Reading Ken Klippenstein’s piece on Elliott Broidy is quite an experience. The criminal and unethical and, frankly, frightening behavior pours forth from the page at a relentless clip. While you’re looking at the article, please remember that until very recently, Elliott Broidy was a deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
He got that job because he was effective in raising money for Donald Trump’s campaign at a time when most bigwig Republican bundlers were keeping Trump at arm’s length. But this is a guy who was convicted in 2009 for “bribing a New York government official in a case involving state pension funds.” That was an indication that he wasn’t the kind of person you should employ or entrust with positions of responsibility.
The Klippenstein piece focuses on how Broidy’s company, Virginia-based Circinus LLC, has people armed with AR-15’s running around in Florida serving as private security forces without any permits. But that barely scratches the surface of what should concern us. Here’s one example:
In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that Broidy at one point discussed a deal in which he would seek to help get the Justice Department to drop its investigation into a Malaysian government-owned investment fund’s multibillion-dollar graft scandal. Broidy potentially stood to gain tens of millions of dollars in fees from one of the figures at the scandal’s center if he got the investigation dropped.
I wrote about that case in March.
Here are two more areas of concern:
Broidy resigned from the RNC last month after a report that he paid $1.6 million to a former Playboy model he had impregnated. Broidy also has close ties to United Arab Emirates adviser George Nader, who is now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
Paul Campos made an incredibly compelling case in New York magazine that Broidy is not actually the person who impregnated Playboy playmate Shera Bechard. He pointed the finger at Donald Trump and all I can say is that you should look at Campos’s argument because he convinced me that this is quite likely the truth of the matter.
As for George Nader, I’ve called him a legendary pervert whose fairly well known proclivities towards child pornography and pedophilia have somehow not prevented him from operating as a globetrotting dealmaker and Washington insider for decades. I would not be shocked if a lot of Trump, Cohen and Broidy’s problems originated with Nader after he was arrested and became a cooperating witness in Mueller’s probe.
Broidy’s main connection to him concerns business opportunities and security contracts in the United Arab Emirates.
A top fundraiser for US President Donald Trump received millions of dollars from a political adviser to the United Arab Emirates last April, just weeks before he began handing out a series of large political donations to US lawmakers considering legislation targeting Qatar, the UAE’s chief rival in the Persian Gulf, an Associated Press investigation has found.
George Nader, an adviser to the UAE who is now a witness in the US special counsel investigation into foreign meddling in American politics, wired USD 2.5 million to the Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
They said Nader paid the money to Broidy to bankroll an effort to persuade the US to take a hard line against Qatar, a long-time American ally but now a bitter adversary of the UAE.
A month after he received the money, Broidy sponsored a conference on Qatar’s alleged ties to Islamic extremism.
During the event, Republican Congressman Ed Royce of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he was introducing legislation that would brand Qatar as a terrorist-supporting state.
In July 2017, two months after Royce introduced the bill, Broidy gave the California congressman USD 5,400 in campaign gifts the maximum allowed by law.
You can choose what to be most worried about, whether it’s private armies operating domestically without permits or corrupting the Justice Department to cover up foreign financial crimes or corrupting politicians and directing the foreign policy legislation they introduce or bribing state officials in New York or selling access to the president and vice-president or having connections to a creep like George Nader and his nefarious wheelings and dealings, or potentially faking his paternity of a child in order to cover for the president’s infidelity and involvement in an abortion.
Again, until a few moments ago, this guy was a deputy finance chairman for the Republican National Committee. The same is true of Michael Cohen.
The swamp has never been more expansive or rancid.
