FBI investigation smeared as "conspiracy theory" by UAE-funded website

UAE-backed website uses misinformation to sow confusion about ongoing federal money laundering investigation

Less than two weeks ago, on Thursday, February 23, a committee hearing in Arizona occurred. It might not otherwise be notable were it not for the final testimony in the hearing, from someone named Jacqueline Breger, which has stirred some controversy. Breger presented the findings of a four-year-long investigation by a forensic investigative law firm based in Arizona.

The firm, run by an attorney named John Thaler, alleges that the Sinaloa Cartel launders proceeds from drugs and human trafficking through systemic real estate, construction, and insurance fraud in Arizona. The investigation further alleges that the cartel has engaged in systemic bribery of public officials throughout Arizona including, they claim, Governor Katie Hobbs.

While Thaler’s allegations may be shocking, they are taken quite seriously by the FBI who, along with the Attorneys General in multiple other states including California and New Mexico, are investigating his firm’s findings.¹

Governor Hobbs is “just kidding”

A few days after the committee hearing, on February 28, Hobbs held a press conference in which she briefly—and nervously—addressed the allegations made by Breger, Thaler, et. al. And her comment was rather curious. At the start of the press conference, before any questions had been asked, Hobbs said the following:

Good afternoon everyone. Before we get started [with] all this, I know you all have one burning question. I’m only gonna answer it once.

No, I am not involved with the Sinaloa Cartel. I’m not taking bribes from them. And I’m not laundering their money. So, um—just kidding—anyway, uh—

When a number of journalists then chimed in for clarification, Hobbs laughed and replied,

No, no, no, no. That was a joke.

A strange way to ward off suspicion, no? If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself:

Hobbs’s statement didn’t provide the conclusive rebuttal she may have been hoping for. If anything, her nervous nature and the fact that she said “just kidding” and “that was a joke” immediately after her denial only added to the buzz that was by then quickly growing on social media.

Grid.news publishes hit piece

Nearly a week after Hobbs’s press conference gaffe, on Friday, March 3, a new piece showed up on Grid.news. It is entitled, “The origins of a conspiracy theory about Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and a drug cartel” and is written by Khaya Himmelman. The piece is heavily dismissive of the Thaler investigation’s findings, which Himmelman writes off as an “Arizona-born conspiracy theory.” The article is rife with misinformation and personal attacks against Thaler and Breger.

Himmelman implies that the Thaler investigation which produced the findings presented at the committee began with “a domestic dispute.” But this is not true. Thaler’s investigation began when his firm was asked by a number of Attorneys General from several states in the midwest to assist with some investigative follow-up to a case that had already resulted in several convictions for money laundering in Illinois and other states. This was made clear by Breger in her testimony and has been reiterated by John Thaler in multiple interviews since.

Himmelman’s misleading claim is based on the fact that Thaler’s ex-wife, Brittany Chavez, became a subject of the investigation after (note: after) Thaler found evidence that she herself was involved in a racketeering enterprise. As a result of the personal fallout from the investigation, Thaler and Chavez initiated divorce proceedings.²

But, again, Thaler’s investigation began at the behest of several Attorneys General at the conclusion of an earlier, related money laundering case. It was already underway when Thaler found evidence of his former wife’s criminal activity. Himmelman’s suggestion that the investigation all started with a domestic dispute between Thaler and his ex is therefore both incorrect and extremely misleading.

Personal attacks on Thaler and Breger

But it’s just the start of the misinformation that Himmelman manages to pack into the article. She went on to describe Breger as an “insurance agent” as if this somehow detracts from her professional expertise. In fact, Breger’s career in insurance and real estate is directly applicable to the investigation, which focused on money laundering via real estate and insurance fraud. I can’t speak for Himmelman, Thaler, or Breger, but personally, it seems like a good idea to have an industry professional involved in an investigation of such magnitude.

In the piece, Himmelman introduces John Thaler—the lead attorney on the four-year investigation—as “Breger’s boyfriend.” Later on in the piece, she again pointed out that Thaler “is in a romantic relationship with Breger” as if this somehow negates decades of professional experience and four years of investigation done by his firm. The romantic status of Thaler and Breger is irrelevant to their firm’s findings but has been preyed upon as a convenient distraction from the gravity of their work.

Himmelman writes that Breger’s testimony is a “baseless story,” but this claim is itself baseless. In fact, Breger’s testimony is based on years of forensic investigation by a team of professionals involving the review of over 120,000 documents. She made this very clear in her testimony and even shared some of the documentation with the committee members.

Hit piece endorses opinion of anti-abortion judge

Himmelman attempts to cast further doubt on the investigation’s findings by drawing attention to a separate case that Thaler was involved in. In it, a District Judge from Arizona named Douglas Rayes accused Thaler of being “delusional and fantastical.” And while Himmelman mentions this three separate times in the piece, she only actually drops the name of the judge once. Frankly, I can see why.

District Judge Douglas Rayes is not exactly someone whose judgment we should deem particularly trustworthy. Why do I say this?

After Roe v. Wade was recently overturned, the same Judge Rayes ruled against women’s right to bodily autonomy in Arizona in an abortion-related case. Thanks to his ruling, “women in Arizona no longer have the legal right to an abortion due to a fetal abnormality at any stage of the pregnancy.”

Do you trust Rayes’s judgment skills? I don’t.

Falsely insists Thaler + Breger have “no evidence”

Throughout the Grid piece, Himmelman claims that the allegations made by Thaler and Breger have “no evidence” to support them. This is laughable.

Again, Thaler’s firm reviewed over 120,000 documents for this investigation. They have assembled a 300 page report about it and shared some of the most pertinent documentation with the committee members who heard Breger’s testimony.

Himmelman’s misleading claim is made based on the fact that Thaler and Breger have not yet published their full report. Additionally, most of the documentation uncovered by Thaler is currently under seal. This is because Thaler is working with the FBI, which has begun to investigate his findings. As he explained in a recent interview, he has withheld publication of the pertinent documents because he does not want to compromise the FBI’s ongoing investigation. This is standard procedure for attorneys and clients working on sensitive legal cases.

Yet Himmelman twists this legal safeguard into a misguided claim that Thaler and Breger have made their allegations without backing evidence. If she had bothered to listen to Breger’s testimony in full, she might have noticed the loads of evidence given, including not only specific names and laundering methods but also documents shared with committee members.

Trite, meaningless analysis

And while Himmelman tries to pull readers in with the lurid subtitle, “How a domestic dispute became the latest Arizona-born conspiracy theory,” she never actually offers readers the promised explanation. That is, she does not explain how Thaler’s investigation became tangled up in the 2020 election denial among the MAGA crowd.

The only attempt that Himmelman actually makes to explain how Thaler’s investigation became included in the committee hearings is a quote from an ABC data analyst who told her that “it just kind of wormed its way into the election fraud community.”

But this is a rather poor explanation for something that is actually quite clear. Thaler’s firm was asked to present their findings by Liz Harris, a Republican representative in Arizona’s House of Representatives. Like Breger, Harris has worked in real estate. Unlike Breger, Harris is widely known as a supporter of QAnon.

Thaler’s investigation has a particular aspect to it which appeals to the QAnon crowd. Thaler alleges that the Sinaloa Cartel has compromised the electoral infrastructure of Arizona and that they are capable of manipulating elections. Supporters of QAnon, MAGA, etc., have therefore taken interest in the investigation because it provides more fuel for their frivolous arguments that the 2020 election was a hoax.

But Thaler and Breger have never endorsed Trump or QAnon and neither of them have tried to connect their findings to the 2020 presidential election. As Breger told the committee during her testimony, the firm has zero political affiliations and has not received funding from any political party or organization. And as Thaler said in an interview, he is not personally concerned with what the committee thought of his investigation, and merely agreed to its presentation because he had been asked to do so.³

It’s worth noting that the manipulation of elections which Thaler alleges is done, he claims, not by the Biden administration, the FBI, etc., but by the Sinaloa Cartel. This particular allegation is quite different in nature than the various far-fetched theories about the 2020 election which revolve around Democrats vs. Republicans, the deep state vs. Trump, or similar themes.

Further, it is not without precedent. Back in 1988, Mexico’s presidential election was rigged to give the win to Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Just a few years later, in 1995, it was confirmed that Salinas’s brother held tens of millions of dollars of laundered drug money in a Swiss bank account. This came to light amidst a joint investigation by Mexican, US, and Swiss authorities into drug money laundering schemes.

While Thaler and Breger themselves have not tied their investigation to Biden’s election or to QAnon/MAGA, they have nonetheless been affiliated, largely because of Liz Harris’s interest in the investigation and her invitation to Thaler’s firm to present their findings for a committee hearing which was meant to focus on election fraud.

But Himmelman never explains all of this. Instead, she assumes the reader will play along and decides not to provide contextual information (such as the fact that there is an ongoing FBI investigation into the matter) which might distinguish Thaler’s allegations from the barrage of truly baseless theories which abound today.

In a vapid attempt to analyze the phenomenon, Himmelman quotes an Arizona attorney Tom Ryan who said “in the world controlled by reality, we can see the obvious lack of truth to it all.” Um….ok, dude. The FBI thinks otherwise.

Who is Grid.news?

If you’ve gotten this far, you may have wondered along the way, who is Grid? I certainly wondered this myself, as I read the article and noticed that nearly all of it clashed with what Thaler and Breger actually said and did. So, I began to poke around a little bit.

According to journalist Alana Goodman, the company “was first conceived in August 2020” by Mark Bauman. Bauman has worked with a wide variety of notable people and institutions over the years.

Bauman holds a masters in International Relations and Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).⁴ Through his career, he has worked for Time magazine and numerous other corporate publications. Bauman also worked with George W. Bush on several public relations projects according to a biography on ContactOut.

In January 2022, Bauman launched Grid with substantial funding from International Media Investments, a company owned by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and a member of the Emirati royal family. Additionally, Grid received professional advice from APCO Worldwide, a lobbying firm that is registered as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates.

Grid also received startup capital from Brian Edelman. Edelman co-founded RAIN, a voice technology firm with offices in the US and Nicaragua that has worked with the State Department, Amazon, and Google, among others. Goodman reported that Edelman “also works as a creative adviser to TrailRunners International, a PR firm that is a registered foreign agent for a US-sanctioned Chinese cotton company, according to DOJ records.” (Grid has stated that one of their goals is to cover “the many facets of the U.S.-China relationship.”)

Grid is owned by Media Investment Projects OpCo LLC, a Delaware-based company that was established in January 2021. Grid’s board members include: Alberto Fernandez, who, before joining the company, coordinated strategic communications for the State Department; John Defterios, a World Economic Forum Media leader and senior advisor at APCO Worldwide; as well as two other board members who have received duPont-Columbia Awards, a journalism award named after Alfred du Pont of the du Pont family. Grid’s head of legal affairs Stephanie Abrutyn was an attorney for Warner Brothers, HBO, and CNN and a legal consultant for Girl Scouts of the USA.⁵

Manufactured dissent?

The above information—particularly that relating to the financial and professional connections between Grid, Nahyan, and China—might reasonably lead one to wonder…is Grid state-sponsored propaganda?

I find it notable that the website is affiliated with organizations that are registered foreign agents for China and the UAE. Why? Because the Chinese government and members of UAE’s royal family have been implicated in transnational drug distribution and money laundering schemes documented by law enforcement agencies across the globe.

For example, in 2019, the Department of Justice announced that a drug distribution ring in San Diego, CA tied to the Sinaloa Cartel had been found guilty of distributing methamphetamine and GHB throughout the US and, oddly enough, the UAE. More recently, as part of the Pandora Papers investigation, it was revealed that members of UAE’s royal family have provided financial cover for drug traffickers who were found to be distributing fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine.

As for China, the investigative journalist Sam Cooper, based out of Canada, has provided thorough documentation of the various connections between the Chinese government and a stunning number of internationally active drug traffickers, money launderers, etc. who operate out of Hong Kong, Macau, Vancouver, and the Golden Triangle and who regularly collaborate with Mexican-based drug trafficking organizations, or DTOs.

Speaking of Mexican-based DTOs, I find it fascinating that Himmelman’s headline alludes to “a drug cartel” but does not specify which one. This would be understandable if the cartel allegedly involved was small or not otherwise well-known. But the Sinaloa Cartel is not just any drug cartel. They are the cartel—the most powerful and dominant DTO in Mexico who are responsible for much of the illicit drug supply in the US.

I can’t help but wonder why the editors at Grid chose not to even include Sinaloa’s name in the headline. It’s comparable to running a headline that says “Company accused of breaking the law” and neglecting to mention that the company is Amazon.

In this piece, we have examined the various claims made by Himmelman’s Grid article on the Thaler investigation. We saw that most of them are either blatantly false or are otherwise used in a misleading manner to smear Thaler and Breger.

You can decide for yourself whether or not Thaler’s claims warrant our attention. Grid has made clear that they, for whatever reason, are strongly opposed to the claims laid forth by Thaler, Breger, et. al—claims which are currently being investigated by the FBI and the Attorneys General of California and New Mexico.

And personally, I can’t help but feel that any such claims that the Sinaloa Cartel has infiltrated the US government should be scrupulously examined, regardless of how bizarre or outlandish the allegations may seem upon first glance. That the same cartel is potentially linked to the UAE royal family and the Chinese state, both of whom have supported Grid in one way or another, only deepens my interest and concern.

In the coming days, I will continue to share information relating to Thaler’s allegations and a number of similar federal investigations and legal cases.

Thanks for reading.

1. See 15:30 in the following interview with Thaler: https://frankspeech.com/video/exclusive-brannon-howse-interviews-attorney-john-thaler-claim-politicians-us-corrupted-drug

2. See 10:00-11:30 in the above-linked video interview

3. See 43:00 in the above-linked video interview

4. The Hopkins SAIS school, which is located in Washington, DC a block east of Dupont Circle, has long been a conduit to the top levels of public office as well as the intelligence community. Its graduates include presidential cabinet members and diplomats among their ranks. The school has also been targeted by Cuban and Chinese intelligence operations. See Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities by Daniel Golden, p. 61 and 116-117.

5. While Abrutyn was a legal consultant for Girl Scouts of the USA, a Girl Scouts troop leader in California plead guilty to sexual molestation charges involving ten children under the age of 14.