DCI Group: The Atrocity Laundromat
One Washington lobbying firm. Three governments committing mass atrocities. Thirty years of dirty work.
By Mike Arnold
On the evening of October 6, 2025, hundreds of families gathered under the stars to light candles and celebrate a Buddhist holy day. A motorized glider appeared overhead and dropped two bombs into the crowd. Twenty-four people were killed, including three children. The government that ordered the attack publicly markets itself as the protector of Buddhism.
A government elsewhere sentences seven journalists to prison for exposing corruption — then bans the human rights monitors who came to document it.
And a third government presides over the systematic massacre of Christians while it arms the killers, its army stands down, and its officials call the perpetrators “prodigal sons who deserve rehabilitation.”
What do these three governments have in common?
Aside from being murderous, corrupt, and totalitarian — they all employ the same Washington lobbying firm: DCI Group.
Born in the Tobacco Wars
DCI Group was founded in 1996 by three men who spent the decade before manufacturing fake public opinion for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco — an industry that knowingly killed its own customers and lied about it for fifty years.
Tom Synhorst, the firm’s chairman, was RJR’s field coordinator. He built what the industry called “smokers’ rights” campaigns — manufactured grassroots opposition to tobacco regulation, coast to coast. One journalist dubbed him “the Johnny Appleseed of Astroturf.”
Doug Goodyear ran Ramhurst Corporation — a front group that received $2.6 million from R.J. Reynolds to coordinate fake grassroots tobacco campaigns in all fifty states.
Tim Hyde was Senior Director of Public Issues at RJR from 1988 to 1997, overseeing every public relations campaign the tobacco industry ran. He left to help co-found DCI.
Three founders. Three tobacco operatives. One business model: make manufactured influence look like public opinion.
The Dirty Work Piles Up
From there, DCI’s client list reads like a tour of America’s least-admired industries.
Big Oil paid them millions. DCI launched an online magazine called Tech Central Station — funded by ExxonMobil — that published climate denial dressed as journalism. The Washington Monthly coined a word for it: “journo-lobbying.” DCI also ran a front group that commissioned a report falsely claiming one million jobs would be lost if climate legislation passed, then pushed it through Congress to kill the bill.
Big Pharma paid them too. DCI ran a campaign paying consultants to plant positive news stories about a controversial Medicare drug law — a bill so contentious it barely passed even after Republican leadership violated normal voting procedures to force it through.
Their campaign work has been just as sleazy, regardless of which side benefited. DCI partner Chris LaCivita served as strategic adviser to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — the smear campaign against John Kerry’s Vietnam record that was later broadly discredited and gave the English language a new word: swiftboating. Their affiliated companies took in more than $17 million from the Bush campaign and the Republican Party in 2004 alone.
In 2002, they took their first foreign client: Burma’s military junta. Paid $348,000 to draft press releases praising the generals’ drug control efforts and denouncing what DCI called “falsehoods” about rape and other abuses the regime was committing.
Same year, a DCI employee coordinated a scheme to jam Democratic get-out-the-vote phone lines on Election Day in New Hampshire. Two Republican operatives went to prison.
The pattern is simple. Whoever cuts the check, DCI cashes it — and builds whatever reality the client needs.
The FBI Is at the Door
The most serious allegation against DCI Group is still unresolved — and it goes well beyond sleazy campaign tactics.
According to a federal prosecutor’s affidavit filed in a UK extradition case, DCI Group allegedly commissioned a cyberespionage operation called “Fox Hunt” targeting more than 128 climate activists, scientists, and state attorneys general who were building lawsuits against ExxonMobil. The stolen documents were then leaked to media in a campaign that prosecutors said appeared “designed to undermine” state climate investigations. ExxonMobil’s lawyers used those leaked stories in court as part of their defense.
When the FBI interviewed the Israeli private investigator alleged to have arranged the hacking, he discussed his “connections with DCI” — his own words, in a sworn court statement. An anonymous source told the Wall Street Journal that current DCI managing partner Justin Peterson commissioned the operation.
DCI denies it. Peterson has not been charged. The investigation is ongoing.
Peterson is also the man who signed Nigeria’s $9 million contract. And Myanmar’s $3 million contract.
The Current Client Roster
Myanmar’s military junta has committed more than 500 documented massacres since seizing power in 2021. It bombs schools, hospitals, and displacement camps. It uses internationally banned cluster munitions. More than 3.6 million people have been displaced. More than 2,200 have died in junta custody — tortured by electrocution, burning, and starvation. Then it dropped bombs on a Buddhist festival. On July 31, 2025, DCI signed a $3 million annual contract to represent them. Justin Peterson signed it.
Azerbaijan jails journalists on fabricated charges, systematically tortures detainees, and bans human rights monitors. The Council of Europe’s own torture prevention committee publicly condemned it for an “unholy alliance” between police brutality, forced confessions, and planted evidence. In 2023, its military operation expelled the entire ethnic Armenian population of a region — more than 100,000 people. DCI lobbied for them.
Nigeria’s government presides over the systematic massacre of Christians across the Middle Belt and North while its army stands down and its officials arm the killers. DCI signed a $9 million contract to puff up this government and deny the genocide. Justin Peterson signed that one too.
Who They Hired
Roger Stone — the man Trump pardoned before he could serve a day of his 40-month prison sentence — filed a sworn statement with the Justice Department declaring he is working as a salaried consultant for DCI on the Nigeria account. His stated mission: help communicate Nigeria’s actions to protect Christians.
Stone had just been fired by a crypto fugitive for failing to deliver a presidential pardon. He signed with DCI for Nigeria within weeks. Now he’s turned on a former friend — Laura Loomer, who funded a school for displaced Nigerian Christian children and has worked publicly to expose the genocide Stone is being paid to deny. Loomer accused Stone of “lobbying with Somalia and Nigeria to represent Muslims and help them lie to the world about their slaughter of Christians.” Stone’s response: “I enjoy kicking the sh*t out of her. I made her and I can break her.”
This is what sleazy narrative war looks like.
That is the character of the man Nigeria hired to protect its image with the United States government.
A Newsmax columnist from Delray Beach registered as a foreign agent on the Nigeria account the same day as Stone.
That is the team Nigeria is paying $750,000 a month.
What They Filed With the Government
In an email blast sent to members of Congress, media figures, and influencers — filed as a public record with the United States Justice Department — DCI described the genocide survivors scheduled to testify at a congressional briefing this way:
“Such claims of genocide are a thinly veiled front for the political opponents of the Tinubu administration and adherents of separatist movements… parroting the same claims for their own political and financial gain.”
I want you to know who they’re talking about.
Meet Enoch Yohanna
Enoch Yohanna grew up in Ngoshe, in the Gwoza district of northeastern Nigeria. When Boko Haram came, they killed his father. Enoch survived the massacre, fled with nothing, and made it to a displacement camp outside Abuja. He has spent the years since teaching children, advocating for his community, and delivering babies — 54 of them — with no equipment and no pay. Camp bosses threatened to kill him for it. He kept going. He is now the IDP Community Liaison for Africa Arise International.
Enoch was one of the genocide survivors scheduled to testify at the congressional briefing attacked by DCI.
The Nigerian government calls displaced Christians like him “criminals” and “beggars.”
DCI Group — in an email blast to Congress, media, and influencers, filed with the United States Justice Department — calls Enoch and others like him a political front operation parroting claims for personal gain.
That is the injustice $750,000 a month buys.
That is what the heirs of Big Tobacco, the architects of swiftboating, the firm under FBI investigation for allegedly hacking climate scientists — that is what they do with front-line heroes like Enoch Yohanna. They slander him to Congress.
Thirty Years. Same Business.
DCI Group has never had a change of heart. They’ve had a change of clients.
Tobacco companies needed cover while people died of lung cancer. DCI built it. Big Oil needed climate science discredited. DCI obliged. Burma’s junta needed a friendlier face in Washington. DCI provided one. Now Nigeria’s genocide deniers need a survivor called a propagandist. DCI email blasted it and filed it with the Justice Department.
One man threads the whole needle. Doug Davenport has been at DCI since 2000. He didn’t just work there when DCI ran its first foreign atrocity account — he ran it. He personally oversaw the Burma military junta contract in 2002. When it became a scandal in 2008, he was forced to resign from the John McCain presidential campaign to prevent further embarrassment. Then he went back to DCI.
He is now the senior advisor on the Nigeria account.
His career began at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly — the same firm where Roger Stone cut his teeth. Davenport and Stone go back thirty years. They didn’t end up on the same Nigeria account by coincidence. They were always in the same business. The clients just keep changing.
Burma to Nigeria. Junta to genocide denial. Same man. Same firm. Twenty-three years apart.
The record is public. The FARA filings are searchable. The FBI investigation is ongoing. The massacres are documented. The bodies are real.
And Enoch Yohanna is still there.
They should be ashamed. But they are not. Shame doesn’t bill at $750,000 a month.
Rise.
#EarthShaker
Mike Arnold is the author of EPICENTER: Nigeria, Radical Islam, and the War for Global Order (#1 Amazon Bestseller) and founder of Africa Arise International.