We have a pretty stunning development about aides to Donald Trump apparently (though they deny it) hiring the same Israeli dirty ops/private intel firm that Harvey Weinstein used to cover up his history to mount an operation against public supporters of the Iran deal.
We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf.
Then overnight Kahl came forward with a story from around the time the firm was reportedly hired in which someone approached his wife about investing in their children’s charter school. You can read the thread here. There was a backstory and details. But it sounded to the Kahls like an intelligence operation – not altogether uncommon for people in that line of work to see. So they eventually cut off communication.
Then a short time ago, Laura Rozen confirmed with Kahl that the purported firm which reached out to the Kahls was ‘Reuben Capital Partners’. That’s the same name used by Black Cube in the Weinstein operations, first reported in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow last year.
Black Cube is now vehemently denying it was hired to spy on or run dirty tricks against Rhodes or Kahl. It’s not clear to me whether that denial came before or after Rozen uncovered the apparent link between the two cases. The denial seems to be unambiguous. But it is very hard to believe that two separate operations would stumble on the same name for a front operation. Conceivably, two different firms worked in concert with yet another firm that was running this front operation. But that’s a very far-fetched hypothetical in contrast to a very straightforward explanations. It was Black Cube working for Weinstein and the Trump aides and they’re simply lying about their involvement.
More soon.
