The Life of the Party: Former FBI official Anthony Ferrante wins friends and influences people by throwing the best bashes in town

Ferrante, who now works for the private intelligence and lobbying firm FTI Consulting, hosts lavish affairs that attract White House and Pentagon officials, military officers, and journalists.

Ferrante’s clients at FTI have included Jeff Bezos, who hired him to find out who leaked his dick pix to the National Enquirer.

When a group of retired federal law enforcement officials gathered for an “alumni reunion” hosted by FTI Consulting last year, they were greeted by a contingent of former colleagues who work there, including the man who hired many of them: Anthony Ferrante, who prior to joining the firm seven years ago held a top position with the FBI and had a seat on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. Ferrante’s high public profile and proficience as a recruiter of government talent has helped FTI reel in clients such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, but when it comes to business development, an equally important asset of Ferrante’s is his reputation as one of official Washington’s premier party hosts. 

The guest lists at these affairs, which he has thrown at a multimillion dollar property he owned on Capitol Hill, the former Trump International Hotel, and at lavish venues in New York when he’s there for business, include senior White House and national security officials, their counterparts in foreign governments,  Fortune 500 executives, journalists, and potential FTI clients who are invariably awed by all the powerful people Ferrante knows. Among the attendees during the Biden era have been Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and top-echelon Ukrainian military officers in the US for official meetings and training.

Ferrante, who runs FTI’s Cybersecurity unit, joined the FBI in 2005 as a special agent in its New York Field Office. A decade later, he’d been promoted to Supervisory Special Agent and Director for Cyber Incident Response at the National Security Council, and later helped “coordinate the response to domestic and international threats,” including Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to an online bio.

The following year, Ferrante left the government for FTI, one of the world’s largest private intelligence, lobbying, and consulting firms, which is headquartered in Washington and has offices in 33 countries. FTI, whose largest shareholders include über-sleaze investment management company BlackRock, works for governments, multinational corporations, and hedge funds, and – like its main competitors – is a jobs pipeline for ex-government officials and lawmakers. 

Among the firm’s domestic lobbying clients are Northrop Grumman, whose account is handled by former Congressman Bud Cramer, who was a rubber stamp supporter of increased military spending from his perch at the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and his former Chief of Staff Jefferies Murray; Philip Morris International, which is represented by FTI’s Kyle Cormney, who previously was Legislative Director for Georgia Congressman Tom Price, who later served as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services for seven months before resigning for squandering wads of taxpayer money on private jet travel; and Dow Chemical, whose in-house help includes Russ Kelley, a former Chief Leadership Strategist for Congresswoman Linda Sánchez and Communications Specialist for Nancy Pelosi. FTI’s foreign lobbying clients include the government of Mexico, which it represented on bilateral free market trade agreements with the US prior to the election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, and the state oil company in East Timor.

The New York Times reported four years ago that when working for ExxonMobil, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and other oil and gas clients, FTI secretly established, staffed and ran industry front groups that were purportedly pro-fossil fuels “grassroots” organizations, such as Texans for Natural Gas, Citizens to Protect Pennsylvania Jobs, and New Mexicans for Economic Prosperity. As part of its efforts for the industry, FTI “monitored environmental activists online, and in one instance an employee created a fake Facebook persona — an imaginary, middle-aged Texas woman with a dog — to help keep tabs on protesters,” said the newspaper’s story. The phony Facebook account of “Susan McDonald,” who loved ice cream, the movie Annie, and shopping at her local farmers’ market, was the handiwork of an FTI unit called StratCom, short for Strategic Communications, which is led by Brian Kennedy, a former spokesman for GOP House Minority Leader John Boehner and subsequently for Transocean, the drilling contractor at the center of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A post at the Instagram account of FrackFeed, which was run by the “grassroots” group Texans for Natural Gas.

Since his arrival at FTI, Ferrante has steadily poached retiring FBI and Justice Department officials for the cybersecurity division he leads. His hires have included Bureau veterans such as Jordan Rae Kelly, who replaced him at the NSC, Brian Boetig, Assistant Director of International Operations Division, and Michael Driscoll, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York office

Ferrante has maintained a place in the public spotlight after moving to FTI. the private sector. CNN retained him as a National Security Analyst in 2019 and that same year Washington Life, a glossy magazine that covers the local social scene, put him on its annual “Tech 25 Innovators & Disruptors List,” describing him as a much “sought-after cyber risk management expert” who was never short of interesting ideas to talk about.

Screenshot of Ferrante during one of his regular appearances on CNN.

One of Ferrante’s reported clients at FTI was BuzzFeed, which court documents show paid him $4.1 million to verify allegations it published from the Russiagate dossier produced for Fusion GPS by its subcontractor Christopher Steele of Orbis Business Intelligence about Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev. Ferrante was retained by Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, BuzzFeed’s law firm, after Gubarev sued the outlet in 2017, and he dutifully delivered an expert report the following year that concluded the dossier’s key allegations concerning Gubarev were true, namely that his firm XBT was used by a Russian cyber espionage group to spearfish and steal the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, and for a malware attack on the Ukrainian power grid.

Bezos hired Ferrante to determine who hacked his iPhone and sold material extracted from it to the National Enquirer, which the tabloid used for an 11-page special edition in 2019 on the billionaire’s divorce. The most embarrassing contents were the former Amazon chieftain’s “dick pix” and text messages he sent his then-mistress Lauren Sanchez. In one message obtained by the Enquirer, which dubbed Bezos “the horn-dog billionaire,” he wrote, “I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon.”

Following the National Enquirer’s lengthy report on Bezos, the New York Post crowned him with the moniker of “horn-dog billionaire.”

Ferrante wrote a report that pointed a finger at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the culprit. According to his findings, Bezos received a WhatsApp message that contained malware from a phone number used by MBS. The Crown Prince’s motive was said to be his anger over coverage by the Bezos-owned Washington Post of the Kingdom’s alleged murder of the newspaper’s columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident.

The quality of Ferrante’s work – which he charges rates in the neighborhood of $1,000 an hour, court records show – has been sharply challenged. MBS vehemently denied having anything to do with hacking Bezos and a subsequent investigation by the Wall Street Journal identified the guilty party as Sanchez’s brother, who it reported had sold the material to the Enquirer. In the BuzzFeed case, Ferrante acknowledged he had no direct proof  that showed Gubarev had knowledge of the hackers’ alleged activities. The Russian businessman’s lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by a Florida court on the grounds that BuzzFeed’s stories were protected under the First Amendment, but it apologized for publishing Gubarev’s name, redacted it from its online stories, and issued a joint statement with him that labeled the dossier’s claims about him as “unsupported by publicly available evidence.”

While his work has been called into question, Ferrante’s unerring aptitude as a party planner for gala affairs attended by a Who’s Who of Washington power brokers is universally recognized. The most common venue for his parties was the 5-bedroom, 7- bathroom house he bought for $3.9 million in 2019, two years after leaving the FBI for FTI, half of which he put down in cash, property records show. The property is located a few blocks away from the Supreme Court and near the home of Steve Bannon, President Trump’s first White House's chief strategist. 

When hosting parties, Ferrante, who one source described as Washington’s “best dressed ex-fed,” was elegantly attired in bright pink cashmere, a velvet jacket, a gold-and-silver brocade embroidered blazer, or similarly striking garb. If he saw guests standing alone, he’d immediately escort them to meet an attendee he thought would make for a perfect conversational match. 

The parties in Washington were organized at different levels depending on who was on the guestlist. The fanciest were held for smaller gatherings of the city’s most influential, privacy-minded political and national security leaders; the most humble were big bashes that well known players also attended, but were aimed at a crowd that wasn’t as uniformly affluent of high-ranking. 

Even the latter affairs for commoners were staffed by uniformed help that poured top shelf spirits from a full bar and served food of the same quality. The lobster rolls were recalled with affection by one source, while another had particularly powerful memories of the tuna tartare and miniature lamb chops. In addition to Pentagon chief Austin, guests at Ferrante’s 2021 house parties included FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate and Justice Department Senior Advisor Marc Raimondi, who previously served on the NSC under Trump and as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for Obama.

I wouldn’t have pegged Pentagon Secretary Lloyd Austin, seen here in his official portrait, as a party animal, but apparently I was wrong.

After he sold the property later that year – for $1.4 million more than he paid for it – Ferrante decamped to the Navy Yard neighborhood, and moved the parties to the former Trump Hotel, which now operates as a Waldorf Astoria. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta was one of numerous Biden administration officials on hand for those gatherings.

Before leaving the FBI, Ferrante founded and became co-director of the Master’s of Science in Cybersecurity Program at Fordham University in New York City. He also established an affiliated annual International Conference on Cyber Security that Fordham and the FBI co-sponsor. 

Panelists at the 2024 event, which was held in January, included FBI Director Chris Wray and NSA Director General Paul Nakasone, who discussed “the possibility of misinformation leading to the chaos around the US election. The guestlist for the conference in 2022 featured leaders from every major US national security agency and legendary historical figures such as retired FBI Special Agent John Anticev of the FBI-New York Police Department Joint Terrorist Task Force, who is best known for being one of the very earliest officials at the Bureau to point to the danger posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

FTI sponsored an After Party during the 2022 event that Ferrante hosted, naturally, and which was so ostentatious that his own extravagant gatherings paled in comparison. The party was held at the Ascent Lounge on the fourth floor of 10 Columbus Circle, which has floor-to-ceiling windows that provide a spectacular view of Central Park.

The glitzy get-together was described as “a celebration for supporters of war against Russia,”one person who attended the gathering told me. There was additionally a sizable contingent of visiting senior Ukrainian military officers and Ministry of Defense officials who had roles in planning military operations against Russian troops. The Ukrainians, who traveled to the US to meet their US counterparts, included a group of cyber warfare practitioners who received Pentagon-financed training during their visit.

There was a heavy security presence at the event and a squadron of FBI agents were assigned to shadow the Ukrainians. So many top military officials from the US and Ukraine were in attendance that a successful terrorist attack or natural disaster could have temporarily crippled Kiev’s ability to conduct the war with Moscow, one person who was on hand told me.

In addition to cultivating potential FTI clients and maintaining warm relationships with powerful figures in official Washington, Ferrante used the parties to build his media network, Hence, a source who attended multiple affairs told me, he invited national security reporters at major TV and print outlets he was friendly with or hoped to become friendly with, especially reporters who cover the FBI and cybersecurity. 

The gatherings were successful in all those regards, which isn’t surprising because in Washington, power, money, and access are all aphrodisiacs, and Ferrante is a potential route to all three.