Zacharia's Mining Board Role Was Never Real, WIRED Finds — SkimNews
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- NRED Intelligent Mining (formerly NovaRed Mining), a Vancouver-based copper-and-gold exploration company, issued a June 24 press release claiming Zacharia had joined its advisory board alongside Kristi Noem — but Zacharia told WIRED "That was fake" and said she never worked there.
- Sam Amsterdam, whose brother is listed on NRED's management page, said the release "was not approved by Ms. Zacharia and was issued without her consent," yet it remained live on the company's website as of last Friday in an archived version listing her as management as recently as July.
- Valentin Saitarli, NRED's CTO and incoming CEO, confirmed discussions of a Zacharia role "never materialized," comparing it to "signing up for a gym but never actually going for a workout," and described the company's vision as going "full robots and AI."
- NovaRed spent months stacking its advisory board with figures disconnected from mining — including retired Navy Cmdr. Phil Ehr (a Democrat running for Congress in Florida), UAE royal-family adviser Gregory Fedun, and HBO's Lee Caplin — while holding just $65,689 in cash as of January with no revenue, per The Globe and Mail; Ehr resigned shortly after Noem joined.
- NRED announced earlier this month it was abandoning its Wilmac Copper-Gold Project to focus all resources on commercializing "MetalCore," its AI-assisted mineral exploration platform.
- Zacharia was fired five days into her tenure as White House press secretary; her résumé already included an admitted failure to pass the California bar and a prior role as a Beachbody MLM affiliate marketer, also previously reported by WIRED.
- Noem did not respond to requests for comment; her appointment to NovaRed's board had earlier drawn Canadian outrage over her past statements calling Canada the "51st state."
Why it matters: The episode exposes how a thinly capitalized Vancouver junior miner ($65,689 cash, no revenue) used unverified advisory board announcements — including a sitting DHS secretary and a future White House press secretary — to manufacture credibility ahead of a pivot into AI mineral exploration. For investors and Canadian regulators, the gap between NRED's press releases and its actual roster reveals how easily name-dropped political figures can be deployed to lend legitimacy to speculative ventures.
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