After a year of Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, the name George Nader seemed to drop into the story of the Trump campaign from somewhere out in left field. First pointed out as a go-between in arranging Erik Prince’s trip to the Seychelles Islands to meet representatives from the UAE, as well as a Russian oligarch, Nader turns out to have a wide range of connections. Some of those connections may have funneled millions of foreign funds not just into Trump’s campaign, but to a range of Republican candidates.
Nader was a frequent visitor at the Trump White House, often dropping in to chat with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, neither of whom were apparently upset by the time Nader spent in jail for sexual assault on ten minors or his multiple charges for importing child porn. Nader’s connections to the UAE are just part of what appears to be an astounding web of deals that tie Trump and Kushner into a joint Saudi-UAE plan to damage Qatar. But as it turns out, the well-connected Nader had connections that went into every aspect of the Trump campaign, transition and White House.
The meeting that Nader arranged for Prince—a Trump adviser, brother to Betsy DeVos, and owner of his own mercenary army—is suspected to have involved setting up a back channel for communications between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. On that trip, Prince met with Kremlin-connected banker Kirill Dmitriev. Dmitriev is the head of Russia’s $10 billion sovereign wealth fund. Prince at first tried to claim that this meeting was little more than a chance encounter in a hotel bar, but the meeting appears to have been both more planned, and more extensive than Prince admitted. Considering the interest that Mueller has displayed in how Russian oligarchs may have funneled money to the Trump campaign through the NRA, it seems the back channel that Nader and Prince were creating may have been for something other than just communication. But Nader’s connections to Russia don’t stop with Dmitriev.
Mr. Nader’s dealings with Russia date at least to 2012, when he helped broker a controversial $4.2 billion deal for the government of Iraq to buy Russian weapons. At the time, he was an informal adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, and he accompanied Mr. Maliki to Moscow in September 2012 to sign the arms deal at a meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Nader’s role in the deal was earlier reported by Al-Monitor.
Even though there were still 40,000 US troops in Iraq and the US had spent over $1 trillion on direct military costs in the country, George Nader brokered a deal to send billions from Iraq to the Russian military. Four years later, money may have come from Russia, possibly funneled through the NRA, to land in Trump’s campaign.
George Nader was on both ends of this arrangement. And now he’s cooperating with Robert Mueller.
That original deal that Nader brokered in Iraq was eventually canceled out of worries over corruption. It’s not clear if it was renegotiated. But it was far from the end of Nader’s attempts to bring the Middle East closer to Vladimir Putin.
Since then, according to people familiar with his travels, Mr. Nader has returned frequently to Russia on behalf of the Emirati government. He even had his picture taken with Mr. Putin, according to one person who has seen the photograph, although it is unclear when the picture was taken.
And it’s not just Trump who may have been the recipient of largess distributed through Nader.
A top fundraiser for 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 U.S. lawmakers considering legislation targeting Qatar, the UAE’s chief rival in the Persian Gulf, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Nader sent $2.5 million to Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy with instructions—use it to get US lawmakers to turn on Qatar, a tiny Middle Eastern state that hosts the largest US military base in the region.
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 $5,400 in campaign gifts — the maximum allowed by law. The donations were part of just under $600,000 that Broidy has given to GOP members of Congress and Republican political committees since he began the push for the legislation fingering Qatar, according to an AP analysis of campaign finance disclosure records.
Nader and Broidy appear to have formed a back channel—a financial back channel that brought Trump and other Republicans millions from the UAE, and possibly from Russia, so long as those Republicans delivered on the demands of foreign funders.
It’s not clear what is included in the redacted portion of Robert Mueller’s instructions from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, but hopefully it includes directions to roll up this whole insane web of foreign funds and domestic corruption.
