Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
As the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee goes all out in his investigation of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russian interests, one of his campaign consultants is working on behalf of a prominent employee of Russia’s foreign-propaganda apparatus.
Ezra Friedlander is a lobbyist and political consultant who runs outreach to the Orthodox Jewish community of behalf of New York Rep. Jerry Nadler’s campaign. He’s also a public-relations executive, and his newest client is the wife of Kirill Vyshinsky, the head of Russian media outlet RIA Novosti’s Ukrainian arm.
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Or at least Vyshinsky was the head of that outlet. He’s now in a Ukrainian jail, where he faces treason charges after the country’s security services raided RIA Novosti’s offices in Kiev. Ukrainian authorities have accused Vyshinsky of illegally fomenting support for the Russian annexation of Crimea. Vyshinsky, once a dual citizen of Russia and Ukraine, renounced the latter last year.
According to documents on file with the Department of Justice, Irina Vyshinsky, Kirill’s wife, hired Friedlander’s firm in late November to attempt to secure his release. Friedlander told PAY DIRT that neither RIA Novosti nor any other independent entity is paying him for that work.
“Protecting the rights of journalists is so front and center to my core belief system,” Friedlander said in an interview Wednesday. “To me, if you’re a journalist and you make inquiries and you write and you report, that has to be encouraged. In all countries, and at all levels.”
Those are points that Friedlander has stressed in meetings with U.S. policymakers, including discussions in December with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), now a presidential candidate, and former Sen. Orrin Hatch, who was the Senate’s most senior member until the Utah Republican retired in January. “They certainly took note, certainly listened. They didn’t make any commitments,” Friedlander said.
Though he frames it as an issue of press freedom, the Ukrainian government isn’t the only one to accuse Russian media of acting as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin. The U.S. intelligence community also concluded that ostensibly independent Russian-owned broadcasters were integral parts of Moscow’s American disinformation campaign in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
That makes Friedlander’s new client particularly noteworthy, given his longtime personal and professional relationship with Nadler, who’s now leading the charge in Congress to further investigate Russian election-meddling efforts.
Friedlander says he hasn’t lobbied Nadler on Vyshinsky’s behalf—or on behalf of any other client. “Not only did I not discuss this with him, but as a matter of policy that was implemented when I started working for Jerry, I never lobby his office,” he said.
Friedlander held a few other meetings on the Hill around the time of his December lobbying campaign on Vyshinsky’s behalf, including with Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC). But he said Vyshinsky’s case didn’t come up during those appointments.
According to his tweeted account at the time, when Friedlander finished up with his meetings on the Hill, he headed over to the real locus of power in contemporary Washington: the Trump International Hotel.
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