The mystery surrounding a would-be media magnate — who owns surveillance and security firms working for repressive regimes — is growing.
The questions about Matania (Mati) Kochavi were sparked again this weekend when Kathryn Ruemmler, who until recently was President Obama’s White House Counsel, showed up on Saturday morning in local Washington DC court to represent one of the 217 people arrested for rioting on Inauguration Day.
Ms. Ruemmler said she was there to represent a journalist, on assignment for the media company Vocativ, who’d gotten swept up with the protesters in the arrests.
Vocativ is owned by Kochavi. Reporters at the courthouse asked why a big gun like Ruemmler, who has long been a specialist in corporate crime, would show up for what would seem to be a misunderstanding involving a journalist doing his job.
Ms. Ruemmler told Buzzfeed that Vocativ is a client of her firm, Latham & Watkins. The firm is one of the most prestigious law shops in New York and Washington with partners such as Ruemmler charging thousands of dollars an hour.
She did look somewhat out of place among the lawyers there to defend anarchists and other alleged troublemakers who are charged with rioting, burning a limo and smashing up stores on the streets of the capital. “The individuals charged were generally brought in front of the judge in groups of 10 and were represented by a cadre of public defenders and other court-appointed lawyers,” according to Buzzfeed. That was not the case when it came to Vocativ.
Based in New York and Tel Aviv, Vocativ publishes mostly reprints of health studies, aggregated videos for Facebook, and female focused feature pieces. The company which employs a large team of US journalists and ex-Israeli intelligence operatives, says it uses technology from the intelligence world to source its stories. Indeed its founder, Kochavi, has a background in Israeli intelligence, having made his fortune providing security and military grade public safety solutions to the superrich Emirate of Abu Dhabi through an entity called AGT.
AGT was responsible for installing a “unique civil surveillance network in Abu Dhabi that means ‘every person is monitored from the moment they leave their doorstep to the moment they return to it,’” according to the noted security publication MiddleEastEye. The invasive system is dubbed “Falcon Eye”.
Kochavi also owns Israeli security and private intelligence firms 3iMind and Logic Industries. Like Vocativ, 3iMind claims to use “the deep web” to mine information, though in 3iMind’s case it provides intelligence services. 3iMind even advertises online that it will monitor “the planning and execution of violent civil unrest” for clients.
The website for Kochavi’s mother company, AGT, says its current business is using “Internet of Things” technology for entertainment and “fashion” applications in partnership with the giant talent agency WME-IMG … though it’s unclear what any of these applications are, and what value they provide for entertainment. Security experts say Internet of Things type sensors could be tied together to monitor crowds.
According to current and former employees, the lines within Kochavi’s companies can blur, with Vocativ employees doing work for 3iMind and Logic, and vice versa. So what was the role of this individual arrested amid the unrest on Inauguration Day? Was he actually doing journalism? Or, as some journalists around town have been asking, could he also have been doing surveillance of anti-Trump demonstrators on behalf of an Arab or Israeli client, possibly a foreign government?
A call to Ruemmler was returned by someone identifying himself as a Vocativ spokesperson. He told Heat Street that the arrested employee, Evan Engel, was doing purely journalistic work at the time he was detained.
“The arrest, detainment and rioting charge against journalist Evan Engel who was covering the protests for Vocativ are an affront to the First Amendment and journalistic freedom,” the spokesperson said. “Vocativ will vigorously contest this unfounded and outrageous charge.”
Kochavi puts a different face, unrelated to corporate intelligence and surveillance, on his American activities. Vocativ identifies as a news organization, though it’s made little splash (and gets remarkably little web traffic) for an operation so large and expensive.
Kochavi has also shown little hesitation to pay top dollar for access to the most powerful figures in America to burnish his American activities. Last fall’s Wikipedia data dump revealed that he and his longtime business partner, New York rainmaking lawyer Marty Edelman, offered Bill Clinton millions of dollars to serve as honorary chairman of the company that would become Vocativ. Clinton turned them down, perhaps wary of Kochavi who’s been described as “a mysterious even somewhat shady character” and the Israeli “version of the old-fashioned arms dealer with a suit and an MBA” by the progressive Jewish blog Tikkun Olam.
And now Kochavi has engaged President Obama’s former White House counsel, Ruemmler, whose name was once on the shortlist for US attorney general. It’s a fair question to ask: why was Ruemmler really down in local DC court on a Saturday morning? Why was getting this Vocativ employee off the hook such a high priority? And what, if any, other services has Ruemmler, the corporate crime expert, been providing to Kochavi and his various intelligence operations around the world?
Ruemmler herself has not returned requests for comment.