The Secret Service certainly has its hands full protecting President Donald Trump. And amid terror threats and assassination plots, we have a Cold War-style throwback: Russians allegedly concealed their control of a company selling sensitive forensic software to the U.S. government, including the Secret Service.
The Department of Justice has now taken down a tech CEO and a Russian national accused of facilitating that scheme.
It's another reminder that Cold War-style espionage concerns never really went away. As if America didn't have enough threats to worry about.
The Justice Department announced Wednesday that Lee Reiber, the 55-year-old CEO of Virginia-based Oxygen Forensics Inc., and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov, 52, were arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging them with conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Prosecutors allege the men concealed the company's Russian ownership and the fact that its software was developed in Russia while pursuing contracts with the U.S. government.
Reiber was arrested in Idaho and released on bond pending further proceedings. Davydov was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport before boarding a flight to Istanbul, and American authorities plan to seek his extradition. The DOJ points out that both men are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
The accusations themselves are incredible. According to the Justice Department, Reiber allegedly represented Oxygen Forensics as an independent American company with no foreign ownership or control. Prosecutors say the reality was very different: five Russian nationals, including Davydov, allegedly owned and controlled the company through a Cyprus-based holding company, while its software was developed in Russia.
That software is pretty serious stuff. Oxygen Forensics makes digital-forensics technology used to recover, preserve and analyze data from electronic devices. According to the criminal complaint, federal customers included components of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and the DHS Office of Inspector General, as well as the Department of War.
The Secret Service's National Computer Forensics Institute was also among the affected government entities. That should be a real wake-up call.
The Russian connections run even deeper. The five Russian owners also owned a Russian company previously known as Oxygen Software LLC and later MKO Systems LLC. According to the affidavit, that company's reported customers included Russia's FSB security service, the Russian Investigative Committee and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
However, there are currently no formal allegations that the Russian government was behind the operation.
Prosecutors allege the effort to obscure those connections intensified after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought expanded U.S. sanctions. Russian owners were removed from public corporate filings, but the complaint alleges they continued exercising substantial control behind the scenes, including making major company decisions, setting Reiber's compensation and retaining authority over bank accounts.
One internal message is particularly revealing. After a reporter began asking questions about the company's ownership in November 2023, Reiber allegedly warned Davydov and two other owners that the resulting coverage "could destroy this entire opportunity," referring to a pending Secret Service National Computer Forensics Institute contract. He allegedly added that the "current existence of this company hangs in the balance."
Prosecutors say Reiber certified in 2024 that no foreign person controlled company decisions and told DHS personnel as recently as March 2026 that no Russian was involved in developing the software and nobody in Russia had access to its build environment.
That does not appear to be the case. The filing claims that the software was written and managed by a Russian development team under Davydov in a cloud environment administered by one of the Russian owners.
The major issue thus far is that the defendants deceived federal agencies about who actually owned, controlled and developed the technology those agencies were buying. That alone is a serious counterintelligence concern when one of the customers is the agency responsible for protecting the president.
Susan Crabtree, who writes for RealClearPolitics, recalled another similar incident worth recounting.
🚨🚨Another Biden-Era Secret Service Scandal exposed:
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) September 24, 2026
Sinister network of Russian agents busted in Cold War-style plot to infiltrate the U.S. Secret Service. h/t @NYPost.
It reminds me of the Russian honeypot at the U.S. embassy in Moscow that @dbongino and current Secret… pic.twitter.com/qtFY74erJo
Her post is worth citing at length:
It reminds me of the Russian honeypot at the U.S. embassy in Moscow that @dbongino and current Secret Service Director Sean Curran tried to report when they were stationed there together. But, according to Bongino, instead of investigating it, Secret Service headquarters back in Washington told them to can it -- keep their mouths shut.
More than 14 years later, U.S. authorities found out the woman was a spy (surprise, surprise) and publicly outed her.
The Secret Service covered it up, according to my sources, allowing a senior Secret Service agent who allegedly failed an inquisition about his months-long sexual relationship with the spy to retire without any serious disciplinary actions or repercussions.
This latest news is another harsh indictment of the Biden-era Secret Service.
An American tech CEO allegedly helped Russian nationals hide their ownership of a digital forensics company so it could land lucrative US government contracts — including a deal with the Secret Service.
The Secret Service-operated institute ultimately awarded Oxygen a five-year contract for its Russian-developed software in September 2024...
That was two months after the Butler assassination attempt on President Trump when the Secret Service was being run by then-Acting Director Ron Rowe.
And the Secret Service hardly needs another security headache. The July 2024 assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania exposed a remarkable series of security failures.
A bipartisan Senate investigation found failures in planning, communications and coordination. A subsequent final report from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul found that the Secret Service denied multiple requests for additional resources during the campaign, failed to communicate crucial information about the suspicious gunman to Trump's protective detail, and failed to adequately share pertinent threat intelligence.
Trump was wounded, Corey Comperatore was killed and two other rally attendees were injured. James Copenhaver, who was also shot at the rally, died in Pittsburgh on Thursday at age 76.
Two months later, another man was arrested after an apparent assassination attempt at Trump's golf club in West Palm Beach.
The threats against the president, unfortunately, are not going away. One of the most surprising developments of the second Trump presidency is that the world is still at war. Many America First supporters expected a less interventionist foreign policy and an end to conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war, which instead continues to poison relations between Washington and Moscow.
Although the Justice Department has charged the defendants with fraud rather than alleging that Moscow directed an espionage operation, the case nevertheless shows why Russian access to sensitive American government technology remains a serious risk.
When Washington and Moscow remain locked in an adversarial relationship, including through America's support for Ukraine, the risk posed by intelligence operations, cyberattacks and other forms of retaliation escalate proportionally.
Russia and the United States have a long way to go before normalized relations return. Until then, Washington would be foolish to treat the counterintelligence risks of the old Cold War as ancient history. This criminal case is a sobering reminder of that.
