Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a Trump administration adviser on intelligence issues who recently stepped down from two senior national security positions , previously helped her father secure at least $12 million from a Russian investment bank that cooperated with the Kremlin, leaked documents show.
Kennedy, a former CIA officer, was involved in the deal in 2009 and 2010 as head of an offshore corporation owned by her father. She was employed as a spy during those years, according to media reporting.
The documents show that as president of the British Virgin Islands-registered Helios Enterprises Limited, Kennedy was involved in an effort on behalf of her father, Hodson Thornber, to pressure a Moscow-based investment bank to fulfill a 2008 agreement to pay roughly $30 million for Helios’ shares in a large Ukrainian agricultural company. The Russian bank, Renaissance Capital, included former senior Russian intelligence officers in its top ranks.
Kennedy told ICIJ that she was appointed Helios’ president as she was preparing to leave government service, and in that position worked with her father to identify investments in consumer technology startups. She said that any involvement she had in the dispute with Renaissance Capital was “pro forma,” and that she “had no knowledge of or involvement in” the dispute or the business project in general.
“I lived in the United States the entire time I worked for Helios and never worked on any deals related to the farm business or Ukraine,” she wrote. “I’ve never met any of the people involved, nor ever visited Ukraine.”
She is also the daughter-in-law of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and managed his 2024 presidential campaign. In one podcast appearance, he called her “the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
Until recently, Kennedy had been serving simultaneously as a deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, associate director for intelligence for the Office of Management and Budget, and as a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. She resigned from her roles at ODNI and OMB, but plans to maintain her role on the advisory board, which provides independent advice on the effectiveness and legality of U.S. spy programs.
Thornber, a University of Chicago-trained economist, had worked as managing director of an arm of Renaissance Capital and guided the firm’s investment in the Ukraine venture. The $12 million received by Helios was Renaissance’s payment for roughly 40% of its shares. The documents do not provide a full accounting of what Renaissance paid for the remaining shares.
In an interview with ICIJ, Thornber said he was aware Kennedy was in the CIA while she was president of Helios, but that she did not discuss her work as an intelligence officer. He said that she “may have signed letters” related to the dispute with Renaissance Capital, but “I don’t think she was particularly deeply involved.”
Thornber declined to provide an exact figure for what he was paid by Renaissance Capital. “We had a contract, I enforced it, and they paid,” he said.
The documents come from the Paradise Papers, a collection of over 13 million documents originating from the law firm Appleby that formed the basis of a 2017 investigation by ICIJ and its partners.
The CIA declined to comment for this story, and it is unclear if the intelligence agency knew of Kennedy’s outside work. Renaissance Capital did not reply to a request for comment.
Kennedy has stridently opposed U.S. support for Ukraine.
In a 2024 post on X, she described the Biden administration’s backing for the country as part of a plot to control Ukrainian natural resources, saying hedge funds were “carving up rights to Ukraine’s fertile soil and vast natural resources” as a result of the Biden policy.
A March 2025 profile by RealClearPolitics portrayed her as cheering from her office across from the White House when Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of being disrespectful of the United States during a contentious Oval Office meeting.
In a post on X, Kennedy said that she was rejoining the private sector because she needed to keep her family “financially on track.” She also praised Trump as a “brilliant tactician and tough negotiator.”
Her involvement in the Renaissance Capital deal, reported here for the first time, was highly unusual for a CIA officer, said former intelligence officers.
“The intelligence community is particularly neuralgic about Russian individuals, Russian entities, any Russian nexus,” said Peter Schroeder, a former U.S. intelligence officer specializing in Russian security policy, speaking in general terms rather than about Kennedy’s work.
There is no evidence that the deal with Renaissance Capital played any role in Kennedy’s resignation from her positions within the Trump administration.
Founded in the mid-1990s, Renaissance Capital has long had links to the Kremlin. In 2007, bank executives secretly awarded a…
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