HEAVY FALLOUT FROM THE KONANYKHINE CASE
The Washington Weekly. September 1, 1997
A Virginia federal judge last week ordered the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate allegations of DOJ wrongdoing that surfaced during a hearing in his courtroom in July.
During the hearing of a deportation appeal by Alexandre Konanykhine in the court of Judge T.S. Ellis, III, former KGB agent Yuri Shvets testified that the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the U.S. Justice Department was collaborating with the Russian KGB to fabricate a case that would deliver Alexandre Konanykhine to the Russian Mafia to be liquidated.
Why? Because Konanykhine, as a former banker, had knowledge of a scheme carried out by the KGB for the Soviet Communist Party to stash hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign countries just before the collapse of Communist dictatorship.
Konanykhine had started blowing the whistle on the scheme, even sending a letter to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The Russian Mafia sent its "enforcer," KGB operative Lt. Colonel Volevodz to the United States, where Konanykhine was living to get Konanykhine back to Russia. Colonel Volevodz found willing assistants in the Clinton administration and obtained an order to get Konanykhine deported, but only after covering up the expert testimony of former KGB agent Yuri Shvets, firing an unwilling INS employee by the name of Antoinette Rizzi who tried to blow the whistle, and lying to Judge Ellis.
Asked by the Washington Weekly to comment on the U.S. Justice Department actions in his case, Konanykhine says: "It's stupid to assist KGB whose institutional purpose is to inflict maximum harm on the USA. It is stupid to take for the face value presentations of KGB, which is notorious for disinformation of the governments and public. It is stupid to unite with the Mafia--which the DOJ knew was behind the persecution--to advance law enforcement."
During hours of cross-examination of Shvets and Rizzi last July, however, the sordid details of the entire botched operation were laid out.
Shvets testified that he was told by INS district counsel Eloise Rosas that "the INS got instructions from the top to cooperate on this case." The investigation ordered by Judge Ellis last week should answer the question "how high?"
As if suspicious that the Justice Department might not do a good job of investigating itself, Judge Ellis warned that if not satisfied he would use "the resources of this court."
Published in the Sep. 1, 1997 issue of The Washington Weekly
Copyright 1997 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal.com)