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>>18117569 National Security Action Q 1353 drop. Penn Biden Center. Another NSA Penn Biden Center loser. Jeffrey Prescott
>>18117643 Think Tankers are Flooding Into the Biden Administration
>>18117802 many of Biden's foreign policy advisers come from four entities: Foreign Policy for America, National Security Action, Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, and WestExec Advisers
>Thursday, July 9, 2020
>How Biden-Aligned Think Tankers Got Rich
>The Prospect recently wrote about how Joe Biden's foreign policy team got rich,
The next day, they were back to reaching out to venture capitalists and corporate leaders. Their whole approach was based on word of mouth and the power of their founders’ reputations. Initially, WestExec’s website, with its cool black-and-white portraits in dark suits, simply listed Blinken by his role in the firm. By April, a boldfaced title had been added under his name: “Former Deputy Secretary of State and Former Deputy National Security Advisor to the President.” It must have appealed to clients.
To look more established, WestExec found partners in a private equity group and a Google affiliate.
The private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners was incorporated a year earlier by John Thain. Blinken and Flournoy joined a startlingly high-profile roster of former policymakers, including four retired senators and the former chair of the Joint Chiefs. (Pine Island declined to comment.) Thain, an investment banker, had tanked Merrill Lynch, sold it off to Bank of America, and paid himself several bonuses along the way. At the height of the subprime mess, he spent $1.2 million remodeling his office, installing a $35,000 golden toilet. He seemed like a less-than-ideal partner for public servants.
Another partnership was with Google’s in-house think tank, Jigsaw.WestExec’s Robert Work, during his time at the Pentagon, collaborated with the tech company in an artificial-intelligence venture, as first reported by The Intercept. That AI initiative, known asProject Maven,led to an insurrection among Google staff upset about collaborating with the military. (“WestExec has done no work on Project Maven. Period,” said Flournoy.) Though Jigsaw has since been removed from WestExec’s list of partners, the Prospect has learned that Blinken and Flournoy have continued to work quietly and informally with Google engineers and executives,spitballing potential geopolitical threats. Schmidt Futures, Google founder and billionaire Eric Schmidt’s philanthropy, has also hired WestExec.
The founders told executives they would share their “passion” for helping new companies navigate the complex bureaucracy of winning Pentagon contracts. They told giant defense contractors how to explain cutting-edge technologies to visitors from Congress. Their approach worked, and clients began to sign up.
One was an airline, another a global transportation company, a third a company that makes drones that can almost instantly scan an entire building’s interior. WestExec would only divulge that it began working with “Fortune 100 types,” including large U.S. tech; financial services, including global-asset managers; aerospace and defense; emerging U.S. tech; and nonprofits.
The Prospect can confirm that one of those clients is the Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward. With surveillance software that tracks ships in real time, two former Israeli naval intelligence officers established the company in 2010. Gabi Ashkenazi, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, serves on its board. Windward also claims former CIA director David Petraeus as an investor, as well as a Hong Kong billionaire (most U.S. military-tech companies avoid money from China, experts told me, so they turn to investing in Israel).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/09/08/project-maven-amazon-and-microsoft-get-50-million-in-pentagon-drone-surveillance-contracts-after-google/?sh=14f976de6f1e