Former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has booked his first lobbying client, a company promising a COVID-19 cure and led by a California businessman who’s been collaborating with Rudy Giuliani on a documentary on Joe Biden and Ukraine.
The company, Linear Therapies, is seeking to develop drugs that can both prevent people from getting the virus and cure them if they do. And Rohrbacher’s role is pretty simple: use his political connections to pitch Vice President Mike Pence’s office, which is playing a leading role on the White House coronavirus task force.
But while Linear is one of many companies turning to K Street for help to pitch its COVID remedies to federal legislators and regulators, the cast of characters behind it—from Giuliani to Rohrabacher to Tim Yale, the Orange County Republican who leads the company—makes it a notable entrant in an industry where political connections can mean a financial windfall.
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“I got into it because I was asked to identify a potential cure for COVID,” Yale said of the company, which was officially formed in April. “We were tasked to do something that would be preventative and also act as a cure.” Yale declined to identify who had done the tasking.
Yale’s work at Linear came shortly after he and Giuliani—along with a California cannabis executive—began shopping for financial backing for a documentary film promoting the former New York City mayor’s long-running efforts to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine. According to a Mother Jones report last week, the trio sought $10 million to finance the project.
Yale said he ditched the documentary to focus on COVID because the virus “seems like a much more urgent task.” He declined to go into much detail about the drugs Linear is hoping to develop, though he said it would be in the form of an inhaler. He also declined to identify any likely competitors, saying doing so could compromise Linear’s competitive advantage before the product is even launched.
The company’s website offered some vague but important sounding words to describe its work saying it “is using the breakthrough solubility technology to create new intellectual properties by formulating biologically active products into novel drugs with increased bioavailability” and “focusing on delivering a safe and immediate anti-pathogen specifically targeted at the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Getting a relatively new company government business in the middle of a global pandemic can be tricky unless one has the right connections. Which is where Rohrabacher comes in. In disclosure forms, the former congressman described his work as “A cure for Covid-19 and other diseases.” Yale said Rohrabacher’s tenure on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as his particular “network of skills,” made him a natural advocate for the company.
Rohrabacher began plotting his move to K Street just weeks after he was defeated in 2018 by Democrat Harley Rouda. In February 2019, less than a month after leaving office, Rohrabacher’s new firm, R&B Strategies, signed its first client, a Kuwait-based company fighting what it says is that country’s political prosecution of one of its Russian-born executives.
Though his firm began lobbying in early 2019, Rohrabacher himself was bound by a legally required one-year cooling off period restricting his ability to lobby. That period expired in January, and Rohrabacher registered on behalf of Linear shortly thereafter, as first reported by Politico this week. He did so in his personal capacity; lobbying disclosure forms indicate Linear is not an R&B Strategies client, but rather employs Rohrabacher directly. Pence’s office is the only government entity that Rohrabacher has reported contacting on Linear’s behalf.
Rohrabacher’s relationship with Yale goes back years. Yale and his wife hosted the congressman at their palatial Orange County home in 2014 for an event supporting a candidate for California attorney general. And when Rohrabacher visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2017 to meet with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Yale was also in attendance, according to a report from the embassy’s security personnel.
According to his lobbying disclosure filings, Rohrabacher actually registered to represent Linear on March 10, more than a month before it was officially incorporated in Delaware. He didn’t respond to questions about his work for the company.
Rohrabacher served 15 terms in the House before his 2018 election loss to Rouda. He and his wife have since moved to a coastal town in southern Maine, where his personal lobbying practice is based (R&B is headquartered in Washington, according to lobbying disclosure forms).
During his thirty years in Congress, Rohrabacher had a quixotic reputation and ideological streak. He was ahead of the curve in his advocacy for medical cannabis, and though Linear was incorporated on 4/20 this year, Yale told PAY DIRT that it’s not doing any work in that space.
Rohrabacher also had a famously friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, so friendly in fact that the FBI warned the congressman in 2012 that the Kremlin considered him a potential intelligence source. In 2017, he attempted to broker a deal whereby the U.S. would pardon Julian Assange in exchange for evidence that Russia was not, in fact, behind the hacking of Democratic email accounts during the 2016 presidential election.
Rohrabacher fully bought into the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee emails were in fact leaked by a junior staffer, Seth Rich, who was killed in Washington in 2016. “Seth Rich’s name came up a couple of times,” he told Yahoo News of his 2017 meeting with Assange. “The whole thing stinks.”
Rohrabacher isn’t the only person with a government background whom Yale is now leaning on. Yale’s partners at Linear also have their own unique experiences with the federal bureaucracy. The company’s vice president is Phil Oakley, who runs a technology company called i3 Integrative Creative Solutions, which does substantial government contracting work.
“Phil is highly functional in working with the government from the mechanisms of processing engagement,” Yale said. “We’re trying to be extremely efficient to ensure that we comply with everything we’re required to.”
The only other publicly-listed executive at Linear is Eric Katz, whom Yale identified as a former agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration. It appears to be the same Eric Katz who just last month sued the Justice Department, alleging the DEA illegally terminated him due to medical hardships associated with his 2017 brain cancer diagnosis. Katz’s lawsuit also alleges cronyism in the awarding of DEA contracts.
That lawsuit received prominent billing last month from the website Just The News, which was founded this year by John Solomon, a former columnist at The Hill who provided frequent and friendly coverage of Giuliani’s allegations against Biden regarding his son’s work in Ukraine.
As for Giuliani, Yale’s collaboration with the former mayor began early this year, according to Mother Jones and a February report from Yahoo News. They teamed up with George Dickson, a California cannabis entrepreneur, to raise money for the documentary.
Where the project stands isn’t exactly clear. Yale said he’s mostly disengaged since he began heading up Linear. “I check in about every two weeks, so I’m nowhere near up to speed,” he said. “It dropped from my priority list.”
