Sam Corcos, the Treasury Department’s new chief information officer, is married to an investor with ties to Russian oligarchs, while funding healthcare ventures that could represent a serious conflict of interest
An anti-DOGE protest outside the US Treasury building in February(Hossein Fatemi / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP)
A DOGE associate who was embedded at the Department of Treasury now has a top job at the agency—but his family’s business ties could represent a major conflict of interest, The Nation has learned. Sam Corcos founded a start-up health technology company with Casey Means, whom President Trump recently tapped as his nominee for surgeon general, and now Corcos has been appointed interim chief information officer at Treasury. Yet Corcos has possibly failed to disclose his wife’s own extensive financial ties to the healthcare industry—as well as her business dealings with at least one Russian oligarch under investigation from American intelligence agents.
A highly placed source, who requested anonymity out of fear of professional reprisals, said that there were discussions inside the agency about naming Corcos to the position permanently later this year.
In February, Corcos filled out a mandatory new entrant public financial disclosure report that requires new government hires to disclose a spouse’s assets and income over $1,000. Corcos left the section for his wife, Varvara Russkova Corcos, blank, but Russkova Corcos has spent the last few years presenting herself as the managing partner of a venture capital firm that invests in health technology companies. She continues to keep that job title on her LinkedIn profile and was commenting as an active investor on LinkedIn as recently as one month ago. Two weeks ago, Corcos filed an amendment to his disclosure, adding an investment his wife holds for a health start-up that is funded by the Department of Defense.
Russkova Corcos previously worked for a sanctioned Russian oligarch named Suleyman Kerimov, and after Treasury officials blocked the trust funding his investments because of his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, she went on to create her own venture capital firm. Immediately before she formed that company, she was managing another Kremlin-linked Russian technology investor’s family office. That concern also scouted investment opportunities in health technology.
That Russian investor, Serg Bell, formerly known as Serguei Beloussov, was under investigation by US intelligence as recently as 2022, according to a report in The Washington Post. (Bell did not reply to an email asking him about Russkova Corcos.)
It’s impossible to know whether Russkova Corcos has additional unreported current income or assets that Corcos did not disclose. But it’s clear that her healthcare interests, together with the unknown nature of her investments and her ties to several Russian investors sanctioned or investigated by US agencies raise a potential red flag.
Kel McClanahan, the executive director of National Security Counselors, who represents clients now suing DOGE, argues that Corcos’s elevation doesn’t pass the smell test, even in a Trump administration that’s already steeped in corrupt conflicts of interest. “It is obviously a huge conflict of interest for someone with such significant monetary ties to a hostile foreign country to be any level of officer in the Treasury Department,” McClanahan said.
Russkova Corcos said in an e-mailed statement: “Before my husband entered government service, I exited all of my positions in the venture firm to avoid any potential conflicts and to comply with applicable ethics requirements. We recently realized that one small, residual position had been inadvertently omitted from the original disclosure. As soon as we became aware of the oversight, we filed an amended 278e to correct the record. Transparency and compliance are very important to us, and we’ve worked closely with ethics officials to ensure everything is in order.”
Corcos has not responded to requests for comment. E-mails to the Treasury Department, DOGE and the White House were not returned.
The amendment to Corcos’s disclosure lists Russkova Corcos’s holdings in a medical device company called Sana Health. The company’s website says, “The Department of Defense has granted Sana Health a $3.4 million grant to conduct a pivotal study on PTSD through the first quarter of 2026.”
Corcos detailed that his wife has realized a carried-interest return of 20 percent of the profits on a $150,000 investment in the company from a special-purpose vehicle fund, indicating she was likely a fund manager for several investors in the company.
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Corcos was named as one of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) representatives at the IRS and at the Treasury in early March, and promptly accessed a vast trove of sensitive private taxpayer information. Corcos also reportedly used his DOGE credential to plan to enlist a third-party vendor to launch a “hackathon” at the IRS to gain access to taxpayer data.
Corcos’s own company, Levels Health, the analytic platforms he founded with surgeon general nominee Casey Means, seeks to develop health profiles based on user metabolic data: “With more than 700 million glucose data points and hundreds of thousands of food logs, Levels leverages its massive data set to provide personalized insights to members, backed by our panel of expert advisors,” a 2024 press release from the company detailed. Josh Clemente, a former engineer at Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm, is also a Levels founder.
Levels received seed and Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm led by Marc Andreessen, a key MAGA ally in Silicon Valley. Levels has so far raised $55 million from its initial public funding rounds, but many of the company’s investors are unknown.
Russkova Corcos began seeking Silicon Valley investment for Russian start-ups as far back as 2010. By 2012, she was working for a Russian company called CardioWave financed by the Russian Venture Company, as she recounted in an article she wrote for a Russian tech website. She relocated to Boston from Moscow not long after the firm won the MassChallenge start-up accelerator competition, according to her résumé.
The Russian Venture Company would later be sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2022, and was one of several Russian technology initiatives that American intelligence tracked that year to determine whether it was was part of a covert operation to aid Russia in developing quantum and AI tech by funding a network of American start-ups, according to The Washington Post’s investigation.
Russkova Corcos then went on to work for Kerimov, becoming a venture partner to a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, GVA Capital. A later investigation found that GVA was moving Kerimov’s money into San Francisco–area businesses from a secretive DC trust. In April 2018, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on Kerimov; Russkova Corcos remained a GVA Capital partner until December 2018.
Kerimov has close ties to Putin—the European Union has said Kerimov, worth almost $10 billion, is part of Putin’s inner circle. The federal regulators who’d blocked Kerimov from tendering further investments in the United States were based at the Treasury Department, where Russkova Corcos’s husband is now a top official. Last year, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the IRS placed Citigroup under investigation for its handling of Kerimov’s assets.
While working with Kerimov, Russkova Corcos focused “on the confluence of AI, healthcare, and blockchain technology,” according to a 2019 interview.
Just three months after Russkova Corcos left GVA Capital, she began working for another suspected Kremlin-linked businessman, Serguei Beloussov, as investment director for his Luxembourg-based family office, Arici Lux Sarl. Beloussov, now based in Singapore, changed his name to Serg Bell in 2021.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russian investment in Silicon Valley became more controversial. Masha Bucher, another one of Bell’s venture capitalist protégées based in the United States, began to distance herself from the Russian investors she had earlier touted. Bucher was well known in Russia as a youthful devotee to Putin, even appearing in a documentary kissing him, according to reports.
Russkova Corcos’s LinkedIn profile says she was at Arici from 2019 until December 2020. In a biography for a June 2020 podcast she participated in, she described the investment work she did for Bell:
The family office is represented globally, investing primarily in the US/UK/EU. Investing in AI, health tech and sport tech. An expert in business development, previously a start-up founder (medical device). Passionate about shifting health care from sick care to actual healthcare and wellness, with the help of connected devices, precise diagnostics and predictive analytics.
Her LinkedIn profile also lists positions at two other Bell-founded firms: director of life science at Acronis and director of business development at Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, now Constructor Institute, between June 2019 and December 2020.
Russkova Corcos was close enough to Bell to be described in a UK lawsuit as operating as Bell’s direct representative to investment partners, handling his e-mail correspondence in April 2019..
In addition to founding Acronis, Bell has also launched a venture capital firm, Runa Capital. Putin’s digital development envoy, Dmitry Peskov, has stressed Bell’s strategic importance for Russian interests. “Acronis teams, even in private, do a lot for the country,” Peskov said in 2019. “The role, for example, of Serguei Beloussov, the leader of the Acronis team, in launching a large state-owned quantum computing system in Russia is not very public now, but it cannot be overestimated.”
In a June 2020 podcast, Russkova Corcos explained her work leading Bell’s family office investments. “We focus on health tech,” she said, adding that she is also “driving support of life science effort[s] for start-ups” for Acronis. She also mentions “a personal investment” she had in a company associated with one Acronis partnered with. Bell has denied that he maintains close ties to the Kremlin.
Three months after leaving her three positions at Bell’s companies, according to her résumé, Russkova Corcos began promoting her own new VC firm and herself as an investor in healthcare technology.
The online footprint for that VC company, ATTA Ventures, is minimal. There is no American corporate registration by that name, nor any with Russkova Corcos’s maiden or married names. The firm has not disclosed any investments or investors publicly.
A former employee of ATTA Ventures told The Nation that Russkova Corcos worked with investors she pulled from her network, mostly from Asia and the United Arab Emirates, although their exact identities were “secret.”
Russkova Corcos continues to comment on LinkedIn as an active investor; the website for ATTA Ventures remains live, although not updated since it launched in 2021, and her ATTA Ventures e-mail address remains active.
If Corcos were to become a regular government employee, the normal protocol would be for Treasury’s ethics counsel to review his and his spouse’s financial holdings for any conflicts of interest. But Trump’s administration has dismantled many basic protections against foreign influence—one of US Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first moves was to disband the FBI task force that countered the influence of hostile foreign governments in American politics. So a DOGE official who has already commandeered vast tranches of sensitive Treasury data may well be on course to have the federal bureaucracy completely disregard an array of compromising financial data within his own family.
Jacqueline SweetJacqueline Sweet is an independent investigative journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Politico, and The Intercept.