Why My Congressman Dan Crenshaw, With Close Personal and Financial Ties to Israeli Intelligence and Chabad, Deserves An FBI Counterintelligence Investigation
What do you do when your congressman is compromised by a foreign power?
A previous post outlined foreign intelligence operations running on U.S. soil through history. We might then ask if any such foreign intelligence operations are running in the United States today and if so, which countries might be running those operations.
I submit to you that they are. In fact, quite a number of these intelligence operations are running here and that one of their beneficiaries may soon be chairman of the House Homeland Security committee. And if I had to bet, I suspect that my congressman Dan Crenshaw will get the gavel — if only because he, like McCarthy, is compromised by foreign intelligence operating in the United States. Of course, McCarthy wouldn’t be the first Speaker to be so compromised.
Like Kevin McCarthy who uses cash from Chinese agent Peter Kuo to pay off his wife with a no-show job at the Republican Party after his affair became public knowledge, it has emerged that Crenshaw does much the same thing. “Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s campaign has paid a small agency that employs his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2020, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records reviewed by the Daily Caller,” goes the story, but it doesn’t really address the larger question of what PinkCilantro really is and who its real beneficiaries are. Let me spell it out for you.
Pink Cilantro is a Chabad-tied, Ukrainian-connected Israeli influence operation masquerading as a consulting firm. What such a firm has to do with Congressman Crenshaw or Kinzinger is extremely disturbing.
This is particularly interesting as Congressman Adam Kinzinger — one of the key Republican participants on the January 6th committee — and Congressman Dan Crenshaw have both paid over $1m to this “consulting” firm connected to Crenshaw’s wife Tara Blake.
The firm, Pink Cilantro, doesn’t even have a website and only has two political clients — Crenshaw and Adam Kinzinger. Baysa Benshushan told the Daily Caller that “Kinzinger sought us out due to Crenshaw’s impressive branding. Pink Cilantro developed Crenshaw’s brand and Kinzinger wanted an agency that could develop their [sic] brand.”
Totally normal stuff you guys. Why does Kinzinger need a “brand” person anyway? Why — exactly — is Dan Crenshaw, who has no children, publishing a children’s book on cancel culture? The merch, always the merch…
Naturally Pink Cilantro also received $60K in PPP Loans. Its proprietor, Baysa Benshushan, has strong ties to Israeli intelligence. She’s even married to an Israeli defense officer who purportedly rescued Jews during a Texas hurricane.
Chabad even wrote it up.
With Basya serving as a coordinator—fielding phone calls and using social media to find people in need—Tomer and Mishiko, both former soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces, drove to Meyerland, an area hit hard by the storm and the center of Houston’s Jewish community. They continued searching for and rescuing people until three in the morning. The next day, they set out again at 8 a.m.
OK.
It’s extremely difficult to find much of anything about Tomer online. According to Basya her husband is a “contractor.” He is rarely in pictures posted by his family members.
Benshushan’s parents — Victor and Devorah Grinshtein — are heavily involved with Chabad Lubavitch of Texas. They’ve sponsored dinners. This sort of thing doesn’t come cheap.
Returning to Basya — you think there's anything unusual about her? Well, in the first 8 minutes of this podcast, “The Patient Hustler” we learn that her father came from Ukraine, to Ithaca, NY and then to Houston, Texas. Her parents are Jewish and both went to Ivy League schools; they were "part of the computer revolution" servicing Enron, Exxon, Shell by getting personal computers for each employee (sounds like PROMIS stuff).
According to Benshushan, her father Victor was a mathematician that worked on IPs for these companies—all of which eventually ended up with the Chinese and Russians but we can't just say that was his fault. Right? Right? Their company was purchased by General Electric, and then they moved to Tzfat, Israel—one of the four holy cities for Jews according to Chabad — in the mid-1990s and they became Orthodox Jews. As one does. She spent her formative years living in Israel before marrying an Israeli.
Hm, you see something strange about this? What was that about Crenshaw being owned by the Ukrainian Jewish mafia? How dare you question his patriotism while he calls for us to be in endless wars!
The numbers paint the picture as they always do. Crenshaw’s donors — if they can be called that — are really victims of an elaborate fraud — a “patient hustle,” to borrow a phrase from Benshushan. He has consistently and repeatedly targeted the elderly. (His top industry is “retired,” according to Open Secrets.) Just how many of these retirees were exploited it’s hard to say. Could Benshushan be running an Israeli op using retirees’ money and Crenshaw’s brand?
Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times, has written a very compelling analysis “How Deceptive Campaign Fund-Raising Ensnares Older People.”
Exploiting the diminishing capacity of older people for cash extends far beyond politics. There is an entire initiative at the Justice Department devoted to elder abuse, and the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported nearly $1 billion in losses for those 60 and older in 2020.
What did Crenshaw spend the money on? Well, he spent $144,000 on an epic lagoon party with drones and a Blink 182 tribute band. That epic lagoon was owned by none other than Israeli entrepreneur Uri Man.
Man brags on his Instagram about his ties with the Coast Guard, a group which happens to be promoted by the Homeland security committee.
While Crenshaw decries fellow GOPers as “performance artists” he puts on quite a show, a show which oozes high level production values. Totally normal for politicians.
It’s all produced by Benshusan (and Benny Johnson). You can read her assessment of the op ad work here. She calls it the “Crenshaw case study.” (For whatever reason the link isn’t working. Here it is. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x6uAYCaVktc_43SFCoRN0ojWK8Z8tRu1/view )
What does Likud get for its money? It gets Dan Crenshaw threatening young men for opposing Israeli treatment of the U.S.S. Liberty and invective targeting anyone who supports Afghanistan withdrawal as an “idiot” or “stupid.”
We might even ask if the Crenshaw-Israeli op goes back to the fake fight between him and Pete Davidson of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Journalist Amee Vanderpool probed the ridiculousness of that made for TV encounter.
Say, isn’t NBC where Israeli spy nonofficial cover Jake Novak worked? Wasn’t he implicated in the Matt Gaetz espionage matter? Oh. He was, wasn’t he?
Whenever insider trading arises the question becomes is this how the assets are compensated? That certainly seems what Senator Richard Burr was up to. Burr, who is retiring as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, was under investigation for insider trading. The DOJ closed that investigation but apparently the matter is still intense enough for Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger to request to Congress that it be banned—only to be rejected by the congressional leadership.
Spanberger is a CIA operative-turned-congresswoman. She clearly knows that insider trading is how operatives of foreign countries are rewarded for their services.
Having met Dan Crenshaw, this seems to me the most credible explanation. He not only beat the market but he was one of the top performers in all of Congress. How did he do it? And may we, his constituents, join his fund? (Mast is interesting there too. Given he’s basically the Republican in West Palm Beach, he destroyed the market. Weird right?)
All of this happens because we’ve allowed Navy SEALs to become super Americans in the popular consciousness.
You can’t ask any questions of their behavior lest you be seen as unpatriotic. In fact, one of my friends asked Crenshaw about some of the allegations that he wasn’t as impressive as he lets people believe. Rather than take the question as an earnest expression, Crenshaw started yelling and screaming at my friend. This isn’t normal behavior, to put it mildly. You can see the same haughty and arrogant behavior on display when Charlie Kirk and Dan Crenshaw debated America’s involvement in Afghanistan. Why can’t we have clarity on what we do abroad Dan?
But we should be asking questions about all of our elected officials and soldiers. We should be asking what the costs are of what we ask them to do. We shouldn’t reward them with committee chairmanships.
Crenshaw said that anyone who supported the “over the horizon” plan that President Biden favored didn’t know what they were talking about. “They love the slogan ‘no more endless wars,'” Crenshaw said at the time. “We made foreign policy based on an emotional slogan, and it has made America less safe, not more safe.”
But Biden’s policy has proven spectacularly effective and culminated in the death of Al Qaeda’s architect — from a drone strike.
Investigative journalist Matt Cole has done a lot of good work on how the Navy SEALs were compromised. Navy SEALs I’ve known talk often about how often the Chinese and the Israelis try to get them to betray their country, sometimes with great effect. Cole’s book, Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six, details how it happens.
This perhaps to be expected when you declare yourself “Super American” or when you pretend to be a hero when really all you did was get yourself blown up.
But hey, it’s a hustle—and a living.
Until it’s exposed.
We deserve better.
Bang on the money, but I suspect only scratching the surface.