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Ex-WSJ Reporter Blames Hired Hackers for Ending His Career

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Ex-WSJ Reporter Blames Hired Hackers for Ending His Career

Image for article titled Fired Wall Street Journal Reporter Alleges a Law Firm Hired Hackers to End His Career

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A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal claims {that a} legislation agency employed cyber mercenaries to hack into his emails and flow into embarrassing materials that finally led to his firing from the paper.

Jay Solomon, previously the Journal’s chief overseas affairs correspondent, was unceremoniously sacked from the paper in the summertime of 2017 after a tranche of emails leaked that purported to indicate impropriety between him and certainly one of his sources. The supply—a rich protection contractor and alleged CIA asset named Farhad Azima—had provided the journalist a minority stake in certainly one of his companies, a small, emergent firm known as Denx LLC. Solomon hadn’t turned him down, the emails confirmed, and had even expressed curiosity within the deal. After his editors confronted him in regards to the chats, Solomon was canned.

However, this story, which is already fairly bizarre, is now getting a complete lot weirder: seems, Solomon is accusing a significant American legislation agency, Dechert LLP, of hiring hackers from India to illegally steal his emails and leak the very messages that led to his termination. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. on Friday, the disgraced journalist claims that Dechert used unlawful techniques to “malign and discredit him.” These techniques allegedly included hiring two Indian cyber companies—BellTrox InfoTech Services and CyberRoot Risk Advisory—to surveil, steal, and publish details about him.

In his go well with, Solomon alleges that what Dechert did was blatantly unlawful and led to the destruction of his profession:

…Mr. Solomon’s employment with the Wall Street Journal was terminated in response to the publishing…of confidential communications between Mr. Solomon and his supply Farhad Azima (“Mr. Azima”), which had been illegally obtained by the hacking of Mr. Azima’s e-mail account—as directed and orchestrated by the Defendants and/or their Cohorts — and which introduced suggestive language making a wrongful look of alleged improper, unethical and/or fraudulent dealings…

Azima, who was additionally allegedly focused by the hackers, has additionally filed a lawsuit in opposition to Dechert. The lawsuits declare that the smear marketing campaign was initiated on behalf of certainly one of Dechert’s purchasers, a Saudi ruler, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, who used the material to win a unique lawsuit filed in opposition to Azima.

Dechert responded, “The claim against the firm is denied and will be defended.”

If this all feels like outright lunacy, it sadly won’t be. The scary development of legislation companies hiring “cyber mercenaries” to focus on journalists, political activists, and different targets, has been widely reported over the previous few years.

Solomon has persistently dismissed the allegations in opposition to him, claiming that he by no means took any cash from Azima or agreed to a enterprise relationship with him. “None of the allegations was true,” he wrote, in a 2018 op-ed for Columbia Journalism Review. While Solomon admits to creating “serious mistakes in managing” his relationship with Azima, he finally denies wrongdoing:

“Rather than leaving to protect myself and my reputation, I was glued to the exotic surroundings and the guests I’d meet through Azima over the years. This contributed to the toxic misunderstandings that led to the end of my tenure at the Journal,” he writes.

However, the unique reporting on Solomon’s termination makes him look…properly…not superb. In 2017, the Associated Press wrote {that a} leaked working settlement confirmed the journalist had been provided a ten p.c stake in Denx. Two different Denx “partners,” former CIA officers Gary Bernsten and Scott Modell, informed the AP that Solomon had been “involved in discussing proposed deals with Azima at the same time he continued to cultivate the businessman as a source for his stories for the Journal.” Solomon has portrayed these communications as his clumsy try to take care of ties to sources however that he by no means meant to go ahead with any form of enterprise dealings.

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