Were Italian Brother and Sister Framed in an Effort to Plant “Russian” Emails on Their Company’s American Servers as Part of SpyGate to Get Trump?

In episode #5 of his research on SpyGate, @jimmomo examines the blowing link emerging from @JudicialWatch‘s FOIA, bewteen SpyGate and the EyePyramid case of the Occhionero’s. Fake rogatories, dirty prosecutors, the Ohr’s and the plot vs @realDonaldTrump.https://t.co/S5FVDMAHXj

— Giulio Occhionero (@g_occhionero) August 16, 2019

Emerging evidence of Italian involvement in both SpyGate and ItalyGate places a new focus on Giulio and Francesca Occhionero, an Italian brother and sister who were arrested just days before President Trump was inaugurated in 2017 for an alleged cyber hack.

Giulio, in his late 40s, is a nuclear engineer by training. Francesca, in her early 50s, is a chemist.

In the late 90s Giulio found success developing algorithms used to trade financial derivatives and selling them to American investment banks. Since that time the pair has set up at least half a dozen companies in the U.S., the UK and Malta (among other countries.) Their firms offered data management and quantitative finance.

In January 2017 just before President Obama left office the pair was arrested, accused of hacking some 18,000 emails accounts. Their alleged victims included former Italian prime ministers Matteo Renzi and Mario Monti, the Vatican’s culture minister and the European central Bank chief Mario Draghi.

Both Giulio and Francesca vehemently deny the accusations. They claim they were framed, the true goal of their accusers being the placement of emails containing compromising information on Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton on their U.S.-based servers which could then be “found” by authorities and blamed on Russia.

Renzi has figured prominently in both SpyGate and the more recent ItalyGate – the alleged hacking of the 2020 U.S. election. He is accused of working with former President Obama on operations aimed at unraveling Donald Trump’s presidency from within Italy.

Some have also speculated that a recent crisis in the Italian government, precipitated by Renzi, was meant to bring Mario Draghi, “the greatest central banker of modern times,” to power.

A whistleblower who says he has evidence of alleged vote manipulation in the U.S. election was arrested in December, also accused of hacking. That hack took place three years prior to his arrest but just days after reports of the election interference were published in Italian media.

Documents made public by a Freedom of Information Act request by conservative group Judicial Watch reveal a role played by Bruce and Nellie Ohr, the husband and wife team that have featured prominently in SpyGate.

Bruce Ohr was the main contact between the FBI and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Steele is the author of the eponymous Steele Dossier, the intelligence report that makes salacious accusations against Donald Trump’s activities in Russia over several years and claims he is compromised by Russia.

Bruce was also the point person between Nellie and her employer (political research firm Fusion GPS), and the FBI. It was Fusion GPS that funded Steele’s intelligence report.

In an email sent to Bruce on January 25, 2017, Nellie annotates several articles that link the removal of some top officials of Russian intelligence services to the publication of the Steele Dossier.

In one of the notes Nellie points out that January 13, 2017, when Kommersant (a Russian news outlet) reported Valery Gerasimov might step down as head of the cyber division of the Russian intelligence service FSB, was “3 days after the arrests of the Occhioneros in Italy, and days after the publication of the “Yellow showers” [Steele] dossier.”

As Italian media has pointed out it is not readily clear how the alleged hacking operation conducted by the Occhioners is connected to Russia and why Nellie felt it important to mention.

What’s interesting is Nellie offers no explanation on who the Occhioneros are or what their case is about, possibly betraying the fact that Bruce is already acquainted with the facts of their case.

Also puzzling is that among the first questions asked to Maurizio Mazzella, a friend of Giulio’s who was accused of aiding and abetting the “hack,” during a search carried out on the same day the Occhioneros were arrested is who his “Trump team contact” was.

Perhaps most telling is that the head prosecutor in the case Eugenio Albamonte reportedly filed the Occhioneros’ crime under “organized crime” and not as a computer or cyber crime. (ITN has come across no reports or even accusations that the Occhioneros’ supposed hack was part of a wider criminal operation.)

That strange “misfiling” had the practical effect of placing the case under the purview of Bruce Ohr, who was the director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force at the Department of Justice at the time.

Giulio and Francesca were held for a year before being released.