Brian Costello: Who protected Sequoia Capital from investigation

A clip from a CPDC webinar, The Case Against Neil Shen and Sequoia Capital

Brian Costello is a seasoned executive and entrepreneur with thirty years in the technology industry as both an operator and investor. He is currently launching a new AI company.

TRANSCRIPT:

Frank Gaffney: [00:00:00]
And Brian, I guess I would like you just to speak specifically to the response that people like Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general of the United States, a woman who served in the Obama administration as the homeland security adviser, and a number of other capacities made when presented with the factual information that you provided. Specifically, if you can, what kind of response did you get from not just the Department of Justice in the FBI, for that matter, but also from the SEC? I think you’ve said, well, you know, it wasn’t much of a response, but could you be as precise as possible with respect to the kind of guilty knowledge that these entities, these individuals received from you and what their response was as precisely as you can reconstruct it?

Brian Costello: [00:01:01]
So I’ll deal with each of the agencies separately at the Securities Exchange Commission. I immediately was actually got what I would call a handler or somebody from the Office of the Whistleblower at the SEC, which I submitted all the claims through the SEC portal. And when you look up that person, he was the person that handled all the Bernie Madoff intake. So essentially, they gave me a handler who would just tell me like, hey, keep submitting the information. We’re not going to give you any feedback on what is or isn’t going on. I was never interviewed by the investigative team there, and it became pretty clear, as you saw correspondences with the SEC related to Chinese crimes that they weren’t going to do anything. Ironically, talk about elite influence. Yeah. Gensler, who runs the SEC now as significant if you look at his financial disclosures, a significant portion of his portfolio is an emerging market funds that are heavily weighted 40 to 50% in Chinese and Taiwan stocks. Regarding the FBI and the DOJ, I was eventually interviewed on February 2nd, I would call it an investigation was opened, which was like, how do we bury this thing? So, they had to bring me in from that process after providing them a binder and sitting with them and going through all information. And clearly the decisions were being made from the market integrity. Major fraud division in the in the criminal department of the Department of Justice. They told me to submit all my future information to the tip line. They also told me they didn’t want to talk about in the interview the national security ramifications of Shen, because there are multiple agencies focused on that and what’s now revealed, and this was the Wall Street Journal cover article last week was one of the multiple agencies was the National Security Council. And apparently Kurt Campbell from the National Security Council was meeting with Sequoia, trying to unwind what was going on here. Despite being in possession of crimes. I went I sent a letter to Lisa Monaco. Adam Hickey at the Department of Justice because they were handling the ByteDance TikTok review. And I wanted them to know that the SEC, the FBI, Washington field office, the Department of Justice, where Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, were all in possession of criminal allegations not only against Shen, but his attorney from Skadden Arps, who is now the CFO of ByteDance, had been involved in a bunch of these allegations or claims predicate crimes in the US capital markets. I received no response from their, I believe, multiple congressional offices. And both parties know that. I’ve met with 50 congressional offices, probably 100 staffers. Everybody knows exactly what’s going on, that the DOJ, the SEC, the FBI, the National Security Council. So multiple agencies within the government are not confronting this in the appropriate manner based on our rule of law. So, it’s pretty extensive. Whose fingerprints are on this?_______
Read More at Committee on the Present Danger: China