Another Eastern European Nation Gets Tangled in US Politics

An Op-Ed by a former Moldovan ambassador on Trump’s acting intelligence director and his dubious ties to an Eastern European politician.

by Vlad Lupan. Read more on PassBlue.

Richard Grenell, until recently US ambassador to Germany, is now acting national director of intelligence. He has worked for a Moldovan politician whom the US has accused of corruption, and the author of this op-ed, a former Moldovan ambassador to the UN, says that “knowingly or not,” Grenell tolerated the politician’s deceit.

Days after Richard Grenell was recently named by President Trump as the United States’ acting national director of intelligence — America’s chief spy — a media site reported that Grenell had worked for an Eastern European politician whom the US has accused of corruption and barred from the country.

Grenell, who is in the job until a permanent director is named and confirmed, apparently did not disclose that income or register as a foreign agent. The story is complicated.

The politician is Vladimir Plahotniuc, whose left-wing Democratic Party in Moldova was portrayed by Grenell and others in an article in The Washington Times, a conservative publication, as being virtually the only pro-Western force in Moldova. Plahotniuc, however, had been financing the pro-Russian Moldovan Communist Party from 2001 to 2009, where the current Moldovan president, Igor Dodon, was his colleague.

President Putin of Russia supports Dodon. In 2017, Putin suggested at a meeting of the World Economic Forum to “ ask Dodon” about Russian election interference in the US. Meanwhile, a Moldovan media investigation found that propaganda was being spread in Moldova in its own 2016 elections by media controlled by Dodon, Plahotniuc and Russia in 2016, suggesting that their cooperation continues.

As early as August 2016, it was revealed that Plahotniuc [pronounced pluh-hot-NEWK] was a main suspect in the so-called Russian Laundromat case, which “legitimized” Russian criminals’ money through Moldovan courts and banks. Eastern Europe security experts knew that Bratva — the Russian mafia — has close links to Russian security services that attack elections and carry out assassinations with unknown sources of money, possibly laundered abroad. The Kremlin’s man in charge of Moldova (and now in charge of Ukraine, too), Dmitri Kozak, was Putin’s chief of staff and a former security service officer.