Consulting firm in Felix Sater’s counterclaim against Kazakhs: The least surprising link of all

There is a substantially longer article on this forthcoming, but in the process of researching the firm RJI Capital, the original parent company of Arcanum Global Intelligence, I came across reporting from 2010 on another company under the same ownership, RJI Government Strategies, Inc.  RJI Government Strategies was incorporated in Delaware in 2002, with a branch in Washington, D.C. incorporated on 8 July 2003 and registered to Ron Wahid, the founder of RJI Capital and chairman of Arcanum Global, a plaintiff in the lawsuit filed against Felix Sater in March 2019.

A tremendous amount is waiting to be unpacked on the players in this drama.  But this particular find merits an early preview, before all the other unpacking is completed.

Just a little more background and then we’ll dive in.  The pursuit of RJI Capital has come about because of Felix Sater’s counterclaim in the 2019 lawsuit, filed last week.

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Kazakhstan, we’ve gotten to know ye a little better

Technically, what we’ve gotten to know better is the interaction of outside players with systemic Kazakh corruption, especially as it relates to Spygate in the U.S.  But work with me, people.

Most recently, the January 2022 flare-up in Kazakhstan brought to the fore a piece of information reported by the Daily Mail and NY Post in October 2020:  that Hunter Biden had business dealings with Kazakh oligarchs while his father was vice president, and the Big Guy was photographed being in on it.

Americans: There’s no excuse for (some of) us

Two beleaguered people have recently come back from the dead, unjustly-ruined-reputation-wise.  Both were victims of attack by legal action.  Both lost their jobs, had their names dragged through the mud, and had to spend tens of thousands in litigation costs.  In neither case was the attack the fault of “lawyers,” although some of the lawyers, of course, took advantage of what these unfortunate victims’ attackers wanted to do.

Both individuals were also vindicated by the justice system – after being run through the wringer.

What you probably didn’t know about the Paula Deen dust-up

It’s something you probably didn’t even think about, when news of Paula Deen’s use of the N-word penetrated your consciousness.

If you’re like me, you haven’t taken the trouble to investigate the Paula Deen N-word business any further.  (I had never paid that much attention to Deen anyway.  I’m not a cooking-show aficionado.)  You agreed, of course, that she should not have used the N-word.  You mentally denounced the practice.  Deen isn’t a rap star or a high-powered director making a Hollywood movie, so, of course, she is ineligible to use the N-word for “art’s” sake.

You figured that what was being retailed in the news about her was substantially correct.  You thought it was sad that a folksy, funny lady who had made a big success out of down-home cooking was brought low by careless bad manners, recorded at some point in her life.  You were annoyed at the apparent persistence of this stupid, destructive pattern in Southern social intercourse.  When is it all going to stop, for crying out loud?

But if you had taken the trouble to investigate, as John Leonard did, you would have discovered the following:

Desperate desert tortoise endangered by Jerry Brown

Q.  When does destroying a creature’s natural habitat with human power-generation activities not matter?

A.  When Jerry Brown is governor of California, the creature is the desert tortoise, and the power-generation activity in question is the installation of a huge solar-power facility in the Mojave Desert.

It’s the, um, selective prioritization that warrants calling out here.  The issue of whether the desert tortoise will be fatally inconvenienced by the solar facility is no more clear-cut than it ever is in such cases.  Some environmentalists can always be found