Former top Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy pleads guilty to foreign lobbying charge
Elliott Broidy, a top fundraiser for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and, at the time, the Republican National Committee, pleaded guilty Tuesday to a single charge of conspiring to serve as an unregistered foreign agent.
He faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine and has agreed to forfeit $6.6 million he was paid for his work. His next hearing is scheduled for Feb. 12, 2021.
The charge is related to his efforts to arrange meetings with top U.S. officials to help quash a U.S. investigation into the 1MDB Malaysian embezzlement scheme and to push for the deportation of Chinese dissident Guo Wengui. Broidy agreed Tuesday that he acted as a foreign agent in his efforts.
Federal prosecutors said in the hearing that additional charges could be forthcoming. Broidy will be able to await sentencing from his home in Beverly Hills and is able to travel within the United States with permission from the government. At the request of his lawyers, and with no opposition from federal prosecutors, Broidy will keep his passport and can file requests with the court to travel internationally.
“Mr. Broidy has business interests outside of the United States that require him to travel,” said one of Broidy’s attorneys.
It isn’t clear what the other potential forthcoming charges could entail. Broidy’s work to help politicians in other countries, including Romania, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, aren’t part of the indictment. McClatchy first reported in February 2018 that Broidy had invited two powerful Romanian politicians to President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, for which Broidy had been a top fundraiser. He subsequently sought a lucrative defense contract in Romania for the Virginia defense contractor, Circinus, he had quietly acquired in 2015. He then sought to use an August 2017 trip to Romania by then-House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, a California Republican, to bolster his company’s prospects in the country and benefit his political allies in Romania.
Broidy’s company didn’t succeed in winning a major contract in Romania, but it was more successful in the Middle East, where Circinus was awarded a $600 million intelligence contract by the United Arab Emirates in late 2017, according to the Associated Press.
After McClatchy reported on Broidy’s efforts in February 2018, a number of news outlets, including McClatchy, began to receive and report on anonymous emails containing hacked messages and documents showing Broidy’s various foreign efforts. Broidy has claimed that Qatar was behind the hacking of his emails and has brought suit against Qatar and several foreign agents and technology companies allegedly connected to the effort to obtain and disseminate the information. The suit against Qatar and some of its agents and a technology consultant was dismissed but is now on appeal. The other cases are all still active.
Broidy also cooperated with prosecutors during his last political scandal. In 2009, Broidy pleaded guilty in New York for his role in a pension pay-to-play scheme, admitting he had doled out nearly $1 million in favors to New York state pension officials in return for their $250 million investment in Markstone Capital, the Israel-focused investment fund he co-founded.
He and his firm each paid $18 million in fines in New York, and state and federal investigations involving Markstone contributed to the conviction of former New York comptroller Alan Hevesi and the former head of California’s pension system, Fred Buenrostro.
Broidy’s cooperation kept him out of jail, and his charges were downgraded to a misdemeanor.
Broidy returned to the inner sanctum of Republican fundraising circles over the course of the 2016 presidential election, first backing Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina, and co-hosting a March 2015 fundraiser for Graham’s exploratory presidential campaign following Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address to Congress. After Graham left the race, Broidy backed Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and then Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, co-hosting a last-ditch April 2016 New York fundraiser weeks before Cruz left the race.
Finally, he signed on to raise funds for the Trump Victory Committee in May 2016, helping the committee bring in $108 million for Trump and the Republican National Committee. He served as a finance vice chair for Trump’s inaugural committee and was named a deputy finance chair for the RNC in April 2017.
He resigned from his position at the RNC a year later, after reports surfaced that he had arranged a payment through fellow RNC fundraiser Michael Cohen of $1.6 million to a former Playboy Playmate he had impregnated after she said she was going to have an abortion.
