Defendant "Allegedly Provided Confidential Information About Dissident Saudi Twitter Users to a Close Associate Of [Saudi] Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman"

From U.S. v. Abouammo, decided today by Ninth Circuit Judges Daniel Bress and Kenneth Lee and District Judge Yvette Kane (M.D. Pa.):

Ahmad Abouammo, an employee at the company then known as Twitter, allegedly provided confidential information about dissident Saudi Twitter users to a close associate of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In return, Abouammo received a lavish wristwatch and hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from his Saudi contact. For his role in this arrangement and his efforts to cover it up, a jury convicted Abouammo for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government or official, 18 U.S.C. § 951, conspiracy to commit wire and honest services fraud, 18 U.S.C. § 1349, wire and honest services fraud, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343, 1346, international money laundering, 18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(2)(B)(i), and falsification of records to obstruct a federal investigation, 18 U.S.C. § 1519.

The court affirms Abouammo’s conviction, concluding that there was enough evidence that he was acting on behalf of a foreign government official; that the statute of limitations hadn’t run on the fraud and money laundering charges; and that there was no venue problem with the falsification of records charge. (Judge Lee concurred to say more as to venue.) Those discussions are long and technical, and you can read them in the full opinion. But here’s the court’s summary of the facts:

In 2013, Twitter hired Abouammo, a U.S. citizen, as a Media Partnerships Manager for the Middle East and North Africa region. In this role, Abouammo was to help onboard influential content creators to Twitter and serve as a liaison to persons of influence in his geographic territory. At this time, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) had fifty percent of Twitter’s users in the region, and it was identified as a key prospect for growing Twitter’s business.

In June 2014, a group of Saudi entrepreneurs visited Twitter’s offices in San Francisco. Abouammo arranged a tour for the group. During the visit, Abouammo met Bader Binasaker, a close associate and “right-hand-man” of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MbS”). MbS is a son of now-King of Saudi Arabia Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. In March 2013, MbS’s father was the Crown Prince, the second most powerful position in the Kingdom, and MbS was named Head of the Private Office of the Crown Prince. In January 2015, MbS’s father became King, appointing MbS as Minister of Defense and Head of his Royal Court. In April 2015, King Salman named MbS Deputy Crown Prince.

Binasaker was a close advisor to MbS. Binasaker was the General Supervisor of the Prince Salman Youth Center (PSYC). In 2011, MbS appointed Binasaker to be the Secretary General of the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation, a charitable organization that went by the acronym “MiSK.” The government’s expert at trial, Dr. Kristin Diwan, testified that these organizations were “very connected to royal power and trying to forward agendas of the particular royal or of the state.” Binasaker used an email address with the official domain name of His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed’s Private Office. In addition, and among other things, when Binasaker traveled with a Saudi delegation for meetings at Camp David, he submitted an A-2 visa for diplomatic travelers, describing himself as a “foreign official/employee.”

After the June 2014 tour at Twitter’s headquarters, Binasaker emailed Abouammo with a request to “verify” MbS’s Twitter account. Twitter’s verification service was generally reserved for public figures and placed a blue verification check box on their account to confirm that a particular Twitter account was actually associated with that person. Media Partnerships Managers were not directly involved in the verification process but would serve as liaisons between the verification team and the public figure. After additional verification requests, a MiSK employee contacted Abouammo “[r]egarding the arrangement between you and Mr. [Binasaker] for many things,” to report an account impersonating MbS. Abouammo was generally expected to address complaints from influential Twitter users in the region that imposters were using their accounts.

In December 2014, Abouammo met Binasaker at a Twitter meeting in London. At the meeting, Binasaker gave Abouammo a luxury Hublot watch. Abouammo later attempted to sell the watch online for $42,000. At the London meeting, Binasaker and Abouammo spoke about a widely followed Twitter account with the handle @mujtahidd. The @mujtahidd account was an “infamous and colorful” persona in Saudi Arabia that tweeted about alleged corruption and incompetence in the Saudi Kingdom and royal family.

After Abouammo returned from London, he received an email from Binasaker that read: “salam brother as we discussed in london for Mujtahid file.” Attached to this email was a dossier describing the @mujtahidd account as “established on July 2011 under an anonymous name with [the] aim of speaking out some confidential information and leaking some hidden facts about Saudi Arabia and royal family.” The document asserted that @mujtahidd violated Saudi law by slandering the royal family and igniting false rumors about them.

Twitter records show that Abouammo used an internal Twitter tool called “Profile Viewer” to repeatedly access the @mujtahidd account, beginning shortly after he met Binasaker in London in December 2014 and continuing through February 2015. Profile Viewer allowed Abouammo to search for specific Twitter users by their usernames and view their confidential personal identifying information, including the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses. Twitter’s records show that on various occasions Abouammo accessed the email and phone information associated with the @mujtahidd account. In February 2015, Binasaker emailed Abouammo about another account, @HSANATT, which had been suspended for impersonating a Saudi government official. Twitter’s records show that Abouammo accessed confidential personal information of the @HSANATT user in February 2015.

During this period, Binasaker and Abouammo communicated using WhatsApp, an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. The content of those messages was not recovered. But the government claimed that circumstantial evidence showed Abouammo used WhatsApp to forward the confidential information of dissident Saudi Twitter users to Binasaker. In a post-trial order, the district court concluded that while “[t]here is no direct evidence that [Abouammo] conveyed the information he accessed to Binasaker,” “[t]here is a significant amount of circumstantial evidence.”

In February 2015, a month in which Abouammo had viewed @mujtahidd and @HSANATT in Profile Viewer, Binasaker wired $100,000 to a bank account in Lebanon that Abouammo recently opened under his father’s name. On a visit to Lebanon later that month, Abouammo withdrew $15,000 from the account and transferred some of the money to his own Bank of America account. In March 2015, the day after speaking with Binasaker, Abouammo messaged Binasaker the following note: “proactive and reactively we will delete evil my brother.” Binasaker responded with a thumbs up emoji.

During sentencing in this case, the district court heard testimony from the sister of a man who worked as a humanitarian worker for the Red Cross in Saudi Arabia. The man used a Twitter account to tweet satire critical of the Saudi government. The witness testified that her brother was detained in Saudi Arabia due to the Twitter account, held in solitary confinement, and tortured through electric shocks and beatings. The man was hospitalized with life threatening injuries and has since disappeared….

Abouammo left Twitter in May 2015 and moved to Seattle, where he started a freelance social media consultancy. Through his new venture, Abouammo introduced Saudi contacts to Twitter employees, serving as an intermediary to follow up on issues such as verification requests. In July 2015, Binasaker wired another $100,000 to Abouammo’s father’s Lebanese bank account, sending Abouammo a note saying he was “sorry for the delay in the transfer.” Binasaker sent another $100,000 wire transfer to Abouammo in January 2016.

On October 20, 2018, the New York Times published an article describing how advisers to MbS had mobilized against critics on Twitter. The article reported that Twitter was warned in late 2015 that Saudi Arabian operatives had groomed a Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, to look up the confidential identifying information of certain Twitter accounts critical of the Saudi government. Alzabarah had repeatedly accessed the @mujtahidd account after meeting with Binasaker in May 2015. After Twitter questioned Alzabarah about his repeated access of the account, Alzabarah and his family fled to Saudi Arabia, where he secured employment with MiSK.

Notified that the New York Times would be publishing this article, which would reveal the government’s ongoing investigation, the FBI flew two agents from the Bay Area to Seattle the night before the article’s release. The same day the article was published, the agents went to Abouammo’s residence in Seattle to try to speak with him. They found Abouammo on the driveway of his home.

After they identified themselves as “FBI agents from the San Francisco office,” Abouammo immediately asked if they were there about the New York Times article. After briefly discussing the article, Abouammo said “something to the effect of he felt bad because he had introduced Ali Alzabarah to KSA officials,” specifically Binasaker. Moving into the house to continue the discussion, the FBI agents spoke with Abouammo for several hours. During the course of the interview, Abouammo told the agents that he presumed Binasaker was close to MbS, that he knew Binasaker was part of the King’s team, and that Binasaker worked for MiSK and PSYC, which were both entities that, according to Abouammo, were owned or controlled by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Abouammo informed the agents that he had met with Binasaker in London, Dubai, and Riyadh, and that Binasaker had gifted him a watch that was “plasticky and cheap and worth approximately $500.” Abouammo recalled that Binasaker was interested in the @mujtahidd account and had repeatedly asked Abouammo to access it. Abouammo admitted he accessed the account but denied that he passed any private user information to Binasaker. Abouammo also described how Binasaker was unhappy when Abouammo decided to leave Twitter, telling the agents that one of the reasons he left the company was the “mounting pressure” from contacts in the Saudi government.

Abouammo told the agents that he continued to assist Binasaker after he left Twitter and was paid $100,000 for his services. When the agents asked Abouammo if there was documentation to support this claim, Abouammo said he had retained an invoice. Abouammo told the agents the invoice was on his computer, and he went upstairs to retrieve it while the agents waited on the first floor.

Several minutes after going upstairs, Abouammo emailed the agents an invoice that had nothing to do with Binasaker or MiSK. Nearly thirty minutes later, as the agents continued to wait downstairs, Abouammo sent a second email with an attachment purporting to be an invoice for work performed for MiSK, which showed $100,000 billed for one year of social media consulting. The metadata of the two invoices showed that although the first invoice was created months before, the supposed MiSK invoice was created during the thirty-minute period that Abouammo was upstairs….

Jeffrey M. Smith argued on behalf of the government.

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