Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Think Tank Fellow Being Sued by Former WSJ Reporter

Here is more from Politico:

Jay Solomon was abruptly fired from his job as the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign correspondent in 2017 after the Associated Press reported on his alleged discussions of business deals with one of his key sources. It was one of the most high-profile examples of a prominent journalist being sacked for unethical behavior.

Now Solomon is suing, not over his firing or the unflattering news coverage that precipitated it — but over what he says was a multi-million-dollar criminal campaign by a foreign emirate’s American law firm that allegedly hired Indian mercenary hackers to turn up his correspondence.

The lawsuit, filed this month in federal court in Washington, makes for absolutely wild reading. It pulls back the curtain on the murky intersection of American media, international law firms, Persian Gulf politics and Beltway think tanks — and ought to discomfit anyone who thinks working in Washington protects them from hardball tactics that hold sway in other parts of the world.

The cast of characters named as co-defendants in the lawsuit is large, and includes the pair of former Dechert lawyers, private investigators in Israel and North Carolina, and a New York public affairs firm and its founder. It also includes Amir Handjani, who works at the New York firm but has been also a fellow at two Washington think tanks: the Atlantic Council, where he left the board in 2021, and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he remains a non-resident fellow. 

 

In March 2022, the Washington Free Beacon had a story entitled "Legal Docs Tie Quincy Institute's Amir Handjani to Spy Operation."  It published another story in July 2022 saying that a judge had ordered Handjani to turn over documents in an alleged hack-and-leak scheme.