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[ad_1] And yet, Mr. Vekselberg, a native of Ukraine, has long-running business ties to the United States. He founded Renova in 1990 as a Russian-American joint venture, according to an archived version of the company’s website . And during a thaw in United States-Russian relations — the so-called reset orchestrated by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state — Mr. Vekselberg was appointed to help attract Silicon Valley investors to the technology park outside Moscow, known as Skolkovo. “The whole country needs some sort of breakthrough,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview about the effort. Mr. Vekselberg also donated to Fort Ross, a state park in California that is the site of a 19th-century Russian settlement, to keep it open during the state’s financial crunch in the recession. After making his fortune in aluminum and oil in Siberia in the 1990s, Mr. Vekselberg, together with partners, closed in 2003 what was at the time the largest private transaction in Russian ...

[ad_1] In 2015, a new conspiracy theory swept across  much of the American South and Southwest, claiming that then-President Barack Obama was planning on using an upcoming military exercise to install martial law across the country. Known as Jade Helm, the exercise took part over a number of states, including Texas. The conspiratorial concerns were sufficient enough to convince Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to send the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercises — a move that a plurality of Texans agreed with .  Of course, Obama never plotted any dictatorship or martial law, and Jade Helm ended as little more than a routine exercise for the American military. But this week, we got a glimpse into why conspiracies about Jade Helm seemed to spike when they did. As the Texas Tribune first reported , former CIA chief Michael Hayden appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe podcast on Thursday , where he revealed that Twitter bot accounts run out of Russia amplified messages about Jade Helm conspira...