The DNC has chosen the firm to investigate what happened in last week's data breach of its campaign database. The name was leaked on Friday, but here's the official word:
(CN) - In selecting its auditor to study the security breach exploited by a campaign staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic National Committee showed it has insouciance to spare.
Described as a corporate CIA, the Manhattan-based private intelligence firm Kroll counts big names like Goldman Sachs and Chevron among former clients....
On Monday, the Sanders campaign pushed for the audit to probe all glitches in the NGP VAN database, and called upon Clinton to support that extension.
"As the Clinton campaign knows, this is not the first firewall failure at the DNC," Sanders' campaign spokesman Michael Briggs said at the time. "There was at least one other failure two months ago that we discovered and reported. Failures like these open the possibility for data access by any campaign."...
NBC reported that the Clinton campaign was "pleased" with the choice. But Sanders, having spent much of the primary season stumping against Kroll's elite clientele, has not yet disclosed any view on the firm...
Before founding Kroll, its namesake Jules Kroll cut his teeth at Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, a company that OpenSecrets.org ranked as Clinton's second-largest lifetime donor.
"Den of Thieves," a book about insider-trading scandals of the 1980s by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Stewart, reported that Kroll detectives were spotted "shadowing" a cooperating witness against a Goldman Sachs investor to intimidate him from testifying.
Kroll also kept tabs on counsel for attorneys representing Ecuadorean rainforest residents who won a $9.5 billion environmental verdict against Chevron....
Though Chevron is a massive political contributor on both sides of the aisle, the company poured at least $10 million into State Department projects while Clinton headed the office.
The lawyer for the Ecuadoreans says about Kroll:
Donziger said he would not classify Kroll as an "objective investigations service."
The firm takes on clients who "have a very specific agenda that requires particular results to be produced regardless of the actual facts," Donziger said in an email.
A profile from 2009 in The New Yorker credits Jules Kroll (who is no longer with the firm he founded) with creating the shadowy industry of corporate intelligence:
Breaking up extortion rings, nailing dictators—that’s the Marvel Comics version of Jules Kroll’s career. Kroll really made his living, and his name, on Wall Street. He owed his success not to Spider-Man but to Goldman Sachs and Skadden Arps and a long list of corporations, law firms, investment banks, management consultants, hedge funds, and brokerage houses. Kroll likes to say, “Sunlight is a wonderful antiseptic.” But he and his company have been more highly valued for keeping things in the dark than for the occasional, client-approved exposé. They are the keepers of innumerable embarrassing, probably career-destroying, possibly corporation-destroying secrets.
No word from the Sanders campaign what they think of this choice of firm, or whether they have any say in the matter.
(via)