Solomon v. Dechert LLP
| Docket Number | Civil Action 22-3137 (JEB) |
| Decision Date | 18 September 2023 |
| Parties | JONATHAN SOLOMON, Plaintiff, v. DECHERT LLP, et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Columbia |
Jonathan “Jay” Solomon, former chief foreign-affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, was no stranger to having his name appear in the news, although he was more accustomed to showing up in the byline than in the headlines. That all changed in June 2017, when a story broke accusing him of maintaining an improper business relationship with one of his sources, prompting the Journal to fire him. Plaintiff has brought this suit against multiple individuals and businesses allegedly responsible for leaking his communications with that source. He claims that Defendants embarked on a campaign to discredit and silence him and are thus liable under a number of statutes, including the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Now that certain Defendants - including a prominent law firm - have been dismissed, those remaining are two groups of alleged hackers and one communications consulting firm and its employees. They now separately move to dismiss all of Solomon's claims. As the Court agrees that the Amended Complaint does not adequately allege the elements of his federal causes of action, it will dismiss those counts and decline to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over his state-law claims.
At this stage, the Court sets forth the facts as pled in the Complaint, assuming them to be true. See Sparrow v United Air Lines, Inc., 216 F.3d 1111, 1113 (D.C. Cir. 2000). They read in certain parts like a mashup of elements from international TV thrillers “The Bureau” and “Tehran.” Solomon was the chief foreign-affairs correspondent for the Journal's Washington D.C., bureau for nearly two decades, where he “covered national security and U.S. foreign policy.” ECF No. 47 (Am. Compl.), ¶ 11. Though a resident of the District Solomon had postings in the Middle East and various regions of Asia. Id.
In 2013, he “broke news on a money laundering scheme designed to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions.” Id., ¶¶ 11, 34. His reporting was based on two types of sources. The first was a series of briefings by “American and Israeli intelligence officials,” from whom Solomon learned that Iran was attempting to circumvent American sanctions and launder money by having “three moneymen for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (‘IRGC')” purchase various businesses within the Republic of Georgia. Id., ¶ 33. One of these transactions, and the one most critical to this case, involved a Georgian hotel sold to these moneymen by Sheikh Saud, the ruler of Ras Al Khaimah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates. Id. Solomon's other source was Farhad Azima, an international businessman, whom Plaintiff describes as “critical” to his reporting. Id., ¶¶ 33, 37. Azima helped broker some of the above-mentioned transactions and “at the time was on good terms with Sheikh Saud.” Id., ¶ 33.
Following the publication of Plaintiff's story, the Georgian government took swift action to prevent Iran from carrying out its unlawful scheme. It reportedly began requiring visas for Iranian nationals in July 2013 and also “froze 150 Iranian bank accounts in the country” around the same time. Id., ¶ 34. The U.S. Treasury Department also got involved, placing the three IRGC moneymen on the sanctions list in early 2014. Id., ¶ 58. These counter-responses consequently prevented Sheikh Saud from selling his Georgian hotel, upending what appears to have been a lucrative deal and exposing him to potential legal penalties by the United States for sanctions evasion. Id., ¶ 34 Solomon believes that his reporting and the subsequent reaction it inspired led Saud to see him as a “person of concern” around this time. Id.
The people Saud was really worried about, however, were Azima and his purported co-conspirators. The Sheikh came to suspect that Azima was working for and with, inter alia, Khater Massaad, the former CEO of Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (RAKIA), as well as one of the Sheikh's brothers to “remove [him] with the assistance of Abu Dhabi.” Id., ¶ 59; see also id., ¶ 60 (). In an effort to “eliminate any threats they and/or others posed to his power,” Saud retained a team of lawyers from Dechert LLP that included David Gerrard and David Hughes. Id., ¶ 60. Under the guise of investigating fraudulent activity at RAKIA during Massaad's tenure, the Dechert team allegedly embarked on shocking conduct far beyond the pale for attorneys. See id., ¶ 36 (alleging that enterprise comprising Dechert lawyers engaged in “fraud, human rights abuses, kidnappings, torture, extortion,” and “attacks against the free press,” among other acts of intimidation).
Their opening act, according to Solomon, was the kidnapping and illegal detention of Jordanian businessman Karam Al Sadeq. Id., ¶¶ 61, 64. On September 2014, Al Sadeq was forcibly taken from his home and interrogated by Gerrard and Hughes. Id., ¶ 64. They sought to get Al Sadeq to (falsely) confess that Azima and his co-conspirators had committed various kinds of fraud against RAKIA and Sheikh Saud. Id., ¶¶ 68-69. Gerrard and Hughes allegedly threatened Al Sadeq and his wife, and they also kept him in solitary confinement at an unofficial prison site to coerce him into giving up any information he had on Azima. Id., ¶¶ 64, 67-68. Al Sadeq eventually broke and “signed statements confessing to his involvement in alleged fraud,” and he remains in jail today despite promises that he would be set free if he confessed. Id., ¶¶ 70-71.
Azima learned of this treatment of Al Sadeq later in 2014, and he tried to expose these “human rights abuses” and the Dechert lawyers' role. Id., ¶ 73. It was at this point that Azima became the focus of the Dechert team's efforts to protect Sheikh Saud and themselves from criticism. Id., ¶¶ 73-74. The team joined up with Defendants Andrew Frank and Amir Handjani - the president of KARV Communications, Inc. and a special advisor at KARV, respectively - to devise a plan to “go after” Azima. Id., ¶ 74. Initially, they planned to harm him by filing civil and criminal lawsuits against him to “cause him to incur significant financial damages” and by planting negative stories about him in the media. Id., ¶ 75.
To this strategy was added the “hack and dump scheme” that is the crux of the case at hand. Id., ¶ 78. The scheme, in essence, was to hack Azima's email accounts and post his communications with third parties elsewhere on the internet where agents of Dechert could retrieve them. The enterprise set up at least three separate teams to assist in this effort. (The reader may take comfort in knowing that, while it is important to detail the alleged scheme in this RICO case, keeping all the Defendants straight is not critical to the resolution of the Motion.) The first team, which included Defendants Nicholas Del Rosso and his company, Vital Management Services, Inc., was tasked with gaining access to Azima's email account and dumping tranches of his data onto online locations that could then be accessed by the other teams. Id. To achieve this, Del Rosso hired a hacking firm that used “phishing and spearphishing emails” to eventually lure Azima into providing his login information. Id., ¶¶ 83-85.
That hacking firm, CyberRoot, is located in India. Id., ¶ 84. At some point in 2016, Del Rosso was able to obtain “persistent access” to Azima's email accounts and to his communications with Solomon. Id., ¶ 85. Either directly or indirectly, Saud and Dechert paid Del Rosso substantial amounts for his work. Id., ¶ 81.
The next team, which included Defendant Amit Forlit and his companies, Defendants SDC-Gadot and Insight Research and Analysis, LLC, worked with Gerrard purportedly to aid in investigating allegations of fraud at RAKIA. Id., ¶¶ 8, 78, 87. In reality, Forlit was to help Dechert lawyers “independently locate the hacked and dumped emails” and disclose their online locations to the law firm. Id., ¶¶ 87-88. Solomon speculates that Forlit was brought in to give Dechert and its lawyers “plausible deniability.” Id., ¶ 78. It appears that in August 2016, Forlit and his team did what they were hired to do, sharing a link to Azima's data with Stuart Page, another team member, who then passed the link to Gerrard. Id., ¶ 97. This team, too, was paid handsomely for its work by Saud through “a variety of [Ras Al Khaimah] entities.” Id., ¶ 80.
The third team consisted of employees at NTi, “a firm recommended by” Del Rosso's lawyer, and their job was to download Azima's emails and provide them to the Dechert team. Id., ¶ 78. NTi eventually did download the data obtained from Azima's account and gave it to Gerrard and his team, although the timing of these events is unclear. Id., ¶ 98. Solomon alleges that this firm was also “directly or indirectly paid by [Ras Al Khaimah] entities or Defendant Dechert” but does not provide any specifics on payments to this team. Id., ¶ 78.
After Del Rosso successfully gained access to Azima's accounts Gerrard met with Azima on July 2016 to “threaten[] him.” Id., ¶ 90. Azima returned the favor, vowing to go to Solomon with Dechert and Sheikh Saud's “human rights abuses and racketeering activity.” Id. ¶ 90. Unfortunately for Solomon, “members of the enterprise” had become interested in taking another look at the abortive sale of the Georgian hotel back in 2013 - a sale that Solomon, through his reporting, had a part in thwarting - around the time of this meeting. Id., ¶¶ 91-92. These unhappy coincidences, Solomon fears, made him a new...
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