The connection is notable because it is the second link between Hunter and the allegedly dirty FBI New York spy chief McGonigal.

Emails found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop show Hunter tried to sell information about Deripaska to a U.S. aluminum firm, Alcoa, which had just signed a two-year metal supply agreement with Rusal, a Russian entity. In 2000, Deripaska founded Rusal.

In 2011, Hunter offered to “provide Alcoa with statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL.” Hunter’s emails show.

The information included a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.”

The price for the information was “$25,000 for phase one of the project [and] $55,000 for refined analysis.”

The deal apparently never came to fruition because the U.S. company’s representative did not “believe the data analysis is worth the full $55,000.”

Seven years later, in 2018, Deripaska “was sanctioned for having acted or purported to act on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation and for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy,” according to a U.S. indictment. Notably, Deripaska was involved in the 2016 Russia Hoax.

The indictment charged former FBI official Charles McGonigal with aiding Deripaska in trying to evade U.S. sanctions, along with taking secret cash payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer in an alleged “shakedown operation on wealthy Albanians for personal profit.”

McGonigal’s indictment for his alleged involvement in Albania for a “shakedown operation” has opened up new questions about why Albanians were allegedly paying McGonigal in 2017 — the same year Hunter’s emails appear to mention payments to the Albanian prime minister’s adviser.

In the fall of 2017, McGonigal, the former FBI’s counterintelligence chief in New York, received a $225,000 payment from a former Albanian intelligence officer known as Agron Neza, according to U.S. prosecutors. In turn, Agron Neza introduced McGonigal to the former Albanian prime minister’s adviser, Dorian Ducka, and a former member of the Chinese energy company named CEFC or CEFC China Energy Co, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported.

In an email thread discovered on Hunter’s laptop, Hunter and his business partners had a conversation about a person named “Dorian.”

“Dorian was a real help early on so we should consider how we include him,” James Gilliar, Hunter’s business partner, wrote in a May 13, 2017, email.

“No way we don’t do it,” replies Hunter, “and if majority says no I’ll take it out of my salary.”

“He says, and I quote, ‘I took control. I shouldn’t do that. I’m not allowed to do that’.

Appendix 10.
Myth: Death Toll Cover-up

One of the most pervasive suggestions – repeated in the popular press even recently – is that far more than the approximately 250 “officially” counted died. The suggestion is many hundreds more, even thousands of people died in the two raids of 19 February. Further, hundreds of bodies were disposed of by surreptitious methods, with the identities of the fallen being left unknown, and that this was done with official sanction.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the myth is perpetuated. From early 1942 the accounts of the first attacks were distorted. For example, a sailor of the time reported in his diary: “Eleven of those (ships) seen in the harbour were lost in one raid and 875 merchant seamen found a watery grave”. Instead, there were six significant ships immediately lost in the harbour and around 235 people died.
But a soldier noted “We buried at least 300 bodies in one mass grave at Mindil Beach. From my estimation the losses were anywhere from six hundred to one thousand”.

Towards the end of the war a Queensland Senator, Herbert Yeates, visited Darwin. In July 1945 correspondence to Arthur Fadden, then Australian Country Party leader, Yeates wrote: “From the definite and reliable information I obtained whilst at Darwin….I am satisfied that about 1,200 people were killed but that includes Merchant and other seamen, such as men from foreign ports. How about you putting this over in the House on my behalf?”

It is easy to see, however illogically, how the fatalities numbers mounted. People in positions of authority made hurried assessments that doubtless were passed on with all the weight of their originators. For example, post-19 February the manager of the Commonwealth Bank wrote to the Governor of the Bank in NSW that: “I can assure you that between 600 and 1,000 lives were lost”.

Yet in the very same letter he charts his own progress, and that of his staff, over the hours following the first two raids, during which attacks he ventured no further from the bank than the bombed Post Office about 45-seconds walk away. His afternoon was full of meetings and decision making, during which the bank was closed and its cash, together with commercial papers, was loaded on trucks. At
0100 hours the day following the raids – that is, some 24 hours after the second raid had ended – he journeyed south down the main highway out of town to Adelaide River and beyond, never to return.

How the manager made his fatality assessment of the casualty numbers is unknown; according to this own accounting he went nowhere near the harbour and nowhere near Mindil Beach – some three miles away, where bodies were being temporarily buried. But doubtless it was the retained wisdom of the bank staff, repeated to anyone they encountered on their trip south and beyond, that “hundreds” had died in the first raids, and probably the figure of 600 and beyond was quoted. And these were witnesses who were there; they were people who had “been to see the elephant”, as American Civil War people said of those who had fought in battles: they knew what a mysterious and fabulous experience was – such as seeing a circus elephant, a great experience for a humble village lad – so
they must be believed. Thus are myths born.

Variations on this theme have been repeated in a number of publications. Over the past few years, perhaps as a result of the increasing publicity, this enemy attack –the biggest ever perpetuated against Australia – has received, the suggestions of a higher death count have received increasing prominence.

Even modern fictional accounts of life in the Northern Territory perpetuate the stories. The popular writer Judy Nunn’s novel Territory suggests in a foreword note that: “The true casualty figure is estimated to be in excess of 500.” Roland Perry says in his history book Centre Stage, that as many as 1,100 died and were buried in mass graves at Mindil Beach. The fictional 2008 movie Australia didn’t help matters by portraying Japanese forces landing in Darwin, which they never did. The body count in the film was at least unresolved. Its director Baz Luhrmann contributed further to the myth when he reportedly said: “The government disguised the truth and that 2,000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater.”

Several men who served in the military in the Territory have contributed. For example, one recent account is from Alex Peterson, who served with a medical supply unit slightly south of Darwin. He believes, in contrast to one “official figure” of 243, that: “…the number is higher, simply from the number of corpses he saw floating in the harbour that afternoon.” It must be asked if those bodies
were counted, and what total was arrived at.

Another claim is from Rex Ruwoldt, who was based at Lee Point during the raids. He says he received a news bulletin from his unit’s Field Headquarters a few days after the 19th. It mentioned “1,100 deaths” that had been based on “estimates from Army Intelligence.” Ruwoldt is of the opinion that a large number of those killed were part of the “approximately 2,000 or so itinerant workers in Darwin at the time of the attacks”. However, official reports of the time point out that: All Aboriginal women and about 20 per cent of Aboriginal men were moved out of the city. Of the Territory’s population of half-caste people, at least 500 women and children were evacuated to southern states.

On the morning of 19 February 1942 only 100 adult Aboriginal men remained in the Darwin area: 30 employed by the armed forces, 24 prisoners of Darwin’s Fanny Bay jail, and the rest in woodcutters’ camps on the edge of town. However, a group of 40 half-caste children from the Roman Catholic
mission on Melville Island had arrived at Darwin on 15 February and were still in port when the Japanese bombers struck. Ruwoldt also advised: “Jack Burton the Mayor of Darwin at the time estimated about 900 killed. Army Intelligence estimated about 1,100. Official figures about 250. Most of the civilians not counted were buried in two mass graves on Mindil Beach.” Further: “One Padre later the Bishop of Bendigo said “250? I buried more than that myself!”

Ruwoldt says the bodies can be found below the sand at Mindil Beach, near where the casino is today:
I’ve spoken to the fellas who dug those graves. It’s a very traumatic thing for them. They haven’t ever talked to their families about it. They’ve talked to other soldiers like myself. One fella told me, `We dug down to the water level and we stacked the bodies in.’ Another fella said he counted 300 in the
first grave – didn’t even look at the second one.

“Jack Burton” was not the “Mayor of Darwin” on 19 February – there was no position of mayor at the time, although Burton had indeed been prominent in local government. Historian John Bradford notes that Burton kept a record of all the raids throughout the period of bombing from February 1942 to November 1943, and his entry for 19 February stated “Estimate 900 killed on wharf and ships” is well in excess of the official figure. Further: “Apart from his dubious claims re the number of personnel killed, his credibility as a reliable eyewitness was not exactly enhanced when he claimed three Japanese submarines were sunk in Darwin harbour, one on 8 June 1942, and two more on 9 August 1942.” No such actions ever occurred. Further, Ruwolt’s “Army Intelligence” documents
showing such numbers have not been found.

Interestingly, the “Padre later the Bishop of Bendigo” [authors’ emphasis] may well have referred to Chaplain Charles Lawrence Riley, service number VX20306, who during the war was the fourth Bishop of Bendigo from 1938 to 1957; and concurrently Chaplain-General to the AMF from 1942 until 1957. His service record is open and available on the National Archives of Australia website, or physically in Melbourne under his full name. However, it shows that he served overseas in 1941; then returned to Australia and was given his high clerical rank in the new year. There is no reason to think he was in Darwin in February 1942; indeed, his record shows he was officially elsewhere.

There are several accounts of bodies being buried on Mindil Beach: none of them attest to religious personnel performing any sort of ceremonies. For example, Bill Dedman recalls:

At about one o’clock….We went around to Mindil Beach, and we worked until eleven o’clock that night [picking] the bodies up…at Mindil Beach, and we were putting them in holes about three foot, or four foot deep, and leaving them there. Of course, that was being controlled by the officers. And then we went ashore. The next day they came down and they arranged for them bodies to be removed…”

Burials occurred near to where death had been met, because as everyone knew then, there were no facilities in Darwin where corpses could be stored. There was on that day only practicality: no morgue attendants to collect the dead, no funeral directors, no bureaucracy to carry out the necessary practicalities – people were starkly realistic, as they had to be. RAAF pilot Kym Bonython noted briefly in his account of the raids that:

At ten o’clock that night, those of us remaining on the base attended a macabre funeral service. By lantern light, the unfortunates who had been killed that day were wrapped in army blankets and rolled into hastily-dug graves on the edge of the airfield.

But it is the inflated accounts of fatality numbers that were later the stuff of media attention – because these are controversial. Adelaide historian John Bradford has been told a story by a Ross Dack, who reports he was a member of a burial party that had buried “1,500 people” on Darwin’s Mindil Beach. Dack said that there were lots of bodies which were placed in a large hole dug by a bulldozer. Nobody counted the bodies, which were all black, as they were covered in oil. However, he
also expressed the belief to John Bradford that the bodies were later exhumed and relocated to Adelaide River War Cemetery.

An officer’s diary, quoted by Rayner, supports this story: “Police anticipate about 500 dead. Many are being washed up now and are being buried on the beaches”.

Another story is from a Harry Morgan, who was also in Darwin during the first attacks. In an article carried in The Age newspaper, he suggests that there was a deliberate and official coverup:

…this officer with a heap of ribbons walked past our captain, ignored him completely, and said to us all: `Keep your bloody mouths shut.’ We didn’t know who he was, we never found out who he was.

We cannot be sure who this officer was, who thought it necessary to wear ceremonial ribbonsi just after a battle, but he must have been a higher rank than a captain. Why at least a major – a rank important enough to command hundreds of men – should have the strange task of walking around talking to haphazard groups of working soldiers is unknown, but anyone familiar with military operations knows that if you wish to give soldiers a legal and important order, this is not the way to do it. The personnel are gathered together; given the order, and then made to sign to indicate – for later legal action if necessary – they were there and heard and understood it.

78 years of age when the article was printed in early 2001, Morgan was said to be “legally blind and living in a retirement village near Bendigo”. He said he “no longer feels like keeping his mouth shut”, and that the official 243 death toll is part of a cover–up. He suggested over 300 bodies were buried at Mindil Beach “in a bomb crater” – that would have been an enormous crater – but admitted they
could have been “later moved, and reburied in official graves”. He further alleged – although he did not say whether he observed this – bodies were taken to sea in “barges” and disposed of:

About three days after the bombing they had these barges down there [near the wharf]. Three of them were piled with bodies – I’d reckon 3–400 bodies at least on those three big barges. They were towed out to sea through the boom defence. They didn’t tell us how far – we’d presume about 15-20 miles – where they were sunk. Nobody knew who they were – they were all colours, races and sizes. Nobody knew where they came from. They were found in little old shanties where they were gathered up. I was there when they were loading them on. I saw it.

It does seem that bodies were buried on this beach after the first raids, a sandy strip about a kilometre long in between Myilly Point, about three kilometres from Darwin’s Central Business District, and Bullocky Point, where Darwin High School has been established on the site of what was once Vestey’s Meatworks.

Mindil Beach has been built over in recent years, first with the pyramid-styled Darwin Casino, and secondly with an esplanade complete with toilet blocks and substantial amounts of paving to host Darwin’s famous Thursday night Mindil Beach Markets

Aboriginal remains have been found in the area, and it seems that the site was a burying ground for the Larrakeyah Aboriginal tribe.20 But none of the excavations over the years have uncovered mass WWII graves.

However, while the possibility that some bodies from the 19 February attacks were buried on the beaches seems positive, it would seem this was a temporary means of coping with the reality of the situation. These remains were soon moved to a more respectful location. Colin Price, who was serving on board the corvette HMAS Katoomba at the time, confirms the burial of bodies recovered from the
harbour and taken to the beach: “On the 19th-20th-21st of February dozens of bodies were floating in the harbour. Manunda lowered one of her boats and went from corpse to corpse using ropes to attach them together and dragging them to the beach where they were buried.”

Author Robert Rayner, who penned that encyclopedic book The Army and the Defence of Darwin Fortress, interviewed 14th Anti-Aircraft Battery unit members who recalled burying bodies on Mindil
Beach, but he noted that these remains were later recovered for reinterment in cemeteries such as Adelaide River and sites dedicated to American personnel.

Mindil Beach was a temporary means of coping with the reality of the situation, for Darwin, a small town, lacked refrigerated mortuaries in which to place the dead. So any suggestion of mass burials has a basis in fact, but it was only a temporary measure. Modern construction activities have found no bodies in the Mindil Beach area except for in 1992 some local Aboriginal remains.

Morgan’s suggestion necessitates involvement with the Royal Australian Navy, given that they were in control of harbour craft at the time. If barges were used then they would need to be towed by a powered vessel, and that vessel’s log would show at least the movement concerned, even if the operation was secret. It is unlikely that such an action would have remained secret over the years – what would be the reason for the scores employed in the covert burial parties to keep the secret? Where too are the notes in the vessels’ Record of Proceedings – all available in archives now, even at the highest Most Secret level – to indicate vessels had this task?

Interviews with two RAN sailors who were in Darwin on the day do not confirm the story. Frank Marsh was on board the corvette HMAS Deloraine, and took part in the ship’s defence and also its duties later. He confirmed he “did not see hundreds of bodies being transported by barge”.23 Nor did his shipmate Clarrie Rogan, who recalled the ship raised steam the following day to visit vessels in need of help. The corvette then was refuelled at the Darwin wharf. There he did see: “…perhaps 30-40 bodies in sheets. We were under the impression they came from (the hospital ship) Manunda”. But there was no transportation of those bodies to their vessel or any other that he knew of. Rogan also notes: “We would have known about such a movement of bodies out to sea… any seaman would know
that disposing of bodies like that wouldn’t make sense – they would come back in on the tide and they wouldn’t have had time to weight them.”

It may well be that Harry Morgan saw the bodies from Manunda. Such a sight would be shocking, and indelibly etched upon one’s memory. The number of bodies sighted may well have created such an impression that Morgan thought there were many more than there were in actuality. Indeed, historian Robert Rayner believes this is the cause of many of these stories: “…what they saw was
indeed a lot of bodies which, to the young mind, stunned by the events in which they were all participating for the first time, might well have seemed larger than it in fact was”.

Just because someone – even a someone with the indelible veracity of having served in the armed force on the day – says they saw something does not mean they did. For example, during the action to sink the Japanese submarine outside Darwin the previous month Deloraine crewmember Stan Hale, loading depth charges on the ship’s quarterdeck, said he and his crewmate Fred Savage saw a periscope from a second submarine: “…about 30 ft. away in line with the port thrower….we saw it turn towards us. When it focused on the ship the periscope started to go down just as the buzzer sounded to drop a depth charge.”

The trouble with this account is that the other three submarines – by their own logs – were many kilometres away, and no other submarines were nearby. What they saw was probably a floating log, or a crocodile.

During the Darwin raids one witness attested to newspapers that he saw Japanese aircraft with British and American markings on them. Another said he saw “swastika markings” on an attacker.28 Does this mean that this was so?

The examination of the raids since then does not suggest that this is true. Should we place credibility on those reports? People make mistakes; hear accounts that become part of their own memories; think wishfully, or sometimes lie for various reasons.

If indeed there were many extra fatalities resulting from the first raid, where did they come from? The raid chronology is quite precise: 81 high level “Kate” bombers hit the wharf, town and ships; then left; 71 “Val” divebombers hit the ships and airfields, dropping their single bomb, with a number also doing some strafing; then left. The 36 Zero fighters combated the P-40s and strafed some
targets, mainly at the RAAF base; then they left too. Each of these attackers had a finite amount of ordnance and we have shown where and how it was expended. The fatalities resulting from each ship have been well documented. On shore the Post Office was almost completely destroyed but those who had died were tallied soon enough. Buildings such as the Police Barracks were also destroyed,although not to the extent that survivors were unable to give a good accounting.

The town was not heavily damaged in warfare terminology, although to those inexperienced in military attacks it certainly seemed devastating enough. Darwin today possesses many examples of buildings which were right in the target zone and yet survived: the Bank of New South Wales, the Commonwealth Bank, the Victoria Hotel, Cashman’s Newsagency, and so on. The documented casualties were relatively light: the Post Office was the main point of loss, but less than 10 other townspeople were killed.

This therefore means that “several hundred more” casualties must have come from somewhere else. But what buildings – damage known and assessed – and what ships can they be? It is not good enough to say that they merely existed and were “lost’ on the day.

On the grounds of logic alone, the suggestion of an “Official Cover–Up” must fail. Where is the motive for the armed forces concealing an enormous number of deaths? For the mass and secret disposal of bodies to have occurred would have taken scores of defence members, and none have come forward to make this admission.

Neither the officers and non-commissioned officers who would have had necessarily to oversee such work, nor the sailors, soldiers and airmen who would have carried out the traumatic physical labour, have appeared. Surely if this had happened, these people would have stepped forward, human nature seeking closure – to use a modern term – of such a troubling event.

Furthermore, to suggest an “official” cover-up is to belie the reality of military operations. Even in wartime administrative procedures are followed, and there has been no paperwork uncovered to show such a claim can be substantiated.

To suggest that the lack of such paperwork is proof itself of secrecy is the stuff of Roswell flying saucer theorists: lack of evidence does not in itself constitute evidence. Dr Peter Stanley, then the Australian War Memorial’s Principal Historian, noted in a public talk of 2002:

Darwin has attracted many myths, not the least being that news of it was suppressed. It was certainly diminished. The following day news reports put the death toll at 17, but word of the raids on Darwin was never suppressed, not least because it supported the Curtin government’s desire to mobilize
Australians into working, fighting or saving by frightening them about what could happen.

If thousands of people died as is claimed in the Darwin raids, where are the many more thousands of relatives who would have followed up the losses after the war? To claim that some 700 dead were itinerants who provoked no inquiries as to their loss seems a casual dismissal. Further, Aborigines in the Top End place great store by their kinship networks, and the loss of many members would be remembered by their families today.

After spending two years in jail not convicted of any crime, Rehl is currently on trial in Kelly’s courtroom along with four other Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy—an indictment filed a year after their initial charges. Kelly has kept all five defendants behind bars awaiting trial, repeatedly denying all subsequent motions for release while at the same time granting one delay after another.

Kelly, naturally, is invested in justifying his cruel decision to incarcerate innocent men (yes, the country’s jurisprudence still assumes the presumption of innocence) for two years.

Which only partially explains why he is running roughshod over the rights of the defendants to make sure they are found guilty.

What’s unfolding in Kelly’s courtroom is a mockery of justice—a politically motivated case heavily reliant on speech and activity that should be protected by the First Amendment rather than substituted for hard proof of any crime, let alone a plan to overthrow the government. For example, when FBI investigators raided Rehl’s home, they found no weapons or detailed plot to run Congress out of town on January 6 but instead recovered clothing and challenge coins produced by the Proud Boys.

Despite having no relevance to the merits of the case, Kelly allowed the government to enter the coins into evidence to show the “relationship” between the defendants.

Apparently nothing is too inconsequential, dubious, or political in nature to offend Kelly’s judicial sensibilities. Kelly has allowed prosecutors to play for the jury a clip of Trump’s comment during the September 2020 presidential debate instructing the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” a throwaway line that had nothing to do with January 6.

“Look, here’s America,” the vessel’s chief architect, Wu Zhe, told the state-run newspaper Nanfang Daily. He excitedly pointed to a red line marking the airship’s journey at about 65,000 feet in the air, noting that in 2019, that flight was setting a world record.

Named “Cloud Chaser,” the airship had been flying for just shy of a month over three oceans and three continents, including what appears to be Florida. At the time of Wu’s interview in August, the airship was hovering above the Pacific Ocean, days away from completing its mission.

Wu, a veteran aerospace researcher, has played a key role in advancing the Chinese regime in what it describes as the “near space” race, referring to the layer of the atmosphere sitting between 12 and 62 miles above the earth. This region, which is too high for jets but too low for satellites, had been deemed ripe for exploitation in the regime’s bid to achieve military dominance.

Despite having existed for decades, the regime’s military balloon program came into the spotlight recently when the United States shot down a high-altitude surveillance balloon that drifted across the country for a week and hovered above multiple sensitive U.S. military sites.