Who is FTI Consulting? Let’s take a look…
“FTI Consulting is a business consultancy firm founded in 1982 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States. The company specializes in corporate finance and restructuring, economic consulting, forensic and litigation consulting, strategic communications, and technology.”
Thanks, Wikipedia (if I can even trust you anymore).
This firm, FTI Consulting, is the firm Hunter Biden hired to clean up his online image, including his Wikipedia information. Not surprisingly, they also worked for Burisma, the Ukrainian energy giant tied to the Biden family.
Independent reporter Lee Fang explains in a recent article how Hunter used the firm to edit Wikipedia using fake accounts, like one called “Earflaps.”
From independent reporter Lee Fang:
Hunter, the emails show, sought to delete a line explaining that the National Endowment for Democracy, which he previously worked with, had ties to the CIA. He also pushed to include more official titles from his various NGO board memberships.
On May 28, 2014, an account called “AmeliaChevalier” edited Hunter’s Wikipedia to delete any reference to “disgraced financier Allen Stanford.” Over the next few weeks, more anonymous Wikipedia accounts began rapidly editing Hunter’s page, records show. Archives of Wikipedia show that a month after engaging with FTI, Hunter’s Wikipedia page had dramatically changed, with negative references scrubbed, and lengthy passages added to discuss his volunteer work, service in government, and appointments to various boards and political committees.
One of the more prolific and anonymous Wikipedia accounts making edits to Hunter’s page was a user called “Earflaps,” which made a number of edits, including the deletion of criticism of Hunter’s work for Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm. That account was later identified as a “sock puppet,” a term of art used for the illicit pay-for-play editing by fake accounts, to airbrush negative information off of Wikipedia. An investigation found that Earflaps was one of nearly a dozen fake accounts tied to PR firms hired to carefully manage the image of Russian businessmen.
Paying for Wikipedia scrubbing is nothing new, but it usually goes hand-in-hand with nefarious intentions as opposed to honorable ones.
No surprise.
