Oh my.  I believe we have heard mention of Oleg Deripaska as part of Putin’s circle of oligarchs, and a target for State Department sanctions under the Trump Administration.  It seems he was an un-paid resource of the FBI when Mueller was the Director:

Mueller may have a conflict — and it leads directly to a Russian oligarch

Legal expert Turley questions Mueller’s past dealings with Russian oligarch

By Jonathan Turley John Solomon, The Hill

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL[?]

…

In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.

While I certainly approve of the Bureau trying to recover one of their agents, doing so in the manner they did appears to be a violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting un-paid services.  In addition, Meuller failed to disclose his relationship to Deripaska and Deripaska’s relationship to Paul Manafort in his indictment of Manafort.  But wait, there’s more:

…

One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirmed.

[UPDATE]

The Hill performed a stealth update of this article adding some essential information:

Deripaska also appears to be one of the first Russians the FBI asked for help when it began investigating the now-infamous Fusion GPS “Steele Dossier.” Waldman, his American lawyer until the sanctions hit, gave me a detailed account, some of which U.S. officials confirm separately.

Two months before Trump was elected president, Deripaska was in New York as part of Russia’s United Nations delegation when three FBI agents awakened him in his home; at least one agent had worked with Deripaska on the aborted effort to rescue Levinson. During an hour-long visit, the agents posited a theory that Trump’s campaign was secretly colluding with Russia to hijack the U.S. election.

“Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious,” the lawyer said. “So he told them in his informed opinion the idea they were proposing was false. ‘You are trying to create something out of nothing,’ he told them.” The agents left though the FBI sought more information in 2017 from the Russian, sources tell me. Waldman declined to say if Deripaska has been in contact with the FBI since Sept, 2016.

[Emphasis added.  I suspect this was Agent Strzok]

Way to bury an important revelation on the most pressing story of our day, as an update of a deniable Opinion piece which is really investigative in nature.  I further speculate that one of the FBI Agents who dropped in on Deripaska (who was under Diplomatic Immunity at the time as a member of Russia’s UN Delegation) in the middle of the night was Strzok, which in turn explains why he texted to Page that he believed there was no “there” to Mueller’s Russia Investigation Debacle.

[End UPDATE]

Competence and transparency don’t appear to be among Meuller’s virtues.