Kroll, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the Bernie Sanders campaign, seems VERY connected to Hillary’s campaign AND the DNC. This smells bad to me — I hope I’m wrong.
From my friends over at the Sanders for President subreddit, some research that is unsettling:
After finding out that Kroll was the company hired to do the investigation on the data breach, I've been doing a lot of research on exactly how the DNC and Kroll are related. I knew they were connected, but it’s honestly insane how biased they’re going to be in this investigation. Please share this far and wide, and spread the news on just how unfair this investigation is.
So let’s get started. First of all, I found that Kroll is owned by Providence Equity Partners Inc. When they bought Altegrity, Inc., they “expanded the business partly by adding Kroll Inc.”:
Altegrity has approximately 18k clients lobbying in the Senate and House combined:
Their president and CEO, Thomas Hartley, also worked for Bain and Company:
Going back as far as 2000, Bain and Company has contributed to HRC and DWS's campaigns:
In 2012, when Garth Williams, CFO of Kroll, was working as VP and Assistant Controller, International for American Tower Corporation, his company gave $61,600 to the DNC. They also gave to the Democratic Executive Committee of Florida, where DWS serves.
Williams’s background:
ATC campaign contributions:
Okay, so what about the bigger company, Providence Equity Partners Inc.? Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup, HRC’s biggest campaign contributor, is also a Senior Advisor for this company.
Citigroup’s contributions to HRC’s campaign:
Biography for Parsons:
In 2013, Parsons gave $15,000 to the DNC:
And in June of this year, he made the maximum individual contribution of $2,700 to HRC’s campaign:
I’m sure there is a lot more to it than this, but it’s Christmas Eve, and this is honestly all the time I have to investigate the various connections between Kroll and the establishment today. Basic takeaway? Providence/Kroll/Atlegrity is absurdly connected to the DNC.
Regarding Kroll’s background, take a look at this article:
A snippet:
Kroll has suffered its share of embarrassments. Its agents have admitted to Dumpster-diving through shredded documents once they’re on public property. That happened in a fight between the cosmetics giants Avon and Mary Kay. But there are allegations that the firm has gone lower still. According to James B. Stewart’s book “Den of Thieves,” Martin A. Siegel, who, in 1987, had pleaded guilty to insider trading while at Kidder, Peabody, was harassed by Kroll operatives seeking to intimidate him so that he wouldn’t testify against an arbitrageur at Goldman Sachs. The Kroll employees impersonated a New York City police officer and a journalist; scared off a potential donor to a children’s camp that Siegel was setting up; and paid his sixteen-year-old babysitter fifty dollars for damning information about him. (Jules Kroll disputes this account.)
...
The company’s “worst black eye,” according to Kroll, came in Brazil in 2004, when the federal police raided the firm’s São Paulo offices and arrested five employees. Kroll had been hired by Brasil Telecom to investigate whether the company’s second-largest shareholder, Telecom Italia, was laying the groundwork for a takeover. The government accused Kroll of wiretapping, bribing officials, and illegally intercepting e-mails. The real reason for the raid, according to Jules Kroll, was a large payment made by Telecom Italia to former police authorities. (Telecom Italia says it played no role in the raid.) Meanwhile, he said, the company still hasn’t recovered from “the pasting we took” in the Brazilian press.
But a deeper injury to the Kroll brand may be in the making. R. Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire now in jail and facing charges of having operated, from a base in Antigua, a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, was a longtime Kroll client. Kroll also gave at least one other client assurances about Stanford. In 2007, a Maryland-based foundation retained Kroll to evaluate the soundness of Stanford’s bank, and Kroll produced a positive report. The foundation lost a substantial amount of money. (A spokeswoman for Kroll said that a lawsuit filed by the foundation has been resolved.) For more than a decade, Stanford fought off inquiries from a battery of United States government agencies—the F.B.I., the I.R.S., the S.E.C., the State Department—that were interested, variously, in whether he was laundering money for drug dealers, defrauding investors, avoiding taxes, or committing other crimes. He was finally indicted, last June. Kroll’s dubious role in the Stanford saga was detailed in the July issue of Vanity Fair. Although no Kroll employees have been indicted, at least one has been fired. The Stanford case has the potential to show a company engaged in something other than the integrity business.
I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about this. I have ZERO trust in the DNC, with their ridiculous ties to the Hillary campaign. This looks like a company that will NOT give Bernie a fair shake in this.
It’s late on Christmas Eve as I’m writing this, and I don’t have time to research it deeply, but if you guys have some time, see what you think about this. I hope you fellow DK Berners tell me that this is nothing to worry about. Let me know what you think.
MERRY CHRISTMAS. GO BERNIE!