A top Trump fundraiser asked the FBI for help. Big mistake.

[Nevilledog]

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Clara Jeffery
@ClaraJeffery
And you thought Rudy and the Kraken were bad at legal stuff..... Great piece by @dfriedman33 and @DavidCornDC

A top Trump fundraiser asked the FBI for help. Big mistake.
Elliott Broidy hoped the feds would investigate a hack of his email. But they had other ideas.
motherjones.com
12:40 PM · Dec 16, 2020

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/a-top-trump-fundraiser-asked-the-fbi-for-help-big-mistake/

In October, Elliott Broidy, once a top fundraiser for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to illegally lobby the Trump administration for a fugitive financier and the president of Malaysia. The plea continued the descent of a controversial businessman and political operative who stepped down from a top Republican National Committee job in 2018 after the news broke that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million in hush money to a Playboy model whom he had impregnated during an extramarital affair.

Now there’s a new wrinkle to the Broidy case. He faces up to five years in prison in part because of what in retrospect seems to have been a dumb mistake. Broidy voluntarily gave the FBI emails from his and his wife’s accounts while seeking the bureau’s assistance in pursuing hackers who he claimed had stolen this material and leaked damaging details about his business dealings to the press. According to a just-unsealed ruling issued in June 2018 by Beryl Howell, the chief US District Judge in Washington, DC, nearly 1,400 pages of emails that Broidy provided to the FBI were subsequently used by the bureau in the investigation that led to Broidy’s guilty plea. Following a secretive legal process, Howell ruled that Broidy had surrendered the material to the FBI and after doing that—when the bureau wanted to exploit the documents for an investigation of Broidy himself—could no longer claim the information was covered by attorney-client privilege or spousal privilege.

A Broidy spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Here’s what happened. Broidy owns a company, Circinus, that sells what it calls “open-source” intelligence services to foreign governments. In 2017, while the firm pursued a contract with the United Arab Emirates, which it later landed, Broidy emerged as an outspoken critic of Qatar, a regional rival of the UAE. Broidy helped to finance conferences and opinion pieces attacking Qatar as a sponsor of terrorism. That criticism dovetailed with attacks on Qatar by the UAE and its close ally, Saudi Arabia, which resulted in those and other Gulf nations imposing a blockade on Qatar in June 2017.

In late December 2017, Broidy’s wife, Robin Rosenzweig, who is an attorney, was targeted by a phishing attack. The hackers gained access to her emails and to Broidy’s. A few months later, media reports based on Broidy’s emails began to appear in major publications. The emails seemed to implicate Broidy in efforts to leverage his access to the Trump administration on behalf of various foreign interests, including officials in the UAE, Romania, Angola, Malaysia, and China. The leaked material raised the question of whether Broidy had broken the law by failing to register as a foreign agent.

*snip*

[Walleye]

1. But his emails! These America first people sure love doing business with foreign countries

[Arne]

4. There is always the hidden servers as well.

You just know they are in some basement with a kid and a keyboard.
It's just like a bad movie, Die Hard Sucks.

[brush]

2. What a nest of vipers these republicans are.

There's a new revelation, not daily even, but hourly of the depths of their pit of vileness.

Another thread I was just on of a trump official pushing herd immunity. He said, "we want them infected."

[mr_lebowski]

3. Entitled fucker probably assumed he was protected by being GOP and known to Trump ...

[tanyev]

5. Thank goodness most of Trump's minions are as stupid as they are corrupt.