John R. Schindler: Does John Conyers Know Who Murdered Chandra Levy?

Source: Observer | December 6, 2017 | John R. Schindler

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Multiple women have come forward with similar accounts of Conyers using his House position to run a harem of sorts for decades. With his resignation, the 88-year-old congressman cuts short inquiries into his rumored misdeeds in office. Some stories now appearing are alarming, none more than that proffered by Courtney Moore, now 36, who claimed that she was a 20-year-old college student when Conyers propositioned her for sex.

When Moore rejected his advances, she states, Conyers brought up the then-current case of Chandra Levy, a Washington, D.C., intern who disappeared mysteriously in the summer of 2001. “He said he had insider information on the case. I don’t know if he meant it to be threatening,” she told the Washington Post, “but I took it that way. I got out of the car and ran.”

The sensational Levy case was the talk of the town in our nation’s capital back in mid-2001, dominating local headlines in that long, last summer before jihadists took down the Twin Towers and America commenced its seemingly endless War on Terrorism. Chandra Levy, a pretty young intern, became a sensation after her disappearance. She belongs to a now-vanished age in Washington, swept away by 9/11, and her case remains as mysterious as on the day she disappeared: May 1, 2001.

The 24-year-old Levy had been working at the Federal Bureau of Prisons while completing her master’s degree. She left her apartment in trendy Dupont Circle in the early afternoon and seemed to fall off the face of the earth. Nobody saw or heard from her after May 1, and five days later her concerned parents in California called Washington police to report her missing.

Extensive searches brought up nothing. The police had no idea where to look. Her Internet searches shortly before she went missing included Rock Creek Park, which is close to Dupont Circle—and a place where women were at risk of assault, especially after dark. Chandra Levy was gone and nowhere to be found.

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After the 9/11 attacks removed the Levy case from the front pages, her disappearance went cold until her skeletal remains were found, by accident, in Rock Creek Park, in mid-May 2002, over a year after she disappeared. After so long outdoors, there wasn’t much for the police to work with forensically; it was determined that Levy was a murder victim, but her remains gave few clues as to what happened to her.

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It didn’t take long for doubts to emerge, however, and the conviction gradually fell apart. Guandique was granted a new trial thanks to prosecutorial errors. Then, in July 2016, prosecutors announced that they would not proceed with another trial since they had so little evidence to go on. Morales, the jailhouse snitch who supplied the key testimony against Guandique, turned out to be a liar and fabricator. Guandique was a free man, but unwelcome in the United States. In May of this year, 16 years after Chandra Levy disappeared, Ingmar Guandique was deported back to his native country.

Who, then, killed Chandra? From the beginning there were whispers that there was a lot more to this case than the police or media let on. I was working in counterintelligence for the National Security Agency at the time, and I heard the whispers too. They centered on Condit’s political life. He was a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the powerful oversight committee for our spy agencies. HPSCI members are cleared to know pretty much all the Intelligence Community’s secrets. As such, they are obvious targets for exploitation by foreign spies.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine that a guy with zipper problems like Condit could have easily gotten himself into a jam and wound up doing things he regretted. This would also explain why Condit, despite having nothing to do with his lover’s death, refused to talk about the case and gave evasive answers to simple questions. He hinted at illicit shenanigans in his semi-memoir, published last year, in which he gives his side of the Levy case. One of its stranger passages was noted by a reviewer:

Condit recounts attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, where he was seated near a Russian woman he describes as “very pretty” with “brown hair and fair skin that melted into her white dress.” They conversed, and then she prepared to take a taxi to her hotel.

“I’ll have the driver drop you off first,” he offered.

Then, the book says, “She got out of line and followed him to the town car.”

The scene ends there.

Is Condit trying to tell us something here? It doesn’t take much imagination to see what possibly—just possibly—might have happened to Chandra Levy. Let’s say you’re working for a foreign intelligence agency in Washington and, miraculously, you’ve managed to strike up a relationship with a powerful member of Congress. Even better, he’s a member of the HPSCI and he has access to valuable spy secrets. This is your career-making golden source.

But there’s a catch. Your would-be star has lady problems. Lots of them. One of his mistresses—the young, naïve, pretty one who thinks she and the congressman have a long and bright future ahead of them—is making noises about exposing him or making him pay for not taking their relationship seriously. You find out about this because, of course, you have the congressman’s phone tapped and you intercept the young lady’s increasingly hysterical calls. What would you do to protect your golden source?

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However, the John Conyers story has put Chandra Levy and her unsolved killing in the news again. Perhaps the aging lothario was merely trying to impress—or intimidate—a young lady by claiming to know what happened to the missing intern. Or maybe he was telling the truth. Given Conyers’ own longstanding ties to Moscow and its intelligence services, which I exposed in a recent column, it can’t be ruled out that he possesses knowledge that would be of interest to the police and the FBI. Somebody should ask him.

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