Top Trump fundraiser raided by FBI over shady foreign dealings

It looks like yet another person in Trump’s orbit is under investigation for possible criminal activity.

On Monday morning, ProPublica published details from a sealed search warrant showing federal investigators raided top Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy’s office last summer looking for evidence of conspiracy, money laundering, and illegal lobbying by foreign officials.

According to ProPublica, investigators raided Broidy’s Los Angeles office in the summer of 2018 looking for evidence that Broidy “attempted to cash in on his Trump White House connections in dealings with foreign officials.” The warrant tied Broidy to Malaysian financier Jho Low, who was indicted by the Justice Department in November 2018 on charges of bribery and money laundering.

In a court filing, the Justice Department alleges that “Individual No. 1,” widely believed to be Broidy, was paid to lobby the Trump administration to take it easy on Low.

In addition to Low, the warrant is looking for documents and records related to China, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and any of Broidy’s travel to the Middle East, ProPublica reports. Previous reporting by the New York Times has linked Broidy to shady foreign influence schemes.

In addition to donating more than $160,000 to the Republican National Committee (RNC), Broidy helped raise $108 million for a joint fundraising venture for the Trump campaign and the Republican Party in 2016.

Broidy played a high-profile role in Trump’s 2016 campaign, and was rewarded by Trump after the election with a job as a deputy finance chair of the RNC.

But Broidy abruptly resigned in April 2018 after the Wall Street Journal uncovered evidence that he secretly paid hush money to a former mistress in order to hide the affair. Trump’s longtime lawyer and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, who served as a deputy finance chair of the RNC alongside Broidy, had arranged the $1.6 million payments from Broidy to his former mistress, Playboy model Shera Bechard.

Cohen also arranged illegal hush money payments to Trump’s alleged mistress, Stormy Daniels, prior to the 2016 election.

Through his lawyers, Broidy has previously claimed to be innocent of allegations that he took money from or worked on behalf of foreign governments. ProPublica notes that Broidy has not been indicted for any crimes … yet.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.