Keith Alexander and the Iron Companies
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Beyond Donald Trump’s direct and obvious grifts is a secondary industry of grifts that both live off the direct grifts and support them. And third-rate hangers on and more. It’s a grift ecosystem. A possible intermediate-level predator just died.
To fully chart the entire ecosystem would require a houseful of walls with sticky notes and yarn, with so many yarn connections going from one room to another that movement inside the house would become impossible.
Early on, when the Steele Dossier was published, I thought I might follow some of those connections, but it turned out that the project was incompatible with living anything like a normal life. I’ve picked up pieces of it from time to time. Marcy Wheeler has worked with bigger chunks.
Some names reappear through various grifts: Recently, George Papadopoulos, Gal Luft, Keith Alexander, and Jack Keane.
One of the secondary grifts involved Michael Flynn in a project to help Russia sell more nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia than they could ever afford. I’ve written about that project, which involved several beltway-bandit type companies that morphed through several forms. Keith Alexander and Jack Keane were on the boards of at least two of those companies.
One of those companies was IP3, whose ancestry I’ve followed back to an entrepreneur named Alex Copson. Jim White at Emptywheel picked up on the security side of IP3, which was eventually spun off as a separate company, IronBridge. Alexander and Keane were on that board. Now AP reports that IronNet, another Alexander company with Keane on its board, has cratered. Wikipedia says that IronNet was founded in 2014, which would put it more in parallel with IP3 than a direct descendent.
IP3 was part of a congressional investigation into Michael Flynn’s pushing of his comrades’ schemes during the early Trump administration. Flynn, of course, was Trump’s National Security Advisor until his inappropriate connections to Russia were uncovered. Most recently, he’s been peddling disinformation about the government’s response to the hurricanes.
Gal Luft, we need a loooong piece of yarn over to Marcy’s side of the house, was part of the attack on Hunter Biden until his connections to Russian intelligence and China were uncovered. Whoops. (Guardian, WaPo, NYT) He also was part of the IP3 complex.
Back in 2019, I wrote about what was known about the Saudi Arabia connection: the companies, the plan, and the people. More has come up since then, including a congressional investigation and finding that a Dutch company was involved with IP3.
There were several Russian connections in IP3. IronNet seems to have dropped the shadier partners of its predecessor companies.
There’s a story here, if only how a former director of the National Security Agency failed to do due diligence on the people he was working with.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner