A strategic communications firm founded by a long-time former Hillary Clinton staffer has quietly become a major force behind a variety of American and Israeli military and intelligence firms.
Following this publication’s reporting on the Manhattan-based facial recognition firm Clearview AI providing “high-value targeting” to Green Berets and supporting the Colombian National Police through the U.S. State Department’s ‘drugs and thugs’ bureau, the author was messaged on the end-to-end encrypted messaging platform Signal by former Clinton State Department staffer Ali Rubin.1
“Hey Jack — Ali Rubin here. I work with Clearview and would love to connect,” read the message on June 17. Subsequent exchanges to set up a background conversation with a senior executive of Clearview confirmed that the approach was through Velocity Partners, a public relations firm Rubin co-founded in 2023 with fellow Axios alumna Kate Meissner. (A third co-founder, Andrea Riccio, departed in January to launch her own firm.)
Velocity Partners publicly discloses Clearview AI and a variety of other military and intelligence firms on its homepage, including: the billion-dollar cyber warfare startup Twenty Technologies, the Palantir-backed military tech startups Valinor Enterprises and Northslope Technologies, and the Israeli weaponized drone company Heven AeroTech.2
Recent court filings spotted by Biometric Update and the independent journalist Daniel Boguslaw revealed that Clearview AI’s $3,750,000 contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division helped power the Trump administration’s political crackdown on 15 Minnesota-based immigrant rights activists.
The June indictment of the activists revealed that HSI’s Special Operations Group (SOG) had thoroughly infiltrated the in-person meetings and Signal group chats of Minnesota activists using tens of undercover agents, further seizing the financial records of affiliated groups and labor unions under the longstanding counter-terrorism authority of the PATRIOT Act and the newer National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7).
The second Trump administration’s overt targeting of left-wing political movements through NSPM-7 was first reported by the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, though a coalition of conservative-leaning nonprofits this week filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Minnesota defendants, stating that the Trump administration has “weaponized NSPM-7 to surveil core First Amendment activity—infiltrating meetings, monitoring encrypted chats, and secretly seizing years of financial records from unions and nonprofits.”
Internal HSI investigation documents published as part of the lawsuit demonstrated how an ICE officer named Guy Gino used a seed photograph of defendant Isaac Sant to purportedly uncover his history of political activity, including through photographs published by civil rights organizations and within videos published to Google’s YouTube. One such instance involved a purported interaction with Sant 15 minutes into a documentary of the April 2015 protests in Baltimore in response to the police killing of Freddie Gray, with the video published just two months after Google issued a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI.
When Clearview AI was reached for comment through Velocity Partners regarding its role in a domestic counter-terrorism investigation deemed to be a political prosecution by even some right-wing groups, the firm doubled down on the legality of its work.
Clearview refused to confirm or deny whether HSI’s usage of its facial recognition was through the roughly $3.8 million contract which is set to end next week. But the company repeatedly asserted that the majority of its work with ICE HSI was to counter the exploitation of children, and that the usage of Clearview AI by the Trump administration to target American political activists is through legal mechanisms with strict logs of searches.
(Five days after publication of this article, it became public record that HSI on September 1 renewed its contract with Clearview AI for an additional year, obligating an additional $3,937,500 to the company.)
Updated on September 2 2026 to note the renewal of Clearview AI’s ICE HSI contract.
Rubin was an aide to HILLPAC director Capricia Marshall, who subsequently became chief of protocol of Clinton’s State Department, bringing Rubin along as her chief of staff. Rubin later worked for Chelsea Clinton at the Clinton Foundation and then, beginning circa late 2022, served as a senior advisor to David Brock’s anti-MAGA fact-checking organization Facts First USA.
Heven’s Israeli and U.S. operations are respectively led by the former Israel Aerospace Industries CEO Yossi Weiss and the former senior CIA operations officer Michael Buscher; the company’s CEO is former Israel Defense Forces combat officer Ben Levinson, who has described Heven as designed to support Israeli drone operations in Gaza.
I've been reading about the HSI investigations - at least the financial records part as it relates to paying agitators etc. I believe no official search warrant was necessary to pull all the financial records, HSI/DHS used administrative subpoenas, which I understand is legitimate. Thanks for the like to the Office of Public Affairs, it provides an excellent summary of the charges.