Members-Only Article
Big states have big ambitions. The backdrop to what we call the “Trump/Russia” story is how Russia has suborned a whole web of business and political elites in the U.S. and Europe using money corruption and in some cases blackmail to serve Kremlin interests. Here’s a new nugget at the heart of the Brexit and Trump efforts which is simply remarkable, though the names of the players are so little known that it likely won’t get the attention it deserves.
We know that Russian diplomats and intelligence officers were supporting the Brexit campaign in the UK in much the same way they were funding and supporting the Trump effort in the U.S. We also know that the two campaigns ended up intertwining. Once Brexit was successful in the UK, its top campaigner and its top money man, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, literally went to the U.S. and started campaigning for Trump.
It turns out that an aide to Farage, George Cottrell, was arrested by the FBI just after attending the GOP convention in July along with Farage. He was charged with a series of crimes related to money laundering, wire fraud, bribery, blackmail and more. He was also something of a denizen of the so-called “dark web.” Cottrell had a close personal relationship with both Farage and Banks, though both sought to diminish the extent of that relationship after Cottrell’s arrest.