Nothing About Jacob Helberg Makes Any Sense

Crooked Kevin McCarthy put the wrong people on the anti-China commission

Jacob Helberg is the man the government considers Keith Rabois’s husband, who has already been the subject of a post here. He was appointed to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission by Speaker McCarthy. Here he is yukking it up with Pipehitter Pompeo:

And with his best friend Crooked Kevin McCarthy:

The tech mafia moved him over to Palantir in August of last year, to be senior policy advisor to the CEO. There is no universe in which this works. Palantir needs to get serious, and getting rid of some of these Likud types is a sine qua non. Nothing about Helberg’s life makes the slightest bit of sense, not his family history, not his work history, not even his stupid book.

This guy is a likely Israeli asset, and having him at the top of Palantir, managing all of the NHS health data, is not going to work. His cousin is Simon Helberg, the Big Bang Theory actor, and his uncle is Sandy Helberg, who had a fairly long-running acting career, with parts in Spaceballs, This is Spinal Tap, and The Jazz Singer.

The family history, going back two generations, begins with Sam and Tonia, both survivors of Nazi persecution in Poland. Sam Helberg’s 2003 obituary in the Toledo Blade claims the following:

A native of Poland, Mr. Helberg was the youngest of 12 children, 11 of whom were imprisoned in concentration camps after the Germans overran Poland during World War II. Only he and a sister survived; another sister had fled the country before the invasion.

Known locally as “Sam, the poor barber,” Mr. Helberg learned his shearing skills as World War II was breaking out. An older brother taught him how to cut hair, a skill that made him useful to the Nazis during his more than five years of detention at a small camp near Auschwitz.

Mr. Helberg was segregated from the general population and given extra food rations, though the latter he secretly shared with other inmates whenever he could, the son said. Caught once sharing his food, Mr. Helberg was punished by being put back in the general labor pool at the camp, but later was returned to his barber's duties after his replacement angered the staff.

Among those with whom he shared food was Tonia Altman, whom he married after the camps were liberated. The couple lived in Germany until 1950, when they and their infant son immigrated to Toledo under the sponsorship of a relief agency.

Tonia’s obituary states she was involved with Hadassah and the refusenik cause, both of which are closely tied to the Israeli government. Here is the narrative of her time during the Nazi occupation of Poland:

It was in a camp there that she met her future husband of 55 years, Sam Helberg, who at great risk used to sneak her small amounts of food through fences that helped her survive. Following her liberation, she was separated from her entire family and was located in a home for displaced survivors by the "stranger" she knew from a distance in the camps. Together Sam and Tonia began their life and after their first son, Sandy was born in Germany, they immigrated to Toledo, Ohio in 1950.

Now, not having statistics to hand, it seems reasonable to surmise there were a great many Jewish barbers rounded up by the Nazis, and that being a barber, in itself, would not suffice to be granted extra rations and segregated accommodations in a concentration camp. What might, however, is being a collaborator or informant.

The first paragraph quoted in Sam’s obituary above is also called into question by the Geni entry on Majer Helberg, a brother, who did not die until 1952:

Sam Helberg, based on immigration documents, also appears to have committed fraud. Sandy Helberg was born in 1949, but on his father’s immigration forms he is listed as single with no accompanying family members:

Jacob Helberg’s father, Ted, is a little more murky. He was involved with Israel and Haiti, both of which being connections that were inherited by his son, who listed on his LinkedIn that he founded the following:

In 2014, Helberg consults for the campaign for Santa Monica assemblyman Richard Bloom, a Zionist who has backed anti-BDS speech restrictions, indicating that he is being moved through the pro-Israel network. In September 2014, Helberg’s LinkedIn states he went to Thermogram, a breast cancer screening company, and it says he left in October 2015. Thermogram was not incorporated until July 2015, so his dates here are being falsified.

Next, he states he was a founder of GeoQuant, a completely fake software that purports to bring machine learning to the study of geopolitical risk. It’s described in the Times of Israel as an Israeli start-up, funded by Aleph venture capital, with one founder in Tel Aviv and another in New York, who began work on it on his way out of the Eurasia Group, where Costin Alamariu’s brother also works, after a long stint at Freedom House. Helberg lists his dates here on his LinkedIn as December 2015-September 2016. Mark Rosenberg, the NY-based co-founder, however, doesn’t date his until April 2016. Helberg appears to have started working at GeoQuant before one of the co-founders. The earliest incorporation for Geoquant in Delaware is September 2016.

Helberg describes his time here in his book in several places:

Throughout much of 2016, I was working to quantify geopolitical risk. GeoQuant promised to take high-quality big data, run it through a powerful “machine learning engine,” supplement those assessments with input from human expert, and generate objective, actionable measurements of political risk. Exciting, right? Our algorithms tracked a variety of factors, such as instability in the governing coalitions of G20 nations, declines in the price of oil, and rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. We analyzed the fluctuations of currency markets and military progress in the battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Here’s another one:

It was these emails that Trump addressed in an unorthodox press conference on July 27. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said, referring to a trove of Hillary’s emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Sitting in the GeoQuant workspace, I was disturbed. Trump and his allies tried to play off the comments as a sarcastic joke, yet another example of “Trump being Trump.” But Trump’s words hadn’t sounded like a joke. They’d sounded like a signal.

Coming from an obvious Israeli asset, this looks like an attempt to set the stage to blame Russia, instead of the Israelis, for the DNC hack. Also, in July 2016, presumably it had no workspace, because the company did not exist until September.

Here’s the third place:

Along with a few colleagues, I decided to give start-ups another try, this time seizing on an opportunity closer to my passion for geopolitics. We called it GeoQuant, and the idea was to use software to measure geopolitical risk. SwissRe, the world’s largest reinsurer, thought the technology was promising and invested. Our clients were Fortune 500 companies weighing the hazards of setting up operations in volatile countries. Typically, they’d bring on consultants with the usual backgrounds from the State or Defense Departments or the intelligence community. Our algorithms offered a quantifiable way to measure risk. Once again, I hired a team and helped raise the initial funding to get GeoQuant off the ground.

I enjoyed the challenge of starting and steering a successful start-up. As the company continued to take shape, however, I realized that being a founder often meant being a full-time fundraiser and recruiter. At heart, I loved policy. But instead of working on the product, I was recruiting and hiring product managers to do that work for me. After about ten months, I decided to bow out and look for the next adventure. Through a friend, I heard about an intriguing opportunity at Google.

He appears to have left a company that didn’t exist right when it was created. Helberg tweeted a congratulations in 2022 when GeoQuant was acquired:

Again, Rosenberg’s LinkedIn lists him as a Eurasia Group director until June 2016, and not being a founder of GeoQuant until April 2016. So he was probably in New York, and it looks like Helberg’s role was fabricated.

Helberg moves from a fake role in a start-up to a policy advisor for global policies and standards at Google. Just prior to this time his relationship with Keith Rabois begins. Here is how Helberg describes his time at Google in his book:

The policy I developed clarified Google News’ stance on these new types of abuse. Importantly, this was a foreign interference policy and was laser-focused on the behavior and conduct of a given entity. It was content-agnostic and was not focused in any way on veracity. It didn’t aim to address all other types of domestically circulated inaccurate information about politics. If the Russian government aimed its disinformation at Ukraine, that could get its operatives removed from curated features that Google designates as “News.”

A number of Googlers jokingly dubbed it “Jacobcare.” To win over skeptics, I began hosting town halls and presentations. Meanwhile, as the scale and sophistication of the threat became clearer, more and more Googlers—and tech veterans as a whole—became convinced that we needed to act. After most presentations, the reaction I got was usually, “Tell us what you need and howe we can help.” To further raise awareness, I laughed an internal listserv that I used to circulate news clips and reporting about Russian interference.

There are discrepancies in two separate accounts concerning Project Dragonfly, Google’s search engine for China. In the book, the story of Dragonfly’s demise is described, but in his interview with The Realignment podcast, Helberg says he worked on it:

I spent a lot of my time at Google focused on addressing challenges that spanned from foreign interference to disinformation and what some people at Google called information integrity. And during that time, I saw the tech industry really caught in the crosshairs of a new geopolitical landscape where governments view technology companies as both proxies and targets of their respective national power. I then briefly worked on Project Dragonfly for a few months before it was leaked to The Intercept, which gave me a window to emerging issues with the one company, two systems model, which I recently wrote about in an article in Foreign Policy.

According to sourcing by The Intercept, only a few hundred people at Google knew about Project Dragonfly, and Helberg was one of them.

Again, the thing to consider here is that Helberg is moved, with virtually no experience, into key roles influencing disinformation policy, likely for Israel’s benefit given the network, and working on a search engine for China. Thereafter he’s put up by the PayPal mafia, and one must assume the Israelis, as a key anti-China influencer, without any expertise on China at all. This is all extremely troubling.