The Republican-led Senate — with the help of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — voted on Wednesday to confirm President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Justice Department’s oversight of criminal cases involving public corruption. The choice was arguably a strange one. Brian Benczkowski, a lawyer with no experience as a federal prosecutor, whose last job involved representing a Russian bank closely tied to the regime of Vladimir Putin, was confirmed by a 51-48 vote on Wednesday. Every Democratic senator except Manchin voted against him.
Benczkowski briefly represented Alfa Bank during the late winter period in 2017. No one at Alfa Bank has been charged with criminal wrongdoing, and it isn’t even clear if the bank is being investigated, but it has been accused of involvement in the Trump-Russia scandal, largely because of documents in the so-called Steele dossier. As Salon reported in March 2017:
The FBI's counterintelligence team, which is also looking into Russia's suspected hacking of Democratic National Committee servers and the email account of [Hillary Clinton's] campaign chairman, is investigating why a computer server owned by Alfa Bank repeatedly looked up a computer server owned by the Trump Organization in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Eighty percent of the attempts to look up that Trump computer server were performed by Alfa Bank — 2,820 in total — with almost all of the rest being conducted by Spectrum Health, a medical facility chain for which Dick DeVos, the husband of Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, serves as chairman of the board.
“This could prove to be a historic mistake,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said after Wednesday's confirmation vote.
"I cannot believe the Republican Party just rubberstamped a nominee to head the Justice Department's Criminal Division who has no prosecutorial experience, who chose to represent a Russian bank with deep ties to Vladimir Putin, and who would not commit to recuse himself from Russia-related matters if confirmed," Durbin said in a statement.
Benczkowski, a former staffer for Jeff Sessions when the current attorney general was a Republican senator from Alabama, told lawmakers he would only recuse himself from matters involving Alfa Bank for two years.
Durbin and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. wrote a letter to President Donald Trump in May objecting to Benczkowski's nomination:
With new information about Russia’s election interference continuing to come to light and with a federal criminal investigation ongoing, it is imperative that we have a head of the Criminal Division who is free and clear from Russian connections. Mr. Benczkowski’s representation of the Putin-allied Alfa Bank and his refusal to recuse himself from Russia-related matters mean that he will not be able to credibly oversee the Division’s involvement in Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of Michael Cohen.
Benczkowski had "demonstrated poor judgment," the senators wrote, by "choosing to represent Alfa Bank, a Russian bank controlled by Putin-allied oligarchs . . . while he was seeking employment in the Justice Department and despite public reports that the bank was under FBI investigation for suspicious computer server contacts with the Trump Organization. . . . At a time when we need the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division to help uncover, prevent, and deter Russian interference in our democracy, Mr. Benczkowski’s choices so far have not inspired confidence that he is the right person to lead this fight."
The Durbin-Feinstein letter also points to the fact that it is unclear whether Alfa Bank is still under federal criminal investigation and that the nature of its relationship with the Trump Organization during the 2016 presidential election remains unknown. (Subsequent investigations have not established whether the alleged link existed between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, or even whether such a link would have been illegal.)
For their part, Alfa Bank associates have not reacted well to unflattering news reports. In May 2017, three investors in Alfa Bank sued BuzzFeed over the publication of the Steele dossier, which claimed they had been involved in the Russian government’s campaign to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. In October, those same three investors — Petr Aven, Mikhail Fridman and German Khan — also sued the private investigation firm Fusion GPS and its founder, Glenn Simpson, over the way Alfa Bank had been characterized in the dossier, according to Politico. Finally, the three men also filed a lawsuit against Christopher Steele and his company, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., by arguing that the dossier had defamed them, according to CNN.
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