Akhmetshin was born in Jan 22, 1968 Kazan, Tatarstan. Akhmetshin served as a counterintelligence officer under the Soviet Union and, according to some U.S. officials, is suspected of "having ongoing ties to Russian Intelligence". According to his statements, from 1986 to 1988 Rinat Akhmetshin served as a draftee in a unit of the Soviet military that had responsibility for law enforcement issues as well as some counterintelligence matters. He moved to the United States in 1994. In 1998, he set up the Washington D.C. office of the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research to "help expand democracy and the rule of law in Eurasia". He has been tied to lobbying for political opposition to Kazakhstan's ruling president Nursultan Nazarbayev, efforts to discredit former member of Russia's parliament Ashot Egiazaryan who fled to the U.S., as well as major corporate disputes. In 2009, he obtained citizenship of the United States. In 2016 Akhmetshin told Politico: "Just because I was born in Russia doesn't mean I am an agent of Kremlin." In 2010, he submitted an op-ed to The Washington Times on behalf of Viktor Ivanov the director of Russia's anti-narcotic police.
Hacking incidents and smear campaign
According to the New York Times, Akhmetshin was accused of being involved in two hacking campaigns and reportedly had a web of Russian connections. In 2011, Akhmetshin was hired by Andrey Vavilov to mount a media campaign in order to derail Egiazaryan's application for asylum in the United States. Egiazaryan, a former State Duma member had fled Russia in 2010. According to his own testimony, Akhmetshin was paid "$70,000 or $80,000" in $100 bills. Akhmetshin pushed negative stories on Egiazaryan in the American and Russian press, and also helped manipulate internet search results to further promote the negative stories. Also in 2011, Akhmetshin was employed by an alliance of businessmen led by Dagestani politician Suleiman Kerimov, a financier close to Putin who was in a commercial and political dispute with competitor Egiazaryan. In early 2011 two of Egiazaryan's lawyers based in London received suspicious emails. The forensics experts they hired for analysis found that the emails contained spyware, and when they fed traceable documents into the spyware the documents were opened by computers registered at the Moscow office park of a company owned by Kerimov. Scotland Yard spent more than 18 months investigating the case but in 2013 concluded that they lacked sufficient evidence to bring charges. In court papers Akhmetshin stated that he was paid only by one businessman in the Kerimov alliance, but coordinated with Kerimov's team. In a lawsuit filed in July 2015 with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, it was alleged by International Mineral Resources that Akhmetshin had arranged the hacking of a mining company's private records. In court papers filed with the New York Supreme Court in November 2015, lawyers for IMR, a Kazakh mining company that alleged it had been hacked, accused Akhmetshin of hacking into two computer systems and stealing sensitive and confidential materials as part of an alleged black-ops smear campaign against IMR. Akhmetshin, who was hired as an expert by a US law firm, denied hacking or asking anyone else to hack into IMR. He said he gathered research for the firm by bartering information with journalists before he was fired because of his ties to another client, the former prime minister of Kazakhstan, who was then an opposition figure in exile. The hacking accusations were later dropped and the case, which was litigated in New York and Washington, was dismissed.
Political activities
In July 2016, an article in Radio Free Europe stated: "Barely registering in U.S. lobbying records, the 48-year-old Akhmetshin has been tied to efforts to bolster opponents of Kazakhstan's ruling regime, discredit a fugitive former member of Russia's parliament, and undermine a Russian-owned mining firm involved in a billion-dollar lawsuit with company information allegedly stolen by hackers."
In 2018 Akhmetshin sued Bill Browder in a federal court in Washington, D.C., accusing Browder of defamation for labeling him a spy or Russian intelligence asset. The case was dismissed in 2019 on jurisdictional grounds. Akhmetshin appealed the dismissal; as of January 2020 the appeal is still pending. On January 16, 2020, Akhmetshin founded a nonprofit in Washington called the Russian-American Anti-Defamation League.
