A veteran Democratic operative with ties to the Biden administration is advising a military spyware firm accused of having helped foreign governments spy on murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, according to new filings.
Bluelight Strategies President Steven Rabinowitz is being paid to provide government relations services to NSO Group, a technology company that develops tools that allow smartphones to be monitored covertly. The firm has been embroiled in controversies over the use of its Pegasus software, which foreign governments have used to target journalists, human rights activists, and government officials, including U.S. diplomats. A phone number for French President Emmanuel Macron was on a list of possible targets of NSO clients, as was a number for the Biden administration’s lead Iran negotiator, Robert Malley.
A forensic investigation published late last year indicated that representatives of the Emirati government installed the software on the phone of Jamal Khashoggi’s wife months before the Washington Post columnist was murdered in Istanbul by a Saudi hit team. The analysis was conducted by privacy and security researchers Citizen Lab on behalf of the Post.
The CIA assessed that Khashoggi was killed with the approval of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, prompting President Joe Biden to call the kingdom a “pariah.”
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In response, the Biden administration blacklisted the group, adding it to an “entity list” that is used for companies whose activities run “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”
The U.S. government said it had added NSO to the entity list based on evidence that it had “developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
NSO has strongly denied the findings by Citizen Lab and other groups.
“The allegation that our products were used on President Emmanuel Macron, Jeff Bezos and Jamal Khashoggi is untrue,” NSO CEO Shalev Hulio wrote in a February op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
The company also insists that U.S. phone numbers cannot be a Pegasus target. Targeting U.S. numbers is “technologically impossible,” NSO told the Washington Post.
The company is seeking to overturn the Department of Commerce’s listing, which prevents U.S. companies from providing NSO with goods or services. A group of Democratic lawmakers last year called for stricter sanctions on the company that would freeze its financial assets and stop employees from traveling to the United States.
The Commerce Department said restricting the company’s trade was part of the Biden administration’s “efforts to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy, including by working to stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression.”
During an Intelligence Committee hearing this month, top U.S. spy officials said the government had purchased a limited license for use in counterintelligence operations.
“We need to know what tools are out there that the bad guys can use against our people,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said before declining to comment publicly on “whether it has been used against us.”
A former Clinton White House aide and adviser to Democratic presidential campaigns, Rabinowitz founded Bluelight with Aaron Keyak nearly a decade ago. The firm has close ties to the administration: Keyak took a leave of absence from Bluelight to serve on the Biden campaign and is the State Department’s deputy anti-Semitism envoy.
Details of Bluelight’s work for NSO were contained in a March Justice Department filing, which details its plan to provide consulting services that could include outreach to Biden’s White House and Congress. Rabinowitz is also advising the company on media and communications, seemingly as a result of the heightened public pressure on the firm over its tools and the groups who employ them, which critics have branded “cyber mercenaries.” Bluelight is contracted at $50,000 per month.
In a comment to the Washington Examiner, Rabinowitz “vigorously denied any association between NSO’s Pegasus software and slain columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”
The technology company has conducted its own investigation into the charges, which it published in a 32-page report last year.
Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the progressive Revolving Door Project and an expert who has scrutinized the influence of money in Washington politics, pointed to the cyber firm’s long record of selling tools that governments routinely abuse as a reason to eschew its business.
“People who work within the framework of small-d ‘democratic politics’ should shun entities like NSO Group, which are credibly implicated in attacking watchdog groups [e.g., Citizen Lab] and journalists [Saudi-assassinated Khashoggi],” Hauser told the Washington Examiner. “That limitation applies even if the pay is good and you’re fond of the corporation’s home country.”
NSO’s chief product, Pegasus, taps the phones of its targets without their knowledge. It has been licensed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other governments, but NSO rejects claims that the technology was involved in Khashoggi’s death.
Chartwell Strategy Group — a firm co-founded by David Tamasi, a longtime Washington lobbyist who raised money for former President Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns — is also advising the Israel-based company.
In the past, it has employed well-connected Democratic strategy firms, including SKDK until 2019, where Biden adviser Anita Dunn is a founding partner, and Beacon Global Strategies, led by former CIA and Pentagon chief of staff Jeremy Bash and which employs former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta. Both men served under the Obama administration.
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Other Biden administration officials have past ties to NSO Group, including senior State Department adviser Daniel Shapiro, a former Obama administration ambassador to Israel, who is now a member of Rob Malley’s Iran negotiations team. In 2018, Shapiro was part of a group of outside consultants brought on to help vet the company’s clients as abuses of its tools drew public outcry. After Khashoggi’s death, the group advised NSO to end its contract with Saudi Arabia “and shut down NSO systems in the kingdom,” according to the New York Times. Shapiro left the group soon after.
White House official Dan Jacobson, general counsel at the Office of Administration, provided legal guidance to NSO Group’s former parent company, Q Cyber Technologies, while working at the law firm Arnold & Porter, according to a financial disclosure.
