Trump official charged in Capitol Riot has family ties to Argentina's Military Junta
A Trump administration official who’s been charged with playing a major role in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol had a history of praising a military dictatorship that seized power in a coup—and close family ties to that junta.
Federico “Freddie” Klein, 42, a former mid-level political appointee at the State Department who sits in jail awaiting a trial for his role in the riots, repeatedly praised the 1976-83 Argentine military junta while working at the State Department, according to three former colleagues.
“He had warm feelings about the Argentine junta. His father’s Argentine, and he expressed some frustration about how history remembers that brutal dictatorship,” one former State Department official who’d heard Klein praise the junta told VICE News.
It turns out that those views may run in the family.
Klein’s uncle Guillermo Walter Klein Jr., 84, was a senior economic official in the Argentine military junta that came to power in 1976.
While he pushed through financial deregulation - which resulted in a devastating 1981 debt crisis - the military and its allies were busy murdering as many as 30,000 Argentine students, trade union organizers and other dissidents.
The elder Klein has charges pending in Argentina over the 1977 murder of one his own top advisors, Juan Carlos Casariego de Bel, after Casariego objected to a $400 million payout for the nationalization of the bankrupt CIADE electric company - whose estimated book value was but $8 million.
One the chief shareholders in CIADE was his boss, Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz.
At: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7az8b/trump-official-charged-in-capitol-riot-has-family-ties-to-argentinas-military-junta
Guillermo Walter Klein, Deputy Economy Minister during the fascist Jorge Videla dictatorship and the architect of the "financial bicycle" debt bubble that derailed Argentina's economy in 1981.
Federico “Freddie” Klein - the State Department official arrested on March 4 after being identified from Capitol Hill assault footage - is his nephew, and was known for his staunch pro-dictatorship views.
Bob Cox, the former editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, told VICE News that he was “not a bit surprised” about his alleged involvement in the insurrection given his father’s and uncle’s politics.
“There is a connection of the belief that you use military force, if you can. That ran in the family,” he said.
