CONNECTION TO PIZZAGATE

This is related to Pizzagate because it concerns the dark underbelly of the international adoption industry which as one critic describes it, has been "a Wild West, all but free of meaningful law, regulation, or oversight" where babies and children from poor countries are bought and sold by unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

Russian adoptions have been in the U.S. headlines for the last few days because of the sensational news of the meeting in Trump Tower last summer between Donald Trump, Jr., and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney who claimed to be lobbying influential Americans for the restart of Russian adoptions in the U.S. which were banned in 2012 by Putin in what many observers believed was retaliation for the Magnitsky Act.

NEW DEVELOPMENT

In Trump's startling interview yesterday with the NY Times, he revealed that during his private conversations with President Putin during the G20 summit, they discussed adoptions:

“I actually talked about Russian adoption with him,’’ he said, in the Times interview. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting.”

As we've talked about in the past here on VOAT, it's puzzling why the female Russian lawyer, as Donald Trump, Jr, said in his initial statement about their Trump Tower meeting was so intent on restarting "a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government."

Puzzling, because it is pretty much general knowledge that Russian adoptions in the U.S., despite the huge number of them, with over 58,000 Russian adoptions in about two decades from 1995 to 2013, were fraught with problems. Russian orphans became notorious for having psychological and health problems and adoptive parents were poorly trained and completely unprepared to deal with their adoptees' difficult behavioral issues. Many Russian adoptees ended up in state mental institutions, and Russian authorities have blamed US adoptive parents for the deaths of 19 children.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Feb. 2013, that

"the U.S. is the only country from which we get genuinely alarming reports about how many families treat our children. And I use the word "many" intentionally," he added.

Lavrov explained that

the number of cases is believed to be far greater since American families change the names of Russian adoptees, making it impossible for Moscow to track them.

In fact, a year after the Dimi Yakovlev Law was passed, the Russian govt. launched a criminal probe into online trafficking of Russian children in the U.S.

The Investigative Committee spokesperson Vladimir Markin said the case was started due to a journalistic investigation by Reuters and NBC initiated in September.According to investigators, illegal markets were created in the US on Yahoo and Facebook websites, on which illicit transactions concerning children adopted by US citizens were performed," he said. He added that, following the reports, the committee had checked the information and decided to open a criminal case on human trafficking involving minors.

Thus, among others, transactions involving 26 underage Russian citizens were made and moreover, it was established that as the result of the deals some of them were sexually abused,” Markin said.

The Reuters investigative report, filed Sept. 9, 2013, entitled "Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas" is here: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1

Lavrov has said the Russian govt is working on a database of Russian children adopted in the U.S. to monitor Russian adoptees until the age of 18. He also announced that Russian MPs intend to ban changing of citizenship of adopted Russian kids over fears that NGOs specializing in adoptions might send children to the United States via third party countries.

“Despite the fact that we are no longer sending orphans for adoption to US families,** the USA has not given up on its policy of purchases of children. If we fail to impose a legal ban on the shipping of children across the ocean, they will transport them through third countries,” State Duma deputy Yevgeniy Fyodorov (United Russia) has told the mass circulation daily, Izvestia.**

“The growing number of registered foreign NGOs [specializing in adoptions] is a direct proof that the transit of Russian children to the United States is growing,” the politician added.

An excellent series of in-depth articles on fraud and corruption in the international adoption industry here: http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/adoption/index.html#TheLie