Clare Rewcastle Brown is an investigative journalist and founder of the Sarawak Report. She was a whistleblower in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, which saw billions of dollars siphoned from governments into private bank accounts and shell companies to fund extravagant parties, major Hollywood productions and forge relationships with some of the world’s most famous and powerful names.
Harvard Political Review: You spent much of your early life in Sarawak, Malaysia, before moving back to London. London can feel like the center of the world when you’re living there, whereas Sarawak must have felt like living on the periphery. How did spending your early years in Sarawak affect your perspective?
Clare Rewcastle Brown: I think it affected my perspective immensely. My parents’ center of the world was London. So I was sitting in the middle of a jungle, listening to parents who were talking about international politics and Britain’s role in the world, but it wasn’t my world. My world was a third world. When I finally, with great excitement, got back to Britain at eight years old and plugged into that society, what I discovered was I just couldn’t think that Britain mattered as much as everybody else did.
I knew there was another world out there. My parents always lived in developing countries, so when I came back to the bubble that we live in, in the West, people would be talking about social movements and issues of social justice that bore no comparison to the suffering that I was seeing.
I think the world is closer now. You know, because we’re all much more aware of each other’s situations and much more connected and much more travelled. I feel that, luckily, the world is coming around to my earlier perspective.
HPR: Some years ago, you spoke about your concern that we are “getting used to corruption.” You mentioned that you would have to go back through stories and add a few exclamation points to really reinforce that “this is not normal.” A few years later, do you think we are now entirely desensitized to corruption?
CRB: I think what you’re seeing in the United States at the moment is a big misfiring of a popular frustration, and I think there’s a very strong feeling now that our systems are being taken over by a small number of vested interests. Anyone with any objectivity would say that voting for Donald Trump was not the answer to the problem. But I think we know that this “draining of the swamp” idea was incredibly powerful and was a sad failing of those post-financial crash years of the Obama administration. As a journalist, I was becoming more and more concerned, as were so many of my colleagues, that these vested interests were driving government.
HPR: You’ve spoken about vested interests infiltrating government, but there is also a growing sense of disillusionment with the media. There is a strong argument that those same vested interests are having too much of a say over what gets printed and published. As a journalist, do you share that opinion?
CRB: Well, I think we were all getting worried from the 1980s about what was described as “dumbing down.” And dumbing down, with the trivialization of stories and pandering to the lowest common denominator in popular culture in the news cycle, was a big issue of debate two or three decades ago, and I think it was deliberate. I think that actually, it was to take people’s minds off of serious issues, distract them with celebrity nonsense, and tell them it didn’t matter if they didn’t exercise their brains in advance of casting their vote, whereas in fact the whole core of democracy is that we respect each other sufficiently to inform, instruct, educate and all the rest.
Again, it always boils down to passing laws that favor a minority segment of the population. So now, in Britain, the libel laws and laws to supposedly protect privacy, supposedly protect the mass of people, actually only protect the superrich.
It has become harder and harder for journalists to do stories. I had a legal threat yesterday from a major American law firm, threatening me over copyright and privacy invasion and suggesting that they would continue to harass me over unspecified defamation. This is what I get every day. But their client, someone I know through a third-party witness, has discussed hiring mafia people to kill me. So that’s the sort of power you’re facing. That’s where I found that my tiny little blog could have an impact. I’m someone with nothing to lose, because I don’t have corporate interests, I don’t have corporate allies – I’m not worried about whether I will get thrown out or whether my company gets thrown out of a country that we’ve criticized. All of these things affect the decisions of big media organizations. I print what they won’t. And then I get legal harassment and so forth.
HPR: Your investigative work has risen to fame for your role in uncovering the 1MDB heist. We’re a few years on now from the initial revelations of that scandal. Jho Low hasn’t been apprehended. Najib Razak looks to be back in the governing coalition. Has justice been done?
CRB: I’m starting to sound like a socialist, having been brought up in an extremely conservative milieu, but I think I represent how many people feel; that is, we’re all socialists except for a handful of people who think they run the planet. So, Najib has been absolutely caught up. The evidence is massive. The electorate has gotten rid of him, but as my lawyer says to me time and again, “Clare, you’ve got the truth on your side and all the facts, but they have all the money.” Najib has a 15-person legal team focused on delaying and delaying the court case, while he, through his stolen money and his contacts with the royalty, effectively bought over a sufficient number of Members of Parliament and undermined the elected government. A coup is underway.
So yes, he may very well end up in the driving seat. It’s a very stressful time for those of us who care about Malaysia. This was a coup that was orchestrated with the help of the sultans, who have a key constitutional role, unfortunately, in Malaysia. They’ve unconstitutionally put Parliament on hold until they can buy off all the MPs. And the sad thing is that when I look at everything that’s happening in Malaysia, and at the way the government defends itself against the indefensible, the way it issues legal action against everybody, abuses power, and all the rest, it’s one step away from what we’re watching in Washington D.C. at the moment, frankly. In fact, one former American ambassador to Malaysia emailed me not so long ago and said that he was glad he’d done his stint in Kuala Lumpur because it gave him so much insight into Washington today.
Najib has likewise been manipulating the situation in Washington. The Department of Justice has brought one of the most devastating cases against Goldman Sachs. Najib has been paying money hand-over-fist to lobbyists in America and to law firms. I’ve seen all sorts of leaked material that shows that they’ve been trying to get the right people into the State Department and the DOJ to let Najib off the hook, but more to the point, to let off Goldman Sachs. William Barr’s old law firm has now been hired by Goldman Sachs. We know that he has given himself a so-called ethical waiver so that he can oversee the 1MDB case involving Goldman Sachs. And that the whispers are already being put about to prepare the way that Goldman Sachs is going to come to an agreement as long as the DOJ agrees to drop criminal charges against them.
As far as Jho Low is concerned, once again, you’re looking at the global elite. Jho Low is being protected by China because China was willing to corruptly help Najib with his payments for the 1MDB scandal and fund his billion-dollar payments on the stolen money that still had to be paid. This was all negotiated with China in return for inflated contracts, and nearly put both Najib and his government and Malaysia firmly into the control of Chinese policy. It was all negotiated by Jho Low.
HPR: A source from Petro Saudi, a major partner of 1MDB, requested to be paid for his evidence while your investigation was unfolding. From a journalistic perspective, what are the ethical considerations that you were thinking about in that period? Is there a line you have to draw? And did you end up taking up his offer?
CRB: Well, it would be nice to have $2 million to spare, wouldn’t it? It certainly wasn’t going to be me paying. I think it was a record payment, and he did get it in the end. He had to do 18 months in jail first. Whistleblowers are always a bit of a “lost” person. They’re always difficult characters to deal with. They always think they can control more than they can, hoping to control the situation, hoping to get something out, rescuing their position, and they want money so often.
It’s a real minefield for a journalist. What you normally do is just cling on to sources like a limpet and try and work the information out of them. I spent six months on this. Xavier, the source, was in a very difficult position, and he rightly judged that his life was in danger. He needed to be able to float his way out of situations, to be able to buy tickets, buy himself a safe haven, and all those things.
I’ve never paid for a story. I’ve worked for organizations like the BBC and so this wasn’t something I was comfortable with. I knew that in the public interest, for such a massive story, it’s a tricky one. So I teamed up. I knew there was a major media baron of a finance newspaper in Malaysia who had developed a pressing interest, and Jho Low had libelled him seriously for having questioned the property of 1MDB. He promised Xavier that money. It took a long time to come through, but Xavier did get money in the end. They were only too happy to pass the material on to me, because none of them were going to dare to publish it. So I didn’t pay the money, but I did broker the deal.
Image Credit: Andrew Testa – The New York Times/Redux