Trump Lawyer Sued for $120M Over Shady Spying Drama

A prominent Republican attorney who worked for Donald Trump’s cherished social media company is facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit over his role in a bizarre international spying escapade.

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Ted Kittila, who was recently hired by the Republican National Committee, has been hit with a $120 million suit accusing him of fraud, civil conspiracy, and extortion on behalf of agents of an abusive foreign regime.

Kittila, 52, has deep ties to the GOP. He previously represented Trump Media & Technology Group in a bitter legal spat over ownership of Truth Social. He also assisted with the long-running Republican probe of the Biden family, and was hired by the RNC to sue the Delaware State Election Commissioner for access to voter rolls. The RNC legal action in Delaware is the latest in a string of similar Republican voter-roll lawsuits across the country that rights groups have slammed as part of a broader push to enable voter purges.

The attorney was born and raised in Delaware, where he now works in Wilmington, and studied for his bachelor’s at the University of Delaware. He has had three failed runs for public office. He was the uncontested Republican nominee for state attorney general and seats in the state House and Senate, but he was defeated on each occasion.

Kittila’s legal work for agents of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq dates back almost three years, when he first filed a complaint on their behalf in New York. The Kurdish regime has long faced accusations of human rights abuses, including attacks on journalists, political opponents, and activists.

A Kurdish spy based in Virginia claims in court papers that he had attempted in late 2022 to purchase $11 million worth of high-tech surveillance equipment from a U.S. vendor. He says the seller, spyware contractor Ben Jamil, failed to prove that the system worked, but refused to refund the $360,000 deposit. So he hired Kittila to sue Jamil.

Now Jamil, 93, has sued the spy for $460 million in a separate action. That lawsuit also directly goes after Kittila.

Jamil is demanding a further $120 million from all parties involved in the original spyware case, including Kittila himself, accusing them of fraud, civil conspiracy, and extortion. Among Jamil’s claims is that Kittila and others weaponized a criminal contempt motion, unusual in a civil case, that he says amounted to “malicious prosecution” designed to stop him from discussing or sharing details of the dispute out of court.

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Jamil told the Daily Beast he believes Kittila sought the contempt order on behalf of the Kurdish spy to save both himself and the Kurdish regime the embarrassment of the “scandal” breaking.

“If he’s a prominent and important lawyer, connected to important people, why would he want to have the world know?” he said.

“If I was an important guy, working for Trump, I would go to church, I’d buy Girl Scout cookies,” Jamil went on. “So people in his particular situation would certainly want to keep their hands very clean and not be associated with anything that could become a scandal. And this is a scandal.”

The Daily Beast previously reported that Kittila’s work on the Kurdish spyware case came at the same time he helped out on the House Ways and Means Committee’s years-long, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to prove that Joe Biden had profited from his son Hunter Biden shopping his D.C. connections to nefarious foreign actors.

His initial complaint on behalf of the Kurdish spy, filed in New York in July 2023, landed just one day after he filed a brief in a separate Delaware case where Hunter Biden’s plea deal with federal prosecutors was then under review. Kittila argued the deal was suspicious because, among other things, it ignored the younger Biden’s alleged foreign influence peddling.

Kittila also continued to work on the Kurdistan proceedings while representing Trump Media last year in a feud over ownership of Truth Social.

His efforts on the Kurdistan case are not the only time his work has touched on surveillance-related issues. His bid to secure damages for agents of the regime over its attempts to purchase spyware from Jamil also came as he led a separate action against the Defense Department and National Security Agency. The attorney accused the U.S. government of spying on American citizens, and called for greater transparency on domestic surveillance operations.