American Kompromat
Page 27
Kirkland & Ellis lawyers were everywhere.
Whether it was the Epstein case or various aspects of Trump’s Russia scandals and impeachment, many of the attorneys representing Trump were based in major white-shoe international law firms such as Kirkland & Ellis and Jones Day, whose clients, together, include billionaire Russian oligarchs and Russian money-laundering financial institutions such as Alfa Bank and Deutsche Bank, and whose attorneys have, during the Trump administration, amassed extraordinary power in such formidable bodies as the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of New York, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the US Supreme Court.
And dozens of them went on to hold powerful positions in the Trump administration. These would be Trump’s enablers, the men—and they were almost all men—who facilitated Trump in dismantling the elaborate system of checks and balances that reined in authoritarianism, who gave Trump counsel during impeachment proceedings in 2019, who helped him implement the doctrine of the unitary executive, who tried to rewrite the history of the Trump-Russia saga as if it were a hoax, who blithely ignored subpoenas, and who abolished oversight by Congress and inspectors general at the drop of a hat.
Under Trump, norms were violated so frequently that conflicts of interest became the rule rather than the exception. The thieves and kleptocrats, or their lawyers, really, were in control.
Historically, there had been an invisible and inviolable firewall between the White House and the Department of Justice to ensure that the ruling party didn’t use the criminal justice system for its own political agenda—or at least that was the norm. As a measure of the extent to which things had changed, during the Clinton administration only four people in the Clinton White House—the president, the vice president, the White House counsel, and the deputy White House counsel—were empowered to take part in discussions with the Justice Department regarding pending criminal investigations and criminal cases, and only three Justice Department officials were allowed to talk to the White House. But that changed dramatically under the aegis of White House adviser Karl Rove in the George W. Bush administration, when, according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), 417 White House officials and at least 30 Justice Department officials were so empowered—a staggering increase that politicized the Justice Department as never before.22
Now, with Trump in command, the Justice Department was further transformed into an institution that embraced the most extreme interpretation of the unitary-executive doctrine imaginable by making the president truly above the law.
In the private sector, no firm played a bigger role in enabling Trump than Kirkland & Ellis. Trump’s affinity with the firm began just two months after his inauguration when former Kirkland partner John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, and his deputy, Michael Ellis, inappropriately shared classified intelligence files with House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA).
At the time, the House Intelligence Committee was investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, and the episode, while perfectly legal, was an early indication that when it came to overseeing Trump’s transgressions, Nunes and other House Republicans were delighted to do Trump’s bidding.
Two years later, in 2019, Eisenberg was still at it, in a key episode of the Trump-Ukraine scandal. In the famous July 25, 2019, phone call that led to his impeachment later that year—the “perfect phone call,” as the president characterized it—Trump urged newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into his chief political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter if he wanted to receive almost $400 million in previously approved military aid.
Specifically, Trump wanted Zelensky to investigate Burisma Holdings, a large Ukrainian natural gas company whose board members included Hunter Biden.
In effect, Trump was saying, If you won’t help my campaign by drumming up a phony investigation against my opponent, I’ll let the Russians do as they please. Given that Ukraine desperately needed the aid because it was at war with Russian troops occupying the eastern part of the country, Trump’s demand was nothing less than an extortionate quid pro quo.
A number of White House aides were deeply disturbed by the phone call, and in an effort to make sure the Trump-Zelensky phone call stayed secret, Eisenberg ordered that a transcript of it be moved to a highly classified server. Eisenberg later was subpoenaed to testify before the House of Representatives but declined to appear on advice of counsel.23
The charges against Michael Ellis are even more damning. Citing the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, Ryan Goodman in Just Security reported, “It was Ellis who came up with the idea of moving the memorandum of the phone call to the highly classified server. After the Ukraine call, Vindman and his brother (an ethics lawyer on the NSC) had an urgent meeting with Ellis and Eisenberg. Vindman testified that he told the lawyers that he thought what happened on the call was ‘wrong,’ that Ellis first raised the idea of placing the call summary into the highly classified system, and that Eisenberg as the senior official in the room signed off on the idea giving it ‘the go-ahead.’”24
Of course, Kirkland & Ellis wasn’t the only major firm sending multiple attorneys to the White House. Don McGahn, who served as White House counsel from Trump’s 2017 inauguration until October 2018, was a partner at Jones Day, another enormous firm that, on Inauguration Day, issued a press release that thirteen of its lawyers were joining the Trump administration.25
Jones Day had represented at least ten major corporations and organizations close to Vladimir Putin, and as a result had a highly significant “oligarch practice” whose clients included Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element; the Alfa Group and Leonard Blavatnik’s Access-Renova Group, which jointly own billions of dollars in oil and gas assets; Alfa Bank, the largest commercial bank in Russia; Letterone, a $30 billion holding company; Rosneft, one of the largest oil companies in the world; the Sapir Organization, which partnered with Trump to build Bayrock’s Trump SoHo; and, of course, Donald Trump himself—not to mention the Trump 2016 and 2020 Presidential Campaign Committees, Trump for America, and certain Trump-related political action committees, as well as the Republican National Committee.26
As the Washington Post famously reported, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, tried to set up a secret and secure back channel between the Trump team and the Kremlin.27 But Jones Day had plenty to offer along those lines, all of which could take place under attorney–client privilege.
Consider that when Steven Brogan, the firm’s powerful managing partner, sat down with Jones Day partner Don McGahn and Vladimir Lechtman, the head of Jones Day’s Russia practice, he was talking to both Donald Trump’s attorney and a man who, when it comes to Kremlin–White House affairs, is almost certainly the single most trusted corporate counsel to Putin’s oligarchs, all of whom are completely beholden to Putin. Lechtman has been said to be one of the first bicultural corporate lawyers, a man who understands the way murder, bribery, and honey traps work in the former Soviet Union and also is familiar with its more civilized analogues in the West, like lobbying, campaign contributions, and the like. In any case, when Russia wanted to retaliate against US sanctions, those companies now had advocates deep inside the White House, advocates whose careers were tied to Jones Day or Kirkland & Ellis and had friends from the firm in the White House, the Justice Department, or other agencies.
Kirkland & Ellis attorneys helped grease the wheels for the Trump-Russia relationship, but in a different sector—the judiciary. One could see Kirkland partners start to flood into key positions in the administration starting in the last half of 2018.
On July 9, 2018, after consulting with the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, Trump nominated former Kirkland partner Brett Kavanaugh, who had worked with Kirkland partner Ken Starr investigating and impeaching President Clinton, to the US Supreme Court. Two other Kirkland partners, Brian Benczkowski as head of the Department of Just
ice’s criminal division and John Bolton as national security advisor, joined the administration. And that December, Kirkland partner Pat Cipollone replaced Don McGahn as White House counsel.
Benczkowski’s appointment was unusual for two reasons. One was that he had never tried a single criminal case in his entire life, which made him an unlikely choice to oversee nearly seven hundred lifelong prosecutors. “This goes beyond an unqualified nominee,” Senator Whitehouse said during Benczkowski’s confirmation hearings. “This is a nominee exhibiting a flashing array of warnings that there may be mischief afoot here. No Senator should take this vote unaware of these obvious warnings. In the name of the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice, Senators should vote no because of the contamination risk Mr. Benczkowski poses, even if he were highly qualified for the post. . . . He may be the weakest candidate ever put forward to oversee the Criminal Division.”28
Another issue that made Benczkowski suspect was that one of his clients at Kirkland was Alfa Bank. Alfa was especially sensitive in that two of its key figures, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, were rich and powerful oligarchs, whose wealth and standing was entirely contingent upon acting in Vladimir Putin’s interests.
In addition, Alfa was presumably being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for its mysterious communications with a special computer-network server in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.29 The relationship between the Trump server and the Russians was unclear, but journalist Franklin Foer reported in Slate that the link suggested that there may have been ongoing secret communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians.30
Regardless, the fact that the FBI was investigating the issue meant that any high-ranking Justice Department official who had been a beneficiary of Alfa’s largesse would have a serious potential conflict of interest.31 “We know from our correspondence with the [Justice] Department that the Russia/Trump collusion investigation is being run under DOJ procedures that require approval by the Criminal Division for a wide array of investigative and prosecutorial steps,” Whitehouse explained. “That gives Benczkowski, if he is confirmed, not just a window into the Russia/Trump collusion investigation, but the ability to interfere.”
Of course, those caveats did not sway Republicans, and on July 11, 2018, more than a year after he had been nominated, the GOP-controlled Senate voted to confirm Benczkowski 51–48 along a nearly straight party-line vote.
Which is exactly what happened again and again. By mid-2020, as the next presidential election approached, so many compromised attorneys had taken powerful positions among Trump’s lawyers that it was as if Trump had created his very own Praetorian Guard.
Trump rued his appointment of Jeff Sessions as his first attorney general—largely because Sessions had recused himself from overseeing Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe because he had been on Trump’s transition team. But that meant Trump could not count on Sessions to rein in the investigation. Now he made sure he was not going to make the same mistake twice. He wanted an attorney general who would do his bidding.
Enter Kirkland & Ellis partner William Barr, in his second stint as head of the Justice Department, and a host of other Kirkland attorneys. Kirkland senior partner Jeffrey Rosen came in as deputy attorney general. Steven Engel came in as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.32 Kirkland’s Robert Khuzami became deputy US attorney in the Southern District of New York, even though he had been general counsel at Deutsche Bank, which loaned Donald Trump more than $2 billion at a time when several of his businesses had filed for bankruptcy and no other Western bank would lend to him. (Deutsche Bank was also involved in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme.)
Pat Cipollone had been a board member of the Opus Dei–affiliated Catholic Information Center, where Barr and Leo (a non-Kirkland attorney) had also been board members, as was Kirkland partner Thomas Yannucci, who had been the longtime chair of Kirkland’s Firmwide Management Committee.
Similarly, Kirkland’s Viet Dinh, who wasn’t in the Trump administration, nonetheless played an extraordinarily powerful role as a close friend of Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, cochairman of News Corp. Dinh was godfather to one of Lachlan’s children33 and the chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corporation, a position that gave him real clout. “Lachlan has delegated much of the running of the company to Viet Dinh, a high-powered Republican lawyer without much experience in the media business, people who work with them said,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Dinh earned more than $24 million in salary and stock last year as the company’s chief legal officer.”34
These were Trump’s lawyers—Kirkland, Kirkland, and Kirkland. And there were many more. Of course, Kirkland was so big, with more than 2,300 lawyers, that it would have been unusual if none of them ended up in the Trump administration. It would also be unlikely if none of them were involved in episodes that had the appearance of conflict of interest. In fact, according to the Trump Town database, coproduced by ProPublica and the Columbia School of Journalism, no fewer than two hundred former Kirkland & Ellis attorneys ended up in the Trump Justice Department.35
This was the start of a horrendously corrupt new calculus in the Justice Department. “There’s extraordinary power within some of these law firms and the social connections they have,” says Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota. “And the restrictions against that revolving door through the private sector and the government are really very weak.”36
Consider, too, that these were highly paid lawyers. According to Bloomberg Law, the average equity partner at Kirkland made more than $5 million in 2019, and it was not unheard of for the uppermost tier to top $10 million.37 It paid Robert Khuzami $11.1 million for his work at the firm between late 2016 and early 2018, according to his financial filing.38 And he was by no means the only partner in the eight-figure bracket.
So why then would Khuzami leave behind such handsome paychecks later that year to serve as deputy US attorney for a salary certain to be under $200,000? That’s a 98 percent pay cut.
“That’s the way it works in Washington,” Painter told me.39 “If your party gets in power and the executive branch, you are expected to go into the government, take the pay cut.” Even though the firm can’t explicitly promise that you can return, he said, it is understood implicitly that you can, and when you do, someone else from the firm will then go into government.
As for potential conflicts of interest, Trump ignored them. Since he first got into business, one of his strategies was simply to say, “So sue me.” He had brought that tactic from his real estate empire into the White House, ignoring one subpoena after another and issuing countless waivers regarding ethical conflicts, knowing how easy it was to tie one’s adversaries up in courts for years. There were loads of potential conflicts of interests with the Russians, thanks to Kirkland’s representation of Alfa Bank, not to mention sanctioned oligarchs such as Petr Aven, Mikhail Fridman, and German Khan. For his part, Aven, in his interview with Mueller, said he had to report to Putin regularly. Kirkland’s London office also represented Oleg Deripaska’s En+ Group, a Russian energy and metals company that controls the world’s largest independent hydropower generator, and Deripaska, of course, was very close to Putin.
If you were making millions of dollars from Putin’s oligarchs, in effect you were representing Putin himself.
So when these Putin allies were pressing for sanction relief, they knew they would have friends in the Justice Department. This was the kind of Justice Department an autocrat would love—if he wanted to kill investigations into any dealings he’d had with Russia, any money laundering, secret communications, or the Epstein case, with Kirkland partners working on both sides of it. That was Ken Starr and Jay Lefkowitz, among others, for the defense, representing Epstein by making a super secret, super sweetheart de
al with ex-Kirkland partner, US attorney, and prosecutor Alexander Acosta, which all but got Epstein off the hook, thereby enabling Kirkland to control huge amounts of potentially toxic material that Epstein and Ghislaine assembled as kompromat and that could be used in any number of ways—with various intelligence services—be they American, British, Russian, or Israeli, suppressing or merely hoarding damaging information and holding it over any number of powerful figures.
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Which brings us back to Jeffrey Epstein, who had returned to New York after his sweetheart deal in 2008 and resumed the profligate lifestyle to which he was accustomed. But in the wake of the Miami Herald’s reporting, Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, when his private plane touched down at Teterboro Airport outside New York and charged with sex trafficking by the US attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York. Viewed as a flight risk, he was detained without bail at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), the notorious and terrifying rat-infested New York jail, which had been at one time home to such notorious criminals as Mexican drug lord El Chapo, mob boss John Gotti, and fraudster Bernie Madoff. It was a striking counterpoint to the decadent and extravagant life Epstein had led.
Then, just over a month later, early in the morning of August 10, a prison guard at MCC went to check on Epstein and found him hanging in his cell, dead, surrounded by orange bed linens. The New York City medical examiner ruled that the cause of Epstein’s death was suicide by hanging.