Richard R. Burt | |
---|---|
United States Ambassador to West Germany | |
In office September 16, 1985 –February 17, 1989 | |
President | Ronald Reagan |
Preceded by | Arthur F. Burns |
Succeeded by | Vernon A. Walters |
Personal details | |
Born | Sewell,Chile | February 3,1947
Political party | Republican |
Alma mater | Cornell University Tufts University |
Richard R. Burt (born February 3,1947) is an American businessman and diplomat who served as United States Ambassador to Germany and was a chief negotiator of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Prior to his diplomatic career,Burt worked as director of a non-governmental organization and from 1977 to 1980 was a national security correspondent for The New York Times . [1]
Burt was born on February 3,1947,in Sewell,Chile. [2] He attended Cornell University,where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. [3] He earned his bachelor's degree,and earned a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1971. Following graduate school,he was selected for a research fellowship at the United States Naval War College. Following this fellowship,Burt moved to London to work as a research associate and later Assistant Director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. In 1977,he was hired by The New York Times to work as a correspondent on national security issues. [4]
Burt began working for the United States Department of State in the early 1980s. In 1981,he was appointed Director of Politico-Military Affairs,and in 1983 Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. In 1985,he became the United States Ambassador to Germany. [4] He assisted in the 11 February 1986 exchange of 9 persons including Anatoly Shcharansky and Hana and Karl Koecher across the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin. [5] [6] His tenure as Ambassador to Germany coincided with the beginning of the process that would lead to the reunification of Germany. [7] In 1989,President George H. W. Bush appointed Burt as chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) between the United States and the Soviet Union,with the rank of ambassador. [2] [4] The treaty,signed in 1991,limited the number of nuclear weapons that the two countries could have.
After negotiation of the START I treaty,Burt left government service and entered the private sector. He served as John McCain's top national security adviser during McCain's 2000 and 2008 Presidential campaigns. [8]
In 2000,he,Lord Powell of Bayswater and others founded the Washington,D.C.,-based private intelligence and risk-assessment and management firm Diligence with Diligence Europe headed by Michael Howard. [9] While he chaired Diligence,Nathaniel Rothschild,a close friend of Oleg Deripaska,purchased a large stake in Diligence. [8] While Deripaska was banned from entering the United States from 1998-2010, [10] he hired Diligence for corporate intelligence gathering,visa lobbying through its considerable GOP connections and,crucially,helping to obtain a $150 million World Bank/European Bank for Reconstruction and Development loan for the Komi Aluminum Project at Sosnogorsk,Komi Republic,a Deripaska subsidiary of Rusal. [8] [11] Through the support from Diligence,Deripaska received a multiple entry visa to the United States in December 2005. [8] From the spring to October 2005,Diligence performed Project Yucca for BGR [lower-alpha 1] in which the auditing firm KPMG was infiltrated by Diligence in order to obtain KPMG's audit of the Jeffrey Galmond and Leonid Reiman associated firm IPOC International Growth Fund for the benefit of Alfa Group's telecom subsidiary Altimo. [15] During Project Yucca,the shareholders of Diligence were CEO Nick Day who was a former British agent,the Chairman of Diligence Richard Burt,the Exxel Group which is a Buenos Aires private equity firm,and Edward Mathias from The Carlyle Group which is a private equity company from Washington D.C. [13] [14] The Bermuda government had accused the IPOC International Growth Fund,which is a Bermuda registered owner of Russian telecoms, [lower-alpha 2] of money laundering and also accused Diligence of impersonating secret service personnel. [13] [14] KPMG successfully sued Diligence for fraud and unjust enrichment and received a settlement of $1.7 million from Diligence on June 20,2006. [13]
In 2007,he left Diligence to work with Henry Kissinger's consulting firm,Kissinger McLarty Associates. [8] [lower-alpha 3]
He has also worked as a partner in consulting firms McKinsey and Company and now serves as a managing partner of McLarty Associates in Washington,D.C. In addition,he has served on boards for the Atlantic Council, [24] Deutsche Bank's Scudder and Germany mutual fund families, [1] America Abroad Media, [25] International Games Technology,UBS mutual funds, [1] a member of the senior advisory board of Alfa Bank in Moscow until November 2016, [1] an advisor to European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) North America’s board until November 2016, [1] and Textron Corporation. Burt is also a Senior Advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies [4] and U.S. Chair of Global Zero. [26] He has lobbied on behalf of LOT Polish Airlines,the Capital Bank of Jordan,and Ukrainian construction firm TMM. [6] [27] He has a working relationship with Mikhail Fridman who is closely associated with the Alfa Group. [6] [28]
In 2014 through early 2016,Burt served as an unpaid foreign policy advisor for Rand Paul's campaign for president. [29] [30]
During the first two quarters of 2016,McLarty Associates received $365,000 to lobby for New European Pipeline AG,a firm owned by Russian oil company Gazprom. [6] Beginning in February 2016,he and a colleague represented the five European energy companies investing in Nord Stream 2,an expansion of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline which would allow Russian gas to reach Europe without going through Belarus or Ukraine. Since 2017,Burt and another lobbyist of a subsidiary of McLarty Associates have received $3.53 million from five Nord Stream 2 financing companies. [31]
Burt claims to have contributed to Trump's first major foreign policy speech,April 27,2016,at the Mayflower Hotel. [32] [33] In the speech,Trump called for greater cooperation with Russia and encouraged Trump to take a less interventionist approach to foreign affairs. [34] : 126 [35] In an April 2019 interview of the Center for the National Interest's Dmitry Simes by Christiane Amanpour,Burt was the top national security adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign. [36] [37] During the campaign,Burt also wrote white papers for Jeff Sessions on foreign policy and national security. [6] [lower-alpha 4]
Burt's simultaneous roles as a campaign adviser for Trump and a lobbyist for Russian interests first drew scrutiny in October 2016 following the release of the Steele dossier. [6] Burt is on both the senior advisory board of the Russian Alfa Bank and the Irina Krivosheeva headed Alfa Capital Partners Advisory Board in which Russia's Alfa-Bank is an investor. [34] [38]
In 2020,Burt,along with over 130 other former Republican national security officials,signed a statement that asserted that President Trump was unfit to serve another term,and "To that end,we are firmly convinced that it is in the best interest of our nation that Vice President Joe Biden be elected as the next President of the United States,and we will vote for him." [39]
Burt is a board member of the Dmitri Simes headed Center for the National Interest. [38]
Kissinger Associates, Inc. is a New York City-based international geopolitical consulting firm, founded and run by Henry Kissinger from 1982 until his death in November 2023. The firm assists its clients in identifying strategic partners and investment opportunities and advising them on government relations.
Mikhail Maratovich Fridman is a Ukrainian-born, Russian–Israeli tycoon. He is one of the co-founders of Alfa-Group, a multinational Russian conglomerate. According to Forbes, he was the second-richest Russian as of 2013, moving down to ninth-richest Russian in 2023. In February 2024, Fridman had a net worth of $13.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Alfa Group Consortium is Russian international privately owned investment groups, with interests in oil and gas, commercial and investment banking, asset management, insurance, retail trade, telecommunications, water utilities and special situation investments.
Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska is a Russian oligarch and billionaire. Deripaska enriched himself on previously state-owned assets that were privatized in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is the founder of Basic Element, one of Russia's largest industrial groups, and Volnoe Delo, Russia's largest charitable foundation. He was the president of En+ Group, a Russian energy company, and headed United Company Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world, until he quit both roles in 2018.
Jeffrey Peter Galmond is a Danish Supreme Court lawyer and businessman. He is the owner of the law firm J. P. Galmond & Co. He owned large portions of the holding companies that owned the Russian mobile telecommunications operator Megafon. One of these portions was contested. Galmond had been accused of not being the true owner of the Russian assets, but of acting as a front to Russian minister of telecommunications Leonid Reiman. These claims were vigorously denied by Galmond.
Leonid Dodojonovich Reiman is a Russian businessman and government official, former Minister of Communications and Information Technologies of the Russian Federation. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
Altimo is the telecommunications investment arm of Russia's Alfa Group Consortium, controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman. Altimo investee companies operate in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Turkey; it holds stakes in VimpelCom, MegaFon, Kyivstar, and Turkcell. Together, Altimo's investee companies have more than 150 million mobile phone subscribers.. Altimo Holdings & Investments Ltd. is a British Virgin Islands company. A majority of its shares are owned by CTF Holdings, a Gibraltar limited liability company, whose sole shareholder is Crown Finance Foundation, a Liechtenstein foundation.
Leonid Borisovich Rozhetskin was a financier and lawyer who went missing under suspicious circumstances after disappearing from his village in Jūrmala, Latvia. In 2013, remains found nearby the year before were confirmed to be Rozhetskin's.
Thomas Franklin "Mack" McLarty, III is an American business and political leader who served as President Bill Clinton's first White House Chief of Staff from 1993 to June 1994, and subsequently as counselor to the president and special envoy for the Americas, before leaving government service in June 1998.
The Center for the National Interest is a Washington, D.C.-based public policy think tank. It was established by former U.S. President Richard Nixon on January 20, 1994, as the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom.
Paul John Manafort Jr. is an American lobbyist, political consultant, attorney, and convicted felon. A long-time Republican Party campaign consultant, he chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016. Manafort served as an adviser to the U.S. presidential campaigns of Republicans Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In 1980, he co-founded the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr. and Roger Stone, joined by Peter G. Kelly in 1984. Manafort often lobbied on behalf of foreign leaders such as former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, former dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko, and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Lobbying to serve the interests of foreign governments requires registration with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); on June 27, 2017, he retroactively registered as a foreign agent.
Nelson Cunningham is an American attorney and a Democratic political advisor who served in the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Paula Ann Cox CBE is a Bermudian politician and former premier of Bermuda. She has been the leader of the Bermuda Progressive Labour Party (PLP), since 28 October 2010. In accordance with the Bermuda Constitution Order 1968, she was appointed Premier of Bermuda, on Friday, 29 October 2010 by Governor Sir Richard Gozney. She was succeeded as Premier by Craig Cannonier on 18 December 2012, when she led her party into election defeat, losing her own seat in the process.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Richard William Gates III is an American former political consultant and lobbyist who pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States for making false statements in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. He is a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort and served as deputy to Manafort when the latter was campaign manager of the Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016, and after under Kellyanne Conway.
Bruce Genesoke Ohr is a former United States Department of Justice official. A former associate deputy attorney general and former director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), as of February 2018 Ohr was working in the Justice Department's Criminal Division. He is an expert on transnational organized crime and has spent most of his career overseeing gang and racketeering-related prosecutions, including Russian organized crime.
Anastasia Vashukevich, also known as Nastya Rybka, is a Belarusian escort worker and author who claimed to have evidence linking Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Konstantin Viktorovich Kilimnik is a Russian–Ukrainian political consultant. In the United States, he became a person of interest in multiple investigations regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, particularly due to his ties with Paul Manafort, an American political consultant, who was a campaign chairman for Donald Trump.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, sorted by topics. It also includes events described in investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. Those investigations continued in 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and 2019, largely as parts of the Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation, the Special Counsel investigation, multiple ongoing criminal investigations by several State Attorneys General, and the investigation resulting in the Inspector General report on FBI and DOJ actions in the 2016 election.
This is a chronology of significant events in 2016 and 2017 related to the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies during the Trump presidential transition and the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Following the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016, this article begins on November 8 and ends with Donald Trump and Mike Pence being sworn into office on January 20, 2017. The investigations continued in the first and second halves of 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, the first and second halves of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
"We have no knowledge of this," wrote Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks in an email. "In fact, our team cannot verify his self-proclaimed contributions to Mr. Trump's speech and, I don't believe Mr. Trump or our policy staff has ever met Mr. Burt. To our knowledge he had no input in the speech and has had no contact with our policy team."