The lawsuit that Republican mega-donor Elliott Broidy filed against former CIA officer Kevin Chalker - accusing him of orchestrating cyberattacks and espionage on behalf of Qatar - has settled without any money changing hands, according to four people familiar with the terms. The outcome caps a legal saga that effectively destroyed Chalker's post-government career even as the underlying allegations grew increasingly difficult to substantiate.
As "Hvylya" reports citing The New Yorker's investigation, Chalker's consulting firm Global Risk Advisors had once employed nearly 200 people and earned about $100 million a year before the lawsuit drove away every client.
Broidy's e-mails were hacked in late 2017 through a routine phishing attack on his wife's Gmail account. The leaked messages revealed that Broidy himself had tried to turn the Trump White House against Qatar to win contracts worth hundreds of millions from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar's regional rival. Broidy later pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent for the Chinese government and a Malaysian financier, though he received a pardon from President Trump before serving any sentence.
Broidy's revised lawsuit alleged that Qatar had paid Chalker tens of millions for hacking and surveillance operations. But key evidence was questionable. Business proposals supposedly submitted by Chalker to Qatar contained language that one former CIA officer who reviewed them called obviously fabricated. The documents could not have been written by anyone with actual government experience, the reviewer said. Meanwhile, people familiar with Chalker's finances told The New Yorker that much of the money flowing through his shell companies in Gibraltar had actually been CIA funds used for covert government operations.
The lawsuit's anonymous former employee witnesses proved its undoing. By 2024, Broidy's lawyers sought extraordinary protections to hide the witnesses' identities from Chalker's defense team entirely. When a magistrate judge gave Broidy's lawyers a one-month deadline to justify those safety concerns, they settled instead. Chalker faced no criminal charges, and while the lawsuit was still pending, his quantum encryption company Qrypt signed technology-licensing deals with both the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos national laboratories.
Previously, "Hvylya" examined how Beijing navigated its Iran dilemma by prioritizing access to American markets.