Brian Benczkowski Worked for a Russian Bank—Now He’s Trump’s Man at Justice
He wouldn’t commit to recusing himself from cases involving the parent company of Alfa Bank or the Russia probe and has never prosecuted a criminal case.
We have a new contender In the stiff competition to be the worst Trump appointee.
It’s
Brian Benczkowski, confirmed last week to a pivotal position as assistant attorney general. He has almost no relevant experience for the job, unless you count passing the bar.
What he does have, as former staffer and close friend of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is the president’s ear from his prior spot on his transition team as well as ties to Russia’s Alfa Bank at a time when Russia’s assumed Most Favored Nation status in the White House.
It was his representation of Alfa Bank that made his nomination one of the most hard fought of the administration. In early 2017, with the transition over, Benczkowski returned to his private law practice. He said yes to representing Alfa Bank as it fought charges that it had suspicious contact with a Trump Organization server. He also sued BuzzFeed on Alfa’s behalf for printing
the Steele Dossier.
In June 2017, Trump nominated Benczkowski to headJustice’s Criminal Division. Rather than disclose his work for Alfa, Benczkowski kept it secret. When Democrats on Judiciary discovered that Alfa was a client in an FBI confidential file and confronted him. Benczkowski said he wasn’t being secretive but had been abiding by a clause in his contract which the client subsequently waived.
Once that was out in the open, Benczkowski agreed to recuse himself from matters involving the Kremlin institution of choice for billionaires close to Vladimir Putin. But he would not agree to recuse himself from matters involving its parent company,
Alfa Group Consortium, which is like saying I’m giving up crack but not cocaine.
Alfa Group is owned largely by billionaires Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven, and German Khan, all on the Treasury Department’s potential sanctions list as “senior foreign officials and oligarchs in the Russian Federation, as determined by their closeness to the Russian regime.” A son-in-law of Khan, Alex Van der Zwaan, pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators and went to prison.
