Is Russia running the Justice Department Now? The Barr/Alfa Bank/Justice Department Link...
This part in the NewsWeek article on Billy Barr is killing me. For those who haven't read it, here it is:
Alfa Bank
Barr’s former law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where he was counsel from March 2017 until he was confirmed as attorney general in February 2019, represented Russia’s Alfa Bank. (Barr earned more than $1 million at Kirkland.)
Barr also supervises, at Justice, another Kirkland & Ellis alumnus with Alfa ties. Early last year, Trump nominated Kirkland & Ellis partner Brian Benczkowski to the Justice Department’s criminal division. In his role with the law firm, Benczkowski had represented Alfa Bank and supervised an investigation into suspicious online communications between the bank and servers belonging to the Trump Organization.
Investigators found no evidence that the Trump Organization had communicated with Alfa. Still, the bank is partially owned by Russian oligarch German Khan, whose son-in-law, the London-based lawyer Alexander van der Zwaan, was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to investigators about a report his firm had written for Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Benczkowski was confirmed last July as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division.
“In terms of a lawyer’s professional codes, it’s definitely legally significant if [Barr] is in counsel position,” Frisch tells Newsweek . “If he is counsel to the company and he isn’t personally working on a matter but the company is, the company’s conflicts are imputed to him.”
Barr had 2 years to get up to speed with inside information from the Russian side of this issue. Benczkowski was the supervisor who investigated the communications FOR Alfa Bank and was later hired as assistant attorney general. This is freaking nuts!!!
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