Trading in Perdition
Mercenary spyware and international treachery
Dateline: Instanbul, 02OCT2018
Six years ago this week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Saud al-Qahtani, his subordinate Maher Mutreb, Saudi Consul General Mohammed Alotaibi, and 14 other members of an operations team for having a role, directly or complicitly, in the homicide of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and dissident with complicated ideas about conservative Islamism. The team included officers of the Saudi Royal Air Force, Saudi Intelligence operatives, members of the Saudi Prince’s security team and principals in the Office of the Crown Prince, Muhammad bin Salman (MBS).
The Treasury press release stated, “The Saudi officials we are sanctioning were involved in the abhorrent killing of Jamal Khashoggi. These individuals who targeted and brutally killed a journalist who resided and worked in the United States must face consequences for their actions.”
A declassified report from the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) dated February 25, 2021, stated, “We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
Khashoggi had been lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey under a pretext. Upon arrival a man familiar to Khashoggi greeted him, then pulled him by the arm and seated him in a side office. There, after a brief argument with MBS top aide, Saud al-Qahtani via Skype, the men smothered him by putting a plastic bag over his head, then they cut up his body and removed the pieces from the embassy in suitcases. The audio of the murder was recorded by embassy devices and released by Turkish intelligence.
The DNI assessed that the Saudi Crown Prince approved a capture/kill operation on Khashoggi, based on several factors.
First, the exertion of absolute control by MBS of the Kingdom's security and intelligence organizations, “making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince's authorization.”
Second, the participation in the killing by seven members of the Rapid Intervention Force (RIF), which is part of the Saudi Royal Guard. It exists to defend the Crown Prince, answers only to him, and has directly participated in earlier “dissident suppression operations” in the Kingdom. The DNI concluded the RIF would not have participated in this mission without the approval of MBS.
MBS viewed Khashoggi’s journalism and public discourse to be a threat to the kingdom and had supported using violent measures as necessary to silence him.
Finally, some of the members of the fifteen-man hit team were associated with the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Royal Court (CSMARC). The center was led by a close advisor to MBS, Saud bin Abdullah al-Qahtani, who had claimed publicly that he did not make decisions without the approval of the Crown Prince. Turkish intelligence has claimed that al-Qahtani ordered the killing, telling the men, “Bring me the head of the dog.” Reuters also reported that al-Qahtani was responsible for the 2017 kidnap and beating of Lebanese PM, Saad al-Hariri.
Illicit Mobile Surveillance
In June of 2023, the widow of Khashoggi, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Virginia, claiming that spyware developed by the Israeli firm, NSO Group, had been used to spy on her in the months prior to her husband’s murder. The highly advanced spyware, called Pegasus, has been implicated in a host of other violations of human rights, privacy violations, unlawful surveillance, money laundering, and killings in Mexico and other countries.
In fact, Mrs. Khashoggi was correct. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert, discussing the Khashoggi/NSO suit, told CBC Radio that Hanan’s device had spyware installed on it. According to Deibert, her phone had Pegasus installed on it when she was being interrogated at Dubai airport when her phone was not in her possession. He said her phone, “communicated several times with a server that is part of the NSO infrastructure.”
The NSO Group is a cyber firm based in Herzliya, Israel. The group gets its name from the first initials of its founders, Niv Karmi, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who formed the company in 2010. All were members of the Israeli military intel Unit 8200. NSO has claimed Pegasus is sold only to vetted governments and law enforcement, ostensibly to track cyber criminals and terrorists. However, the software has been sold to rogue governments, been abused by other “legitimate” governments, and possibly by organized crime and cartels, who have the means to afford the seven-figure price tags for Pegasus surveillance packages.
NSO sold its first license for the Pegasus software in 2010 to Mexico using middlemen with links to NICE Systems, an Israeli enterprise software company that has been involved with the Hacking Team of Italy that has sold interception and surveillance software to nation states, as detailed by Buzzfeed after revelations by Wikileaks.
This information originally surfaced in emails and other documents related to a lawsuit filed in a Tel Aviv court by the plaintiff, an insurance agent named Udi Oren. He filed the suit against Eren Rashef and Matan Caspy over non-payment of fees he claimed were due because of his alleged involvement in the NSO/Pegasus deal. Oren sought 3M NIS (New Israeli Shekels) which is roughly $789.5K as of this writing.
The Israeli publication, Calcalist, described the deal as being completed in two stages. In the first phase, NSO sold Pegasus to an unnamed non-Israeli businessman who in turn sold it to Mexico. The businessman remains unnamed following a petition to the courts by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The Calcalist investigation revealed that a businessman and Donald Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, was one of the “original architects” of the Pegasus deal. His involvement was apparently corroborated by testimony from two other players in the scheme, Eric Banoun, former VP of cyber sales and intel business for NICE Systems Ltd; and NSO cofounder, Shalev Hulio, who was CEO of NSO at the time the deal was brokered. Calcalist reported that after Hulio’s testimony, the court ruled that the case would proceed in camera (in the chambers). Banoun later joined Circles Technologies, itself tied to NSO and another rogue Israeli intel operative, Tal Dilian, who markets the Predator spyware through the Intellexa consortium, also sanctioned by OFAC.
In 2020, Elliott Brody pleaded guilty to violating the (US) Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires foreign agents involved in lobbying activities to register with the Department of Justice. At his sentencing, prosecutors revealed that Broidy had been covertly lobbying to influence US policy toward Qatar in exchange for a lucrative $200M deal with the UAE for his defense contracting company, Circinus. This lobbying effort was a well-orchestrated campaign involving many conservative outlets and think tanks, along with the requisite payouts, but is far too complex to get into here.
Senate Hearings
What follows is clipped from the 2019 nomination hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the subsection, Responses to Additional Questions for the Record Submitted to Andrea Thompson, (Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs) by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
Question: Recent reporting revealed that in or about October 2017, Elliot Broidy presented President Trump with a proposal to recruit a “thousands-strong international Muslim army – to be advised by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal'' and that “the team behind the Muslim army plan was led by McChrystal.'' Were you ever aware of this plan during your time as a Director at the McChrystal group, Deputy Assistant to the President in the White House, or Senior Advisor at the Department of State?
Answer: No.
Question 34. During your recent tenure at the Republican National Committee (RNC), did you work in any capacity with Elliot Broidy, who then served as vice chairman of the Trump Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee between the Trump campaign and the RNC? If so, please describe the nature and extent of your interactions and communications with Mr. Broidy.
Answer. I did not work with Mr. Broidy during the 2016 election cycle.
Question 35. During your time in the White House, did you ever attend any meetings with Mr. Broidy or arrange any meetings between Mr. Broidy and other White House personnel? If so, please describe the nature of these meetings, including the date, who attended, and what was discussed.
Answer. No.
Questions were also submitted to David Schenker, who served under Mike Pompeo as the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, sworn in August 29, 2019.
Question: A defense company owned by Elliot Broidy, Circinus, is currently implementing a large contract on behalf of the Government of the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Broidy has also reportedly pursued large contracts with other countries in the Middle East, while allegedly attempting to influence U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of the Governments from which he was pursuing business deals. These allegations have a potentially grave impact on matters that fall within the jurisdiction of the Senate Foreign Relations committee. If the committee requests information from your Bureau on these and related matters, do you commit to provide the information in a timely and responsive way?
Answer. Yes, I will coordinate with the Bureau of Legislative Affairs to respond in as timely and responsive manner as possible.
Remember, Broidy was convicted in 2020 of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and sentenced to two years in federal prison and a forfeiture of $6.6M. Trump pardoned him before leaving office in 2021.
Circinus
The Circinus company mentioned during the Senate hearings has three web sites:
Circinusgov.com; Circinusworldwide.com; Circinus-llc.com
The contact person on the Circinusgov.com website is Charles Africano, who also happens to be the Senior Capture Manager (sales) at Academi (formerly Blackwater) of the Constellis Consortium of private military contractors, sometimes referred to as mercenaries. The area code for the contact number for Africano covers Reston,VA, home of Academi, as listed on Africano’s LinkedIn page.
Circinusgov.com is a rudimentary website with no ‘about’ page and lists no leadership team. Several searches of publicly available information revealed the following. The company address is listed through federal registries as a private home in the US, once owned by the CEO of Circinus, Stanley R. Manning. Manning is a former member of and Liaison Officer to the US Army Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Special Operations Command is a unified combatant command that manages SpecOps capabilities. The mission of that command is to develop and employ Special Operations Forces (SOF – Green Berets, SEALS, Marine Raiders etc) to conduct global special operations activities, such as those which permanently ended the fortunes of Bin Laden and al-Baghdadi.
Given that Circinus has acquired eight-figure DoD contracts for security and intel services provided in the Middle East, it seems odd that he would associate his home address with the company. I wouldn’t advise approaching a home that likely has a locked and loaded M4 at every portal, but I still find it an unwise choice.
An additional address in the federal records pertaining to Circinus is in Fredericksburg, VA. That address is for Threat Deterrence Capital, LLC (TDC), with Stan Manning as an agent of the company. According to Open Corporates, the company dissolved in 2022, however, in that same year, Elliott Broidy formed another company of the same name in Tallahassee, Florida, listing Broidy as a Director along with Paracorp Incorporated. An agent for the Threat Deterrence Capital is CT Corporation System, which provides incorporation services in Delaware.
Threat Deterrence Capital is also listed in Kent, Delaware with Paracorp, which provides document filing services, as an agent. The address in Delaware is the same as Parasec, an entity formation company. TDC lists a co-working space in Boca Raton as the head office.
Broidy is listed as a director in a company called Event Solutions International, registered in several states. The home office is 2044 Austin in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Curiously, this is the same address listed in Bloomberg for Tomcar, the military-grade ATV manufacturer founded by Yoram Zarhi in Israel. Zarhi was a commander of an airborne commando unit in Israel. In 2020 the company announced a partnership with Prince manufacturing to build the Tomcar X in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. Prince Manufacturing was founded by the father of the infamous Erik Prince, whose name just seems to show up along the way whenever certain search terms are investigated. He is a recurring character in my rabbit-hole explorations.
The Jerusalem Post ran an article in which they explained that the Tomcar deal was due to a cooperation agreement between Prince Manufacturing and Comframe Solutions, an Israeli defense/technology firm. An executive partner in Comframe is Lital Leshem, who is quoted in the J-Post article explaining why Comframe is essential to helping Tomcar meet US security needs. She said that the company having boots-on-the-ground was important for securing defense deals. By way of analogy, Leshem said, “Hi-tech companies like Toka, with clients like the CIA, can’t discuss what they do using zoom.”
Interesting that Leshem, a major in the IDF Reserves (Intel), drew on Toka as an example, while confirming the CIA is a client. Toka is an Israeli tech firm that also sells spyware and other digital forensics and intelligence tools. One of the advisors for Toka is Ehud Barak, former PM of Israel and frequent guest of Jeffrey Epstein in Manhattan.
One of the founders of Toka is Brig. General (Res.) Yaron Rosen: former Chief of Israel Defense Forces Cyber Staff, where he was the lead architect of all cyber activities. Toka has offices in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC. If you’re curious, you can read the bios of the leadership and advisory group here. You’ll probably shake your head.
A search for Comframe’s website will bring you to Il-Ventures, for which Leshem is on the strategic advisory board and as her bio states, an Executive Partner at Comframe. Her bio lists her affiliation with Frontier Resources Group (FRG) as an Executive Director. FRG was founded by Erik Prince who also founded Frontier Services Group, which he led until 2021 when he stepped down to make room for Chinese leadership. Its largest shareholder is a unit of Chinese state-owned conglomerate CITIC Group Corp. FSG’s main mission is protecting Chinese battery-metal mining interests in Africa.
Leshem is also a cofounder of Carbyne, a cloud-based platform for first responders. Carbyne’s leadership team includes two former Secretaries of Homeland Security, Kisrtjen Nielsen and Michael Chertoff. Carbyne is connected to Israeli Intel Unit 8200 (Israel’s NSA) and was – until his “suicide” – co-owned by Jeffrey Epstein. Peter Thiel, cofounder of the CIA-backed mass-surveillance platform, Palantir, is an investor. One of the original board members of Carbyne was Pinhas Buchris, the former director of Israel’s Unit 8200.
As of 2019, 100% of the series A preferred stock in Carbyne was owned by a company called SUM, which was co-owned by Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein, along with Nicole Junkerman, who invested $500K in SUM through her stake in Montilla International. Junkermann is a wealthy, German-born entrepreneur and tech investor married to an Italian gas baron. Her company, NJF Capital, has a substantial portfolio that includes investments in SpaceX. Junkermann was reported to be an investor in Carbyne for which she served on the original Board, along with Barak. Junkermann has been linked to Epstein and has been reported to have flown on Epstein’s plane at least three times.
Although in this space I can’t independently validate all the claims made in this article titled, Nicole Junkermann, the IDF-linked Bond Girl Infiltrating the UK and NHS, it does include some juicy conspiracies. It’s wild reading and implicates Junkermann in a slew of scandals.
Her name popped up in the Panama Papers regarding money laundering, as well as the 2015 FIFA bribery scandal. Enough of this tangent.
Back to Broidy
Broidy was the CEO and Director of BCH Group, Ltd, with an address in Los Angeles, CA. A search of that address revealed that Broidy listed the same address in Los Angeles for his Threat Deterrence Capital, LLC (Delaware) wherein he filed a $4M Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities with the SEC in 2015. It is the same address (Century Park East) from which Broidy Capital Management made multiple donations to the Republican National Committee, per FEC filings.
The amount of corporations and subsidiary companies in multiple states with overlapping addresses and players can be dizzying and frustrating. In the context of exploring how the notorious NSO Group earned its first licensing deal, Broidy’s knowledge of corporate shell games is impressive but not necessarily relevant. What is relevant is that his connections fed into his sense of invulnerability which led him to brazenly seek favors for people with whom he did business, irrespective of the nefariousness of those contacts. He represents the transactional dynamic of Washington and international politics, where the truth belongs to the highest bidder; the business of banking and bag-men; rich government contracts, lucrative speaking and advisory roles; white-collar crime, and war.
In December of 2009, Elliott Broidy entered a guilty plea in State Supreme Court in Manhattan for making nearly a million dollars in illegal gifts to NY State officials in exchange for helping secure $250M in investments from the NY State pension fund into Broidy’s private equity firm, Markstone Partners, posted at the same California address as noted above. It also had an office in Israel.
Markstone Capital Group (Israel) was an investor in Tomcar, in February of 2009. It’s listed as an LBO or leveraged buyout, but exited in March of 2012.
In 2019, Vice reported that Broidy worked closely with Lebanese pedophile, George Nader, throughout 2017, when Nader was an adviser to Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. This slippery trifecta worked on “a secretive lobbying effort to alter U.S. policy in the Middle East.”
“From the start, the men had a two-track mission: to carry out a campaign against Qatar that would curry favor with the princes, and to then turn that success into millions of dollars in defense deals, documents show,” according to the AP.
The NY Times reported in 2018 that Elliott Broidy, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee and a member of the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, was paid $2.7M by George Nader for his efforts to influence Trump to back the UAE in its riff with Qatar.
In addition, the UAE provided political and military support for General Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) in 2014, which was counter to the US policy at the time. According to the Atlantic Council, “During Haftar’s offensive, the UAE conducted hundreds of drone strikes on Haftar’s behalf, supplied him with weaponry and jet fuel, and financed Sudanese mercenaries that fought with his LAAF.” Note: Abu Dhabi (UAE) is estimated to have $1.3T in its sovereign wealth fund and spends a boatload on both defensive and offensive weaponry.
The UAE acted as a conduit for Russian paramilitary forces on the ground who supported Haftar. The US DoD claimed that the UAE funneled payments to the Wagner Group, a sanctioned Russian mercenary group.
Haftar is a war criminal and former CIA asset who has supported the RSF in Sudan. He has been accused by multiple countries of committing acts such as indiscriminate bombings, starvation sieges, and the torture and killings of civilians. If this sounds familiar, they are documented tactics of the Israeli government against Palestinians – perhaps you’ve read about them.
Speaking of private military contractors, the UN Security Council has issued a 120-page report that accuses one Erik Dean Prince of violating the arms embargo in Libya. Among scores of Prince mentions in the report is this. “In early 2015 Erik Prince supplied the use of a private jet to Khalifa Haftar through the auspices of Frontier Services Group (FSG), of which he was then the Chairman. This aircraft made flights with timings and itineraries that coincided with Khalifa Haftar’s rise to Head of the LNA.”
FSG is now mostly owned by Chinese state-run investment group CITIC, for whom Prince provides private security services, including protecting China’s mining interests in roughly eight African countries and Xinjiang in western China, an area where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been detained in China’s “de-radicalisation” strategy to prevent extremist thought.
In North Africa operations, “During 2015 Erik Prince repackaged the Operation Lima proposal and developed a joint concept with Khalifa Haftar for a private military operation to counter the illegal migrant trafficking from Libya.”
Prince, who must literally never sleep, was reported by the UN and numerous other sources, including the Mueller investigation, to have met in 2017 in the Indian Ocean archipelago of Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the Chief Executive Officer of Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. That meeting was orchestrated by George Nader, who admitted to bringing a 14-year-old boy from the Czech Republic to the US for sexual activity. He also admitted to possessing child pornography involving sexual abuse of minors. Just another in a snake pit of unsavory characters linked to Elliott Broidy.
One last Prince note: He has just appeared in another UN report on sanctions violations. He has turned up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where, according to this article in InkStick Media, Prince attempted to broker a deal to deploy 2,500 Latin American mercenaries in the country’s war-torn, mineral-rich North Kivu region.”
Broidy’s connections to the Republican party elites would come into play in an unrelated international incident.
A Malaysian Embezzler and Pras Michél
As reported by Bloomberg , in the spring of 2017, after receiving a cryptic phone message, Fugees star, Pras Michél took a hired car to the Four Season Hotel on 57th Street, NYC, to meet unknown person(s) affiliated with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). At the hotel, Michél met China’s vice minister of public security, Sun Lijun, who screamed at him through an interpreter about his frustrations with the US government.
Wait, what? Yeah, I asked the same question. Hang on.
Sun had come to the US for negotiations with then President Trump but could not secure a meeting. The PRC had been actively working to repatriate Chinese citizens living in the US whom they viewed as threats. They had detained family members in China as a method of extortion, among other means.
One person who stuck in Sun’s craw was a real estate billionaire named Guo Wengui, who was accused of reporting the assets of top party members. Beijing held two Americans, one pregnant, on an exit ban but was prepared to release them in exchange for Guo. Michél recommended they release the pregnant woman, presumably as a sign of good faith.
Michél’s connection to these political machinations dates back to 2006, when he met and befriended a Malaysian businessman named Low Taek Jho, aka Jho Low. Jho Low was known for lavish spending on A-list celebrities, including Michél, but the relationship went south in 2016 when US investigators named Jho Low as the mastermind of the multi-billion dollar embezzlement from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, known as 1MDB.
With the feds on his ass, Low turned to his pal Michél for help, hoping that the singer’s connection to President Obama, for whom Michél raised funds, could save him from having his assets seized and possible prison time, or worse, if extradited back to Malaysia. Low also sought help from the PRC but was apparently denied. On a side note, in 2022, the aforementioned Sun was given a death sentence with a two-year reprieve for corruption. If they don’t execute him, he will live out his life in prison. Imagine what a different country this would be if the US had such strict penalties for corruption. The halls of Congress would be silent; only the whir of the janitor’s floor polisher would be heard.
Reporters from Bloomberg stated that Justice Department records show how Low requested Michél to help assemble a team of Republican influencers who could reach the top levels of the new Trump administration. The team included, guess who, Elliott Broidy, Hawaiian businesswoman Nickie Lum Davis and casino tycoon Steve Wynn. I can picture the team walking in slow motion into DC hotel lobbies with Broidy at point. In the movie, Broidy would be played by John Goodman with Wynn as himself and Ali Wong as Lum.
The entire plot fell apart as the FBI’s International Corruption Division took on the case along with federal prosecutors from NY to Hawaii. Low is currently on the lam and has an Interpol Red Notice issued for his arrest.
But who is Nickie Lum Davis? Davis is a television producer and old friend of Pras Michél. It was Davis who suggested bringing on Broidy to influence Trump. Nickie Lum comes from a family of Clinton supporters, because, why not?
During the time of the suspicious death of Clinton Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown, Nickie’s parents, Gene and Nora Lum, were significant Dem donors with business dealings in China. They met Ron Brown in 1991 and eventually hired his son, Michael Brown, as a board member for one of their companies, Dynamic Energy Resources (DER). The hiring of Michael Brown raised questions of influence peddling. Just prior to Brown’s dying in a sketchy 1996 plane crash in Croatia, there were ongoing investigations into campaign and financial shenanigans involving a number of parties, including the Lums.
This exchange occurred during DER interrogatories (page 53):
Q. Is Michael Brown a licensed attorney to your knowledge?
A. To my knowledge he has taken the bar several times, but I don't think he has passed.
MR. WOHLGEMUTH: I'm going to object to that as a being a gratuitous insult.
A. None meant.
The comical conversation regarding the probative value of Mr. Brown’s inability to pass the bar exam went on for a while.
Nickie Lum switched support to the GOP after marrying Joe Shapira, who made a fortune in the development of dating sites, including J-Date, geared toward Jewish singles.
In January of 2023, Nickie Mali Lum Davis (47) was sentenced to two years in prison, “for her role in facilitating an unregistered lobbying campaign of the Administration of the former President of the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice on behalf of foreign principals in exchange for millions of dollars.”
The DOJ press release stated, “According to court documents, Nickie Mali Lum Davis, 47, of Honolulu, Hawaii, admitted that between March 2017 and January 2018, she and her co-conspirators – Elliott Broidy, George Higginbotham, and Prakazrel “Pras” Michel – agreed to lobby the then-President of the United States, the Attorney General, and other high-level U.S. government officials to drop civil forfeiture proceedings and a criminal investigation into the embezzlement of billions of dollars from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a strategic investment and development company wholly owned by the Government of Malaysia.
For their efforts, Lum Davis and her co-conspirators were paid millions of dollars by Low Taek Jho, aka Jho Low, an alleged architect of the 1MDB scheme. Lum Davis and others also agreed to lobby the Administration and Justice Department on behalf of Low and a minister of the People’s Republic of China (PRC Minister A), to arrange for the removal and return of a dissident of the PRC living in the United States. Lum Davis and her co-conspirators concealed from the officials whom they lobbied that they were working on behalf of Low and PRC Minister A, and were being paid millions of dollars by Low with the expectation of tens of millions more in success fees. The lobbying campaigns were ultimately unsuccessful.”
Oh and don’t forget, Broidy was pardoned by Trump.
Full Circle
NSO Group faces competition in the US mainly from defense contractor L3Harris, which has developed surveillance systems of its own. At one time L3Harris was in talks to buy NSO but the contractor faced backlash from the US government over security and other concerns, so the deal was skuttled by L3Harris.
Though not stated in any public articles regarding the takeover of NSO, it would not surprising if, given the Inslaw/PROMIS software scandal, US intel agencies had reservations that NSO/Israel could potentially install a backdoor into the software that allowed NSO to ‘see’ what the US could see through its customers. PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information Systems) became headline news after it was discovered that former AG, Ed Meese, had misappropriated the software and distributed it to various governments. Other significant aspects of the case involved allegations that both the Mossad and the DOJ were pushing modified versions of the software to facilitate espionage on the governments who purchased it.
A journalist named Danny Casolaro died in 1991 under suspicious circumstances in a West Virginia hotel room while closing out an investigation into a vast trans-national criminal conspiracy he called The Octopus, which is related to the PROMIS software and Inslaw, its manufacturer, who sued the DOJ for stealing it – really. The NetFlix docu-series, “American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders" is worth your time.
For a stunning synopsis of the scandal, Octopus, the Clinton/Epstein connection, the CIA, crooked bankers, and the suspicious death of Danny Casolaro, I recommend reading Whitney Webb’s investigative report in MintPress News.
Since Trump has won the election, NSO is stepping up its lobbying efforts, including the writing of checks to ‘Pete Sessions for Congress’, in a blitz to get off the US blacklist. The lobbying firm hired by NSO includes a former MoC from Texas, Greg Laughlin, once again illustrating the revolving door from the House to the private sector and back again, checkbook in hand.
NSO’s efforts include sending an “urgent” email from the lobbying firm of Paul Hastings to Secretary Blinken, also known as, Netanyahu’s lawyer. In the letter, NSO concedes that cyber technology can be “misused by end-users to violate important human rights…” Such rights include, one presumes, the right to not be assassinated in an embassy. However, Hastings continues, NSO “has taken concrete steps to address potential downstream human rights impacts of its products.”
Those steps include a “compliance program” in which customers pledge to be good little governments. However, whenever one of NSO’s clients does something abominable, NSO claims they can’t be responsible for what their clients do with the software once they pay for a license. They claim they can’t see what their clients do, even though they control the servers.
One reason the sanctions may not be lifted is this from Haaretz, “Should it wish to, NSO has enough evidence to prove the involvement of several key individuals in approving and promoting its sales as part of diplomatic processes, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and several senior U.S. officials.” Stated another way, Israel will use NSO’s capabilities as a means of quietly gaining political favors from countries in exchange for the Israeli government approving of access to the spyware license.
Let’s wrap this with one more bit of WTF regarding Broidy. In 2019, former Playboy model Shera Brechard filed a suit against Broidy stemming from their affair, during which, she claims Broidy impregnated her (hopefully via text). Broidy is alleged to have paid her $1.6M to keep the affair quiet. That payment was facilitated by Trump nemesis and courtroom jester, Michael Cohen.
Here’s a picture of the lovebirds from the NY Daily News. You’re welcome.
There’s much more to the slimy web of deceit, espionage, mass surveillance, war crimes and the occasional valise full of cash. This is just a sampling of the kind of work I’m doing for a book I hope to publish in 2025. Stay tuned. Reach me at my encrypted (for now) email – joehefferon@proton.me