Belarusian model and escort Anastasia Vashukevich grabbed headlines last year when she claimed to have recordings of conversations between Russian officials and Trump campaign members. Upon being freed from jail the ‘sex trainer’ has changed her tune.
Anastasia Vashukevich, who spent months in a Thai jail last year for organizing sex training seminars, grabbed headlines after saying she has evidence that Russia worked with Trump’s campaign.
She asked the U.S. government to secure her freedom from the Thai lockup and grant her political asylum in exchange for recordings in which she said Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska is heard talking about interfering in the U.S. presidential elections. She reportedly worked as an escort, with Deripaska being one of her clients.
Following her deportation from Thailand earlier this month, she was detained in Russia on prostitution charges. She was later released after an investigator decided to free her without an “obligation to appear” for further proceedings.
But the model now claims her story was just an effort to attract media attention and save her life while she was detained in Thailand.
“I think it saved my life, how can I regret it? If journalists had not come at that time and that story had not come to the newspapers, maybe I would die [be dead by] now,” she told CNN.
The woman added that Russian security services told her not to speak about Deripaska anymore.
“They explained to me very clear[ly] what should I do, what should I say and what I shouldn’t say,” she said. “They said to me, ‘Don’t touch Oleg Deripaska anymore.’”
During her short detention in Moscow, she also promised in a Russian court that she won’t be releasing any further recordings concerning the oligarch and asked for his forgiveness.
“There won’t be any more audio recordings about Oleg Deripaska,” she told reporters, according to the Telegraph. “I won’t compromise him anymore, so he can relax, really, I’ve had enough.”
A bombshell report from investigative reporter John Soloman claims that two months before Trump became president three FBI agents floated the “Trump-Russian Collusion” theory to Deripaska.
The FBI approached this man because he had helped them back in 2009 when Mueller ran the bureau. Deripaska spent millions of his own dollars funding an FBI operation to rescue retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who was captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
The FBI ended the operation in 2011 but Levinson was never found and his whereabouts remain a mystery.
From a Truth and Action May 2018 report:
Two months before Trump was elected president, Deripaska was in New York as part of Russia’s United Nations delegation when three FBI agents awakened him in his home; at least one agent had worked with Deripaska on the aborted effort to rescue Levinson. During an hour-long visit, the agents posited a theory that Trump’s campaign was secretly colluding with Russia to hijack the U.S. election.
“Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious,” the lawyer said. “So he told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false. ‘You are trying to create something out of nothing,’ he told them.” The agents left though the FBI sought more information in 2017 from the Russian, sources tell me. Waldman declined to say if Deripaska has been in contact with the FBI since Sept, 2016.
So why care about some banished Russian oligarch’s account now?
Two reasons.
First, as the FBI prepared to get authority to surveil figures on Trump’s campaign team, did it disclose to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that one of its past Russian sources waived them off the notion of Trump-Russia collusion?
Second, the U.S. government in April imposed sanctions on Deripaska, one of several prominent Russians targeted to punish Vladimir Putin — using the same sort of allegations that State used from 2006 to 2009. Yet, between those two episodes, Deripaska seemed good enough for the FBI to ask him to fund that multimillion-dollar rescue mission. And to seek his help on a sensitive political investigation. And to allow him into the country eight times.
I was alerted to Deripaska’s past FBI relationship by U.S. officials who wondered whether the Russian’s conspicuous absence from Mueller’s indictments might be related to his FBI work.
Robert Mueller’s obvious conflict of interest due to past ties with Deripaska should be enough to end the Russian investigation immediately, if not put Mueller in jail. Mueller’s FBI was trying to do something with a 3rd party that they couldn’t do themselves, which is a violation of federal law.
Mueller, then leading the FBI, would have been well aware of the deal. ‘I kept Director Mueller and Deputy Director [John] Pistole informed of the various efforts and operations,’ Robyn Gritz, the retired agent who supervised the Levinson case in 2009, told Solomon. ‘We tried to turn over every stone we could to rescue Bob.’
Source: Fox News
