Harvey Weinstein’s hiring of Black Cube, a private intelligence agency run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies, became a key topic on an otherwise subdued day at his rape trial in New York.

The trial is likely to heat back up Friday when prosecutors call Jessica Mann to the witness stand. Mann, a hairdresser and former actress, is one of two women whose allegations against Weinstein form the basis of the criminal case against him. She alleges that Weinstein raped her in her hotel room in 2013.

Black Cube was retained by Weinstein via his law firm, Boies Schiller. According to reporting by the New Yorker and others, agency investigators reportedly adopted false identities in order to obtain information about Weinstein’s accusers, among them Rose McGowan and Annabella Sciorra. The role of Black Cube, once it was revealed two years ago, aroused enough suspicion that federal prosecutors looked into charging Weinstein in 2018.

Dev Sen, a corporate attorney from Boies Schiller, gave brief testimony on Thursday, confirming that the firm had hired Black Cube at Weinstein’s behest.

Bernie Sanders’s recent rise in the polls has elicited an entirely predictable reaction from all the usual suspects who make up America’s op-ed pages. But, personally offended as the chatterati are, there are signs that the prospect of a Sanders victory in the Democratic primary contest is awakening an altogether more vicious beast that’s long been in the Vermont senator’s crosshairs.

This week, NBC, the Associated Press, and Politico all reported on the emerging anxiety within elite Democratic circles about Sanders’s ascent in the polls and nascent efforts by operatives to arrest his momentum. As journalist Andrew Perez noted, all three reports cited one Matt Bennett, cofounder of the organization Third Way, who issued boilerplate warnings about the supposed dangers of a Sanders nomination. In a pattern that is almost certain to be repeated in the coming weeks and months, Bennett’s intervention was framed as an earnest expression of concern by a moderate Democrat mindful of taking what he believes to be a major political risk.

But it was actually something else, given Bennett’s job at a self-identified “think tank” that has received extensive contributions from corporate patrons, including health insurance company Humana and Koch Industries. Washington is packed with groups like Third Way and others in the same mold, the function of which is to provide a layer of institutional sediment separating corporate interests from the mouthpieces they fund to advance their interests. In the gelatinous mass of lobbyists, megadonors, corporate spokespeople, and political operatives resulting from this arrangement, it can often be difficult to tell where the private sector ends and the public sector or party apparatus begins.

Nonetheless, Bennett’s anguished intervention is a telltale sign that panic about Sanders is starting to spill outside the op-ed pages and into the boardrooms of corporate interests — from pharmaceutical companies to Wall Street investment firms — who have an immediate pecuniary interest in opposing his program. If Sanders’s performance in the first round of primaries and caucuses matches current expectations, big business will undoubtedly intensify its efforts to stop him — likely aided, as in this case, by centrist Democrat operatives who sit at the noxious juncture of party politics and corporate agitprop.