FBI investigating immigrant Inna Yashchyshyn who accessed former president’s inner circle for Russian crime gangs
By Patrick Sawer, SENIOR NEWS REPORTER
27 August 2022 • 6:03pm
A Ukrainian woman posed as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty to infiltrate the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump and gain influence with his inner circle on behalf of a front for Russian crime gangs, it has been claimed.
The FBI and Canadian law enforcement agencies have launched a major investigation into the activities of Inna Yashchyshyn, who is said to have told numerous Florida socialites and acquaintances of President Trump that she was the heiress Anna de Rothschild.
Her ruse allegedly led to her being “fawned all over” by guests at Trump’s Florida home and private club who were in thrall to her boasts about owning a Monaco property portfolio and family vineyard.
Miss Yashchyshyn’s presence at Mar-a-Lago raises fresh concerns over the classified documents kept by the president at his palatial waterfront home.
On Friday, it emerged that documents held in his basement may have contained US secrets obtained by spies in the field.
A redacted version of the 32-page FBI affidavit which led to a raid on Mar-a-Lago on Aug 8, released by a court on Friday, showed that 14 of the 15 boxes recovered contained classified documents, including some marked “HCS [HUMINT Control System]”.
Ed Martin, a former US Treasury special agent who spent more than two decades in criminal intelligence, said: “That’s his residence. She shouldn’t have been in there.”
Miss Yaschyshyn is believed to have been taken to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club for the first time by a donor called Elchanan Adamker in 2021, posing for a photo with the now former president the next day.
It has now emerged that Miss Yaschyshyn is actually the Ukrainian-born daughter of a truck driver called Oleksandr Yaschysyn, who lives in Buffalo Grove, Illinois.
Miss Yaschushyn, 33, faces an FBI investigation over a charity she was president of called the United Hearts of Mercy.
It was founded by Florida-based Russian businessman Valeriy Tarasenko in Canada in 2015, but the FBI allege it has been used as a front to fundraise for Russian organised crime gangs.
She is also accused of obtaining fake IDs – including a US passport and multiple drivers’ licences – using her fake Rothschild alter ego.
John LeFevre, a former investment banker, who recalled meeting her by the Mar-a-Lago pool on May 1 2021 after she arrived driving a Mercedes-Benz SUV, told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “It wasn’t just dropping the family name. She talked about vineyards and family estates and growing up in Monaco. It was a near-perfect ruse and she played the part.”
Mr LeFevre added that Mar-a-Lago members “fawned all over her and because of the Rothschild mystique, they never probed and instead tiptoed around her with kid gloves”.
Miss Yashchyshyn was seen the next day rubbing shoulders with Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham at the president’s nearby West Palm Beach golf club.
Photographs show Miss Yashchyshyn with Trump and Graham and Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Previous Rothschild impersonations
Ukrainian national Inna Yashchyshyn is not the first fraudster to pose as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty.
In 2016, British national Oliver Rothschild duped China’s leading businessmen into inviting him into their inner circles. The 65-year-old was offered generous corporate hospitality and business invitations, before later being outed by Chinese media as a London-based corporate adviser with no connection to the Rothschild family, other than sharing their last name. Chinese media accused him of deliberate deception, although he later told the Financial Times: “I’m not from the bank, I don’t deal with the bank and I never alleged that I am.”
In 2010, Huffington Post blogger Stefan de Rothschild made the headlines after “donating” $2.5m (£1.75m) towards relief efforts in Haiti from his firm Rothschild Estates, a business which never existed. He duped news agency Reuters, who quoted him during an apparent appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A man named Stefan Roberts was behind the scam, which was carried out through a series of fake Wikipedia pages.
In 2008, a counterfeit Rothschild banking heir cropped up in Australia and targeted Sydney’s party scene after claiming he had recently moved from the UK “to head the Rothschild’s media division ELOM Holdings”. Alex Rothschild-Reid was in fact Australian-born Alex Reid. His real identity was revealed after an anonymous woman tipped off the press.
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In video footage from the day she met with Trump a man is heard saying: “Anna, you’re a Rothschild. You can afford a million dollars for a picture with you and Trump.”
The Post-Gazette reports that Miss Yashchyshyn was first invited by Trump supporter Elchanan Adamker, who runs a financial services firm, to Mar-a-Lago in May 2021.
Members of Trump’s inner circle were eventually told Miss Yashchyshyn was not an heiress by Dean Lawrence, a Florida-based music creative director, who had met her in her role as president of the Rothschild Media Label. She was promoting Mr Tarasenko’s teenage daughter, whose stage name is ‘Sofiya Rothschild.’
Miss Yashchyshyn denies the claims, telling The Post-Gazette: “I think there is some misunderstanding. That’s all fake, and nothing happened.”
Miss Yashchyshyn claims that any passports or driver’s licenses using the Rothschild name had been fabricated by Mr Tarasenko, which he denies.
She is currently embroiled in a separate lawsuit with Mr Tarasenko, 44, whose daughter she used to babysit, and claims she has been framed by him.
Mr Tarasenko says Miss Yaschushyn looked after his children while was away on business and claims she was keen to use Mar-a-Lago to find rich benefactors.
Neither the US Secret Service nor the FBI would comment on whether they were investigating Miss Yashchyshyn – but several sources said they had been questioned by FBI officials about her behavior.
Canadian law enforcement confirmed Miss Yashchyshyn has been the subject of a major crimes unit investigation in Quebec since February.
The allegations come a day after it emerged that a Russian spy posing as a jet-set jewellery designer infiltrated Nato’s naval HQ in Italy by sleeping with officers stationed there. The agent – real name Olga Kolobova – became a fixture on the social circuit, targeting Allied Joint Forces Command in Naples, home to the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet.
Russians are very busy trying to get political influence everywhere. That’s what Putler does.
It’s not only Russians. The US sees China, Iran it’s not only the Russians. In the US you see China, Iran and even Israel. Who knows what the US intelligence services are up too.
Trump is too exposed to mafia land. He should be barred from running for POTUS again.
I don’t want Trump running either but the the Russian collusion crap has already been debunked. Not saying his admiration of the cockroach isn’t only bad but also evil. He s a loud mouth ass that I wish would just go away. But I’m not into barring someone because someone doesn’t like him.
According to the Mueller report the case was just one wheel shy of Trump conspiring with the ruscists. I’ve read the whole report.
The real meat of it was the 11 counts of obstruction of justice.
Sorry you see it that way Bill the Mueller report has been debunked by career DOJ employees and the DOJ Office of Legal affairs who specifically wrote a letter to the AG that the obstruction charges should not be pursued. The Mueller report was a partisan hack job written by a lm extreme partisan Weinstein. Please keep in mind I’m no Trump fan but I wish people would just sit back and look at the facts rather then taking in partisan comments.
I miss our country being in the middle. That’s where our country was great.
Manafort, Stone, Flynn and others all went to jail for criminal activities relating to Russia, but Trump pardoned them.
Manafort is the person most responsible (apart from putler) for this genocide; it was he and Stone who were hired by proxies of putler to skank Yanukovich; a convicted armed robber, into power.
Manafort, Stone and Flynn are abominations who should be doing life.
The first two are 40 year close friends with DT.
Please stop the crap. How about Biden and his so called connections. How about and her stupid reset button. This is all nonsense.
What “crap” and “nonsense” do you refer to precisely?
Sorry to fall out with a good guy like you, but if you seek to defend the activities of Trump and his criminal associates, I find it beyond comprehension; on a par with supporting Tucker Carlson. Have you even read or heard the actual words he spoke when putler unleashed his Holocaust?
Please state which factual information I gave you in that brief comment that is incorrect?
What has Biden got to do with my comment? I will answer for you : nothing.
I would have to disagree With what the AG said did or didn’t happen AG was part of the cover up to sweep the charges under the rug. I don’t believe for a minute that Mueller or his team were partisan in their investigation.
Though it is a lengthy read the Mueller report was the fruition of a careful and thorough investigation with a top-notch team, looking into two primary things as well as many side things.(However Mueller and his team did not look into Trump’s finances.) The two primaries were collusion,(which the way the law was written that term rolled over into conspiracy or coordination). And Obstruction of justice which there were over 20 counts just 11 of them were the most provable in a court of law.
Weinstein was not trying to “cook something up”. Source: New York Times: “If there’s something to find, he’ll find it,” said Katya Jestin, a former colleague in the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, who called Mr. Weissmann’s ethics unimpeachable. “If there’s nothing there, he’s not going to cook something up.” The president’s allies in conservative news media, went to great lengths to discredit Mr. Weissmann.
Barr did not say there was no evidence of collusion. Quoting Mueller himself, Barr reported that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election” (emphasis added). What this means is that Mueller collected lots of evidence, but what his team found was not enough for a slam-dunk criminal conviction of anyone else.
I say “of anyone else” because Mueller already found sufficient evidence to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Russians conspired to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Those conspiracies are set forth in painstaking detail in two existing indictments from the Mueller grand jury. (I encourage you to read them both.)
In studying the report I tried to take a non biased look at it as if I were a juror. As well as think about what had enough of a case to legally be prosecuted or not.
I’m all for middle ground but they don’t call Trump “teflon Don” for nothing. Through out his life He has skated through many legal battles. Had it been one of us we would have been in jail.
Prosecutors walk away from troubling cases all the time—not because the subjects are squeaky clean, but because they don’t believe they can win a conviction at trial. In this case, a lot of the evidence bearing on the Russian conspiracies is presumably still in Russia. With the exception of one Russian entity, none of the defendants in these two indictments have appeared in an American courtroom. Mueller does not have access to their testimony. He can subpoena information from them, but he has no way of enforcing those subpoenas so long as the defendants are in Russia.
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William Barr’s missive purporting to briefly summarize Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was, as the Washington Post pointed out, mischaracterized by cable news. Given the language of Barr’s carefully lawyered letter, this is somewhat to be expected. But it’s also immensely damaging to the rule of law.
So, let’s dispel three of those myths.
Myth No. 1: Mueller found no evidence of collusion. (Wrong, wrong, wrong.)
Regrettably, “[a]ll three major news networks were consistent in saying that the special counsel found no evidence of collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.” Both CNN and MSNBC heralded that “TRUMP CLAIMS ‘COMPLETE AND TOTAL EXONERATION’” on Russia. Fox claimed “MUELLER PROBE FINDS NO PROOF OF COLLUSION.” This is wrong as a matter of law and as a matter of fact.
Barr did not say there was no evidence of collusion. Quoting Mueller himself, Barr reported that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election” (emphasis added). What this means is that Mueller collected lots of evidence, but what his team found was not enough for a slam-dunk criminal conviction of anyone else.
I say “of anyone else” because Mueller already found sufficient evidence to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Russians conspired to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Those conspiracies are set forth in painstaking detail in two existing indictments from the Mueller grand jury. (I encourage you to read them both.)
The first conspiracy indictment was issued in February 2018, charging a number of Russian entities and individuals with conspiring to defraud the United States by “posing as U.S. persons and creating false U.S. personas” in order to “operate social media pages and groups designed to attract U.S. audiences [and] reach significant numbers of Americans for purposes of interfering with the U.S. political system, including the presidential election of 2016.”
The second conspiracy indictment came down in July 2018, accusing Russia’s military intelligence agency (known as the GRU) and other Russians with a conspiracy to hack “into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
That Mueller decided not to add more people to these conspiracies is not a sign that he found no evidence of collusion. That’s not how criminal investigations and prosecutions work.
Prosecutors walk away from troubling cases all the time—not because the subjects are squeaky clean, but because they don’t believe they can win a conviction at trial. In this case, a lot of the evidence bearing on the Russian conspiracies is presumably still in Russia. With the exception of one Russian entity, none of the defendants in these two indictments have appeared in an American courtroom. Mueller does not have access to their testimony. He can subpoena information from them, but he has no way of enforcing those subpoenas so long as the defendants are in Russia.
What the Barr letter reveals is that the evidence Mueller did find (such as emails and other communications between Russians and the Trump campaign, for example, including the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton) was simply not enough to prove a conspiracy case against any American. But that’s a far cry from a definitive finding of no evidence whatsoever of Russian “collusion.” Which is precisely why Congress and the American people need to see the full Mueller report—as well as the stockpile of underlying evidence supporting it (law permitting).
He’s too deeply involved in worshiping the Kremlin rat. Maybe there is kompromat on him, maybe he’s just a fool, I don’t know. But, we can’t have a POTUS who admires such an evil creature and who is leader of one of our worst enemy nations.
Collusion with known putlerites is proven. Trump pardoned the criminals involved. Collusion with the kremlin was not proved. Which is pretty ironic because Don Jr took a meeting at Trump towers with senior criminals from the regime to offer assistance in the election/dirt on the Clinton in return for improved relations/sanctions relaxation.
Wherever you’re getting that information you stop looking at it. My factual information comes from non partisan career DOJ lawyers who have shown me over many years that they are non partisan. That is a FACT!!!
Sorry for double printing some of the information.
But bottom line I don’t believe the report was “debunked” nor was former president Trump exonerated in any way.
Myth No. 2: Questions surrounding Trump’s cozy relationship with Putin are now laid to rest. (Also wrong.)
The Mueller investigation began not as a probe into Trump personally, but as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the oddly unconventional Russia-Trump relationship. The Barr letter zeroed in on two aspects: the hacking of Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee email servers, and the social media disinformation campaign—both of which were spearheaded by Russians as explained in the two existing conspiracy indictments.
Without more data, serious questions about Trump’s ties to Russia remain unanswered. Those questions are not about the 2016 election. They have to do with core issues of national security.
For example, the Barr letter does not address:
Why so many people lied to investigators about their communications with Russian officials (including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, to name two prominent examples);
Why Trump publicly lied about his negotiations with Russia to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the campaign;
Why Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes from a private meeting with Putin;
Why Trump is so solicitous of Putin in contrast to his antagonistic approach to American allies such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau;
Why Trump tried to lift sanctions on Russia in the wake of the public announcement that America’s electoral process had been attacked by the Russians; and
Why Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, shared internal polling data with a suspected Russian asset.
The Barr letter does not even indicate whether Mueller investigated these and other questions, let alone reveal what conclusions—if any—Mueller drew from these known facts in addition to the other information he uncovered in the course of his two-year probe.
Myth No. 3: Obstruction of justice requires proof of an underlying crime. (Nope.)
Legal scholars and historians will debate for years the propriety of Barr’s decision to make a call on whether Trump obstructed justice where Mueller apparently could not. Structurally, the entire point of appointing Mueller was to avoid the inevitable conflict of interest in having someone answerable to Trump in charge of making that decision. If the historical DoJ guidance that a sitting president should not be indicted is to be respected, then any post-Mueller determination on obstruction belonged with Congress—which has the impeachment prerogative—not a political appointee of Trump himself.
Fortunately, Barr’s words resound less loudly than those of Mueller himself which, according to the letter, provide that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Follow me here: This means that Mueller found evidence to support a conclusion that Trump obstructed justice in violation of federal criminal law. Much of that evidence is already public. But Mueller could not comfortably determine whether that evidence passed the slam-dunk test needed for a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt—setting aside the constitutional wrinkle facing Mueller over whether Trump could be indicted in the first place.
Russians are not made to sleep with, but to track down and destroy.
This is the only path to world piece.
Find then and liquidate them.
Peace
Them