

It is simply odd that the RNC would pay for a report on Clinton Foundation activities, especially after the 2015 book Clinton Cash, which examined every avenue in depth, looking for dirt on the former Secretary of State, and even its author admitted finding no smoking guns.

Hamilton Trading Group is a small firm with a rich lore straight out of the pages of a Tom Clancy thriller, founded by ex-CIA agent Ben Wickham, the current head of another intel company Stratfor, and the recently passed CIA legend Jack C. Platt III aka the “Cowboy.”

Former KGB counterintelligence officer Gennady Vasilenko and Jack Platt’s story has been national news for decades, because two two had attempted to recruit each other during the Cold War.

Like the story in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Vasilenko became famous for having been in KGB custody, but having never turned, he was released unscathed.

Unlike Hollywood, the Russian spy’s fortunes soured ten years ago, he was taken into custody ten years ago by Putin’s men, which resulted in his second release after being arrested by Russian intelligence agencies.

Vasilenko was exchanged back to America along with three other Russians, who probably were agents for the CIA, in exchange for 10 Russian spies the Justice Department dubbed the Illegals Program in 2010, which included the infamous Anna Chapman.

As we all know, one of Trump’s Republican primary competitors — Jeb Bush, whose father headed the CIA before becoming President — also hired a British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, to compile a dossier on Donald Trump because of his Russian expertise.

Did the RNC choose Hamilton for the same reason?

Was it something to do with ex-NSA Deputy Operations Director E. Alan Platt? He famously testified in a San Diego case about maintaining the secrecy of Navy Seals special forces operators identities and is presumably well known to Hamilton, since the firm was co-founded by his brother.

What’s not in doubt is that major elements of Christopher Steele’s Trump Russia Dossier are being proven by the day.

Furthermore, this week’s news suggests a stronger link between Putin, money — and the people who move cash the most — and the Trump campaign.

The Agency Putin Uses To Manage Russia’s Oligarch Population

Another key claim in the Steele Dossier, is that that there’s a secret file of ‘kompromat’ or compromising political data in the hands of the FSB’s Directorate K, the Bureau of Financial Counterintelligence.

The FSB’s Directorate K places operatives into financial institutions, and is a remnant of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services financial espionage division, deployed in their fight against capitalism.

Today, that Division K has become one of Vladimir Putin’s most potent tools against Russia’s oligarchy, and it is known to have been involved in the massive Russian state-run oil company privatization deals last year, at least by removing the head of Bashneft.

It would be reasonable to speculate that Directorate K could be involved in the Alpha Bank server mystery, since they are the FSB’s Financial Counter-intelligence unit.

In just the last week, two major reports about Russian agents covered as bankers or economics diplomats underscores the use of spies covered as financial operatives.

The BBC reports that a Russian intelligence agent covered as an left the United States, he was the head of the economics section at the Russian Embassy in Washington.

Mikhail Kalugin left the United States by August 2016, shortly after the Democratic National Convention, which the Steele Dossier reported last September.

Trump’s son-in-law and White House Advisor Jared Kushner met with the Russian executive who heads VneshEconomBank (VEB) during the transition, which state-owned institution, and subject to US sanctions.

The bank is a dumping ground for Putin’s money losing infrastructure projects, a lot of Sochi Olympics financing and after being impaired due to sanctions, and after bailing out other Russian institutions VEB itself got bailed out by the state in 2016

In 2015, VneshEconomBank famously paid for the defense of an accused intelligence agent — who worked for the bank — simply saying that it’s a state owned bank, so they should be allowed to defend their spy.

Ultimately, the accused VEB “banker” was convicted by former US Attorney Preet Bharara, who said this about Russia covering their spies at bankers last May when “Zenya” pled guilty to working for the SVR:

“An unregistered intelligence agent, under cover of being a legitimate banker, gathers intelligence on the streets of New York City, trading coded messages with Russian spies who send the clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. This sounds like a plotline for a Cold War-era movie, but in reality, Evgeny Buryakov pled guilty today to a federal crime for his role in just such a scheme. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, Russian spies still seek to operate in our midst under the cover of secrecy. But in New York, thanks to the work of the FBI and the prosecutors in my office, attempts to conduct unlawful espionage will not be overlooked. They will be investigated and prosecuted.”

Bharara was fired three weeks ago.