Pavel Durov, Robert Maxwell, Belle France, and Patriotic Smuggling

How does tech transfer really work? Might some of it be encouraged through espionage?

Robert Maxwell with his French Huguenot bride Elisabeth Jenny Jeanne Meynard

Fine, I’ll be the one to say it: There’s a direct through line between the wrongful arrest of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and the righteous detention of Pavel Durov, cofounder of Telegram.

You’re missing the French connection, of course. Ah yes, we are watching the geopolitical return of France. How long I have waited for this moment! How magnificent it is. The reason we love Macron is that he is an American manqué. Hard working, self confident, unapologetically himself.

I’ll explain, but first a digression.

Ever since I got involved with the Federal Bureau of Investigation I’ve begun to enjoy reading the files that the FBI makes public through the Freedom of Information Act.

Most people don’t realize it but you can file a request through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) once someone passes away. Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold has made something of a career FOIAing these documents, filing over 9,000 requests!

(One of the business ideas — or more realistically, nonprofit ideas — I have had is building a search engine of FOIAed documents. If such a thing interests you, too, please reach out to me and let’s build it together. You could imagine, say, attaching money to have certain things FOIAed by other people.)

Power is increasingly concentrated in American life. Many of the billionaire “donors” in public life oftentimes serve the interests of one or more foreign governments. You can learn a lot about people from knowing who they are related to.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams talked a lot about a “natural aristocracy.” Many prominent people often have prominent parents. Your behavior, intelligence and personality are all highly heritable. (We’ll tuck into Donald Barr’s OSS file and all the misinformation and disinformation around the Barr family later.)

To quote our Vice President and maybe our future madame president, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Quite right.

All of which is to say I have enjoyed reading the FBI file of Robert Maxwell, which a friend helped me put online. You can read it, too, in all its 1300+ page glory. If you find an interesting detail, please show me.

I think that this FBI file is particularly interesting when we consider that Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, is currently in federal custody. (Good will among nations requires her release and I’ll be making that case more emphatically in the weeks to come.)

The final page of Maxwell’s FBI file suggests a trade.

And of course you have the NSA tracking every move that Maxwell made.

If the NSA was aware of Maxwell’s activities surely they must have approved of it. France and America were becoming closer during this period. We’ve written about that before when we discussed the Farewell Dossier.

HOW TO STAGE A SABOTAGE: L'Affair Farewell, Fake History, Fake Science By Deep State Design

This is the tech transfer they didn’t teach you about in school.

One of the things you’re not really allowed to talk about is how deep states actually like it when China rips off American inventors. At least in limited ways—and so long as the technical innovations aren’t later used to flood American markets and destroy the American innovators. In this way, both America and China have an interest in tariffs continuing. The world’s largest economy gets the developed world; the second largest gets the developing one.

Ask yourself: Would the world be better or worse if cheap Chinese electric vehicles flooded the market?

Of course higher interest rates harms the mafia because the returns to capital accrue without having to constantly move it around.

Tariffs can be used to funnel espionage into certain corridors or through certain middle men — or middle women. Unquestionably that’s the family business of the Maxwells.

Which brings me to the talented Mr. Pavel Durov who I once had occasion to meet.

My conclusion? Not the guy but the front. We’re seeing a lot of that these days. These fronts who think they are the main attraction. One could maybe argue that that’s how Silicon Valley has worked since the 2000s.

Shortly after I met Durov I was introduced to Chabad, who I suspected was the real money behind Durov.

Some research from the irrepressible DeAnna Calderón confirmed my suspicions.

Here’s Durov’s business partner, Yitzchak Mirilashvili talking about why he supports Chabad. Yitzchak’s father is Mikhail Mirilashvili, who is in turn business associate of media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, one of the two main national Jewish organizations in Russia, while Mirilashvili is director of the St. Petersburg chapter. The elder Mirilashvili is deeply involved with organized crime and lives between Israel and St. Petersburg — and helped fund the late Wagner group Yevgeny Prigozhin’s restaurants.

Not to be outdone here’s Durov’s other business partner Lev Leviev who invested in Slack, Spotify, Twitter, Airbnb and Alibaba, and worked closely with Yuri Milner, the Russian-Israeli Facebook investor.

If you squint you can see Durov’s Facebook clone VK and Telegram as outgrowths of the very Likud heavy Facebook and WhatsApp. WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum is also a Chabad donor. You might wonder, as I do, about all those Facebook acquisitions and whether they were just a way of paying off the Russians or Chabadniks and whether Zuckerberg had to pretend the metaverse was real lest the regulators realize it was just a way of paying off the Russian investors in Oculus.

We’ve written about Sheryl Sandberg’s and her parents’ connections to foreign intelligence elsewhere and there’s no need to talk more about neoconservatism and Facebook go together like peas and carrots.

The Constructs: Is Sheryl Sandberg an Israeli Agent of Influence?

I’ve written about Chabad’s relationship with the Russian Federation elsewhere but for our purposes it’s best to say that the relationship is strained. Its days of state sanctioned Judaism have passed.

But if you can have a state-sanctioned Judaism can you have a state-sanctioned anti-Semitism? Of course.

Naturally the Russophilic “antisemites” Andrew Tate & Candace Owens have ties to Pavel Durov and his Chabadnik friends. It’s not a coincidence that Tucker Carlson, who is backed by Rebekah Mercer, interviewed Pavel Durov and Andrew Tate.

I’ll have more to say elsewhere about Owens and her husband and the Tates, who I have covered previously, but suffice it to say, these are some very bad, very Russian-affiliated people. It’s incumbent on the Russian deep state to help us take down these networks and it seems as if that’s precisely what’s been happening.

Allowing extractive people to run amok leads logically to human trafficking and slavery. In their world view it’s perfectly fine to sell women into prostitution and cut up their bodies and sell their organs. When everything can be commodified eventually everyone will be. It’s grizzly stuff. A strong state must stand against it and so must we, a free people.

Now it’s too early to tell if Durov’s visit to Paris was him being arrested — or him defecting. And how, exactly, Durov’s ties to the Italian world affect this whole matter, I couldn’t say.

But I do know that the arrest of Patel Durov marks the beginning of a new era in how states interact with the Internet barons. It’s nothing short of revolutionary.

Naturally France is at the center of yet another revolution. But then again, so were we.

Goodbye Section 230!

Now what do you call the arrest of a tech executive? A good start.

Are you paying attention yet Joe Lonsdale?

David Sacks?

Elon Musk?

Tory tech LARPer Paul Graham thinks that the arrest of Durov reflects poorly on France but I think the defense of Durov reflects poorly on the tech industry.

Careful players of the game will note that Macron and I share an affiliation through the French-American Foundation where I became the first cryptocurrency donor.

And, indeed, French connected investors were quick to support me in my fight to expose the foreign interlopers in facial recognition company Clearview and satellite company Umbra.

There’s no greater feeling than when your French friends join the fight.

I’m sure it was just a coincidence that a documentary I was in won France’s highest film prize, le FIGRA.

Gee, I wonder what I talked about with my French friends when I went there this summer.

The Treasury Department is now closing all the pathways for Russian money laundering through real estate, private equity, and venture capital.

There's a lot of joy, or joie de vivre, going around these days.