The Chairman of Trump‘s 2017 Inaugural Fund has been arrested for illegal foreign lobbying.

Thomas Barrack Arrested For Illegal Foreign Lobbying

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NBC’s Pete Williams reported:

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This is about Thomas Barrack, a long-time friend of the president and as you said was chairman of the inaugural fund. The charges relate to that. For more than a year, from if April of 2016 through September of 2017 Barrick was acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Lobbying the United States on behalf of the government of the United Arab Emirates, the UAE, without telling the federal government that that’s what he was doing.

He was arrested this morning along with a man from Aspen, Colorado, named Matthew Grimes who is 27 years old. — 27 years old. And there is a UAE official also charged who remains at large. Barrack will appear in court this afternoon. What the prosecutors say is that Barrack continued to advise the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration on matters involving the Middle East. Drafted language to include in a presidential speech about energy policy. Met in December of 2016 with the UAE officials. And said basically give us your wish list. What is it that you want American foreign policy to do?

And then after being confronted about all two years ago by the FBI according to federal prosecutors, Barrack made several false statements and denied he ever received any request from the official in the United Arab Emirates to act on behalf of the UAE. These are all charges connected to failing to disclose foreign lobbying. 

Trump’s Friends Were Selling American Foreign Policy

These charges should sound familiar because what Barrack was doing was similar to both what Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani were doing. Among Paul Manafort‘s many crimes, he was also operating as an illegal foreign lobbyist.

People all around Trump were selling US foreign policy, but they could not have been the only ones.

Attention should be paid to Trump and his own family because they never distanced themselves from their business interests and used the White House for personal financial gain.

Donald Trump wants the American people to believe that he has done nothing wrong, yet he is the only former president whose old friends all seem to end up criminally charged or in prison.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association