Elliott Broidy
Stefanie Keenan | Getty Images
Elliott Broidy, a formerly influential campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump and the Republican party, was charged Thursday by federal authorities with violating a foreign lobbying law.
Broidy was charged in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., with an instrument known as as a criminal information, which is typically used when a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.
The charging document says Broidy agreed to lobby the Trump administration and the Justice Department to drop or favorably resolve the investigation of a foreign national for his role in the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the Malaysia state development fund, known as 1MDB.
1MDB has been mired in legal probes for several years, with investigations into money laundering and other illegal activities.
Broidy and Nickie Lum Davis, another person involved in the case, failed to disclose to the Trump administration or to the Justice Department that he was acting on behalf of the foreign national, the court filing Thursday said.
Davis, an American consultant, pleaded guilty in August to one count of violating the foreign lobbying act as part of the Justice Department’s probe of involving 1MDB.
Both Broidy and Davis, along with someone identified in the filing as “Person A,” tried to arrage a meeting between Malaysia’s prime minister and Trump in September 2017 “to raise the resolution of the 1MDB matter with” Trump, according to the filing charging Broidy.
The document notes that Broidy, Davis and another unnamed person, identified only as Person A, “were unsuccessful in their efforts to have the 1MDB matters dropped or otherwise favorably resolved for Foreign National A.”
The filing also said that the trio also met with a minister of the People’s Republic of China in China and agreed that Broidy, assisted by the other two people, would lobby the Trump adminstration to return an unidentified Chinese national to China.
That Chinese national is understood to be the billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Kwok and Miles Guo, a critic of China’s government who has sought asylum in the United States.
Broidy is charged with conspiring to act as unregistered agent for a foreign principal.
Broidy resigned from his high-ranking role as the Republican National Committee’s deputy finance chairman in 2018, following bombshell revelations that he agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model he impregnated in an affair.
In 2009, Broidy pleaded guilty in New York state court to a misdemeanor charge related to his making nearly $1 million in gifts to state pension fund officials in exchange for Broidy’s private equity firm being handed $250 million in pension funds to manage.
The same investigation that snared Broidy in that case led to the conviction of former New York state comptroller Alan Hevesi.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
