"Acting DNI Richard Grenell has a problem with his consulting work for foreign clients.
Fortunately for us, he once decided to boast about them to the wider world.
It’s not a disclosure under the Foreign Agents Registration Act but, rather, something else: an archived version of his company Capitol Media Partners’ website, which lists a few intriguing entities on whose behalf Grenell apparently flacked.
Here's a screen shot of the webpage:
To obsessives like those of us here at TPM, it’s all interesting, but a few clients in particular catch my eye.
One is the country of Somalia, featured in blue showing the country’s breadth along the Horn of Africa.
What is this meant to signify? In what capacity did Grenell represent “Somalia”? Was it a political party, or the Somali government?
We don’t know, because he didn’t register under FARA.
Other clients include Zaland – a television channel for the Afghan diaspora. Capitol Media Partners put out a press release in 2011 about a bizarre episode in which the network’s founder appears to have been abducted in Kabul and made to denounce himself on TV at gunpoint as a CIA agent.
The executive was released safely; Grenell did what might be referred to as “damage control” after the incident. The network also produced a Youtube series that seems to be an Afghan version of Judge Judy – Kabul Court.
But for a connoisseur of all things post-Soviet and all things corrupt like myself, the granddaddy of the client list is in the bottom right of the page, with a gray logo: ENRC, the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation.
ENRC features in a long saga involving an Israeli diamond magnate, the Congo, and the London stock exchange.
A lot of the story remains murky and unknown, and to this day is at the center of heavy, contentious litigation that recently saw the daughter of a Kazakh oligarch convicted in a British court for hiding documents to protect her father.
But the basic story is this: ENRC, a publicly traded company on the London stock exchange, tried to make inroads in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011.
The firm entered into a copper-mining partnership with an Israeli magnate named Dan Gertler, who had been accused of making billions off of corrupt dealings with Congolese leaders to loot the country’s wealth.
ENRC was forced to back out of the partnership amid widespread criticism. It soon faced a criminal investigation in the UK, which is ongoing, and recently netted a conviction of the daughter of a Kazakh oligarch who partly owns ENRC after she refused to turn over evidence involving her father.
It’s not clear whether the U.S. opened any inquiry into ENRC and Gertler, but it is clear that the firm faced a real “image” problem at the time that Grenell listed it as a client.
What’s more is that Grenell has claimed elsewhere that he had clients in the U.K., Kazakhstan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The typically secretive Gertler went on a disastrous media tour at the time in a failed bid to save the ENRC deal.
The U.S. sanctioned Gertler over his Congolese dealings in 2018, calling him a “corrupt businessman.”
I’m interested in whether Grenell was involved in trying to clean this imbroglio up back when it began in 2012. We’ll be reporting back as the story develops."
