Monday, January 7, 2019

Russian 'troll factory' lawyer represented Breitbart News companies in libel case

A US attorney has garnered a lot of media attention for defending a Russian troll factory accused of allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, but his prior work for the Trump-friendly website Breitbart News - which has been accused of publishing fake news - has been ignored by the press.

In April of 2018, it was revealed in court filings, that "[a] Russian company charged with helping fund a Russian propaganda operation that allegedly tampered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has retained two Washington lawyers to handle its defense." Reuters reported,"Concord Management and Consulting LLC, will be represented by Eric Dubelier and Katherine Seikaly of the law firm Reed Smith, the filings say." Concord was one of three firms located in Russia that were accused by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller "in a February indictment of a conspiracy to defraud the United States."

The indictment stated, "Defendants CONCORD MANAGEMENT AND CONSULTING LLC and CONCORD CATERING are related Russian entities with various Russian government contracts. CONCORD was the ORGANIZATION's primary source of funding for its interference operations. CONCORD controlled funding, recommended personnel, and oversaw ORGANIZATION activities through reporting and interaction with ORGANIZATION management." Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin who is suspected of being the owner of Concord was also indicted, and he reportedly has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Prigozhin, nicknamed 'Putin’s cook' because of his catering business that has organized banquets for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other political figures, has been quoted by the RIA news agency as saying he was unfazed by the indictment," Reuters reported.

As John Simerman reported for the Advocate on May 20, 2018, "the Tulane University graduate had a hand in some controversial cases," and "also played a key role in a case that featured perhaps the most infamous episode of prosecutorial misconduct in New Orleans in a generation."

Dubelier was blamed by a judge for withholding a confession in a point-shaving college basketball case in 1985, and "led the trial team that helped ship John Thompson off to death row" that same year. "Thompson was staring at an execution date in 1999 when a defense investigator unearthed a lab report that undermined his conviction in an earlier armed robbery trial that Dubelier had also prosecuted," Simerman reported. "Dubelier, the lead prosecutor in Thompson's subsequent murder trial, used the earlier armed robbery conviction to persuade a jury to hand Thompson a death sentence."

As Simerman noted, Dubelier gained a lot of media attention "for his feisty courtroom advocacy", and has "presented an aggressive challenge to the indictment." He has accused prosecutors of lying and claimed that Mueller was "conjuring up a 'make-believe' crime in the indictment for political reasons."

In October, ABC News reported that Dubelier argued Mueller's indictment was an attempt to "regulate what people say on the internet.” Ironically, President Trump has tweeted many times that mainstream media stories he considers "fake news" should be regulated, and the press is the "enemy of the people."

Earlier today, Tierney Sneed reported for Talking Points Memo, "A federal judge on Monday reamed the American lawyers for a Russian firm charged by special counsel Robert Mueller for the lawyers’ 'unprofessional, inappropriate, and ineffective' court filings." Dubelier accused Judge Dabney Friedrich of "some bias" after she told him to "knock it off."

In an October 5, 2013 court filing, Dubelier represented Susannah Breitbart, after attorneys for former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod substituted Andrew's widow in a defamatory lawsuit, a year-and-a-half after he suddenly died. Josh Gerstein referred to him "as Breitbart companies lawyer Eric Dubelier" in a Politico article published on July 21, 2014. In late 2015, Sherrod settled her case over a "selectively edited" video which cost her her job with the Obama Administration, but the terms have remained confidential.

According to www.law360.com, Eric A. Dubelier also represented BREITBART HOLDINGS, INC., BREITBART NEWS NETWORK LLC, BREITBART.COM LLC, and BREITBART.TV LLC in the Sherrod case. A notice of appearance was filed by Dubelier on July 17, 2014 for all four of the Breitbart companies.

Breitbart News was co-founded by Steve Bannon in 2007, and five years later, after Andrew Breitbart died, Bannon took over as executive chair of Breitbart News LLC. Bannon left Breitbart News to advise Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race, but after serving as the White House Chief Strategist for seven months in 2017, he returned to the website, which has almost unconditionally supported Trump, and dismissed the Russia probe as a "witch hunt."

Last October, Samantha Cole reported for Motherboard, that editors for Wikipedia voted that Breitbart "should not be used, ever, as a reference for facts, due to its unreliability.”

"Breitbart, a far-right conservative media website, has come under scrutiny—such as when it vehemently supported Alabama politician and alleged pedophile Roy Moore, when it shilled for scam cryptocurrencies through its newsletter, or when it fueled racist narratives about black NFL players," Cole wrote. "Wikipedians decided that because fact checkers have found much of Breitbart’s coverage to be 'misleading, false or both,' they won’t abide it as a source of fact anymore."

"Right-wing news site Breitbart News has apologized to German football star Lukas Podolski after publishing a photo of the 32-year-old former international player accompanying a story about human traffickers operating between Morocco and Spain," Haaretz reported on August 21, 2017. Breitbart admitted, "There is no evidence Mr Podolski is either a migrant gang member, nor being human trafficked."

(Editor's Note: I've worked on a few articles published at Breitbart News, including this story, where I'm named, but I've never been paid by them. Or Russia, as far as I know.)

No comments: