The web with which the president has surrounded himself while in office is continuing to be illuminated by Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller. With charges against at one point four former Trump associates under his belt, Mueller has now secured the cooperation of yet another significant figure in the swamp in which Donald Trump has positioned himself.
According to The New York Times, Lebanese-American businessman George Nader is among the latest individuals to find themselves under scrutiny from Mueller’s team. Shortly after arriving at Washington Dulles International Airport in mid-January, intent on traveling to Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago resort to celebrate the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, Nader was served with search warrants and a grand jury subpoena.
Having at least some of his electronic devices seized, Nader has been subjected to repeated rounds of questioning in the weeks since mid-January, according to The Times.
One of the incidents that Mueller’s office is interested in Nader’s perspective on is a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that included, besides him, informal Trump adviser Erik Prince and Russian banker Kirill Dmitriev. According to insider accounts, Emirati officials believed Prince to be representing Trump and Dmitriev to be representing Russian president Vladimir Putin at that 2017 meeting, although the substance of the meeting has proven difficult to nail down.
Prince, who is the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, has insisted that he was not representing the Trump team at that meeting.
It’s worth noting, of course, that Trump associates don’t exactly have a great record when it comes to the truth. Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos have both, for instance, pleaded guilty to lying to authorities.
Dmitriev, for his part, runs a Russian state investment fund that seeks funds from foreign government sources to boost Russian infrastructure projects. The United Arab Emirates — which set up the meeting between Prince and Dmitriev — has been a major contributor to that fund, and Emirati officials have reportedly come to see its head as a “key conduit to the Russian government.”
Besides Nader’s take on these issues, the special counsel has reportedly also questioned him about meetings with Trump advisers including Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. Kushner has faced his own set of problems, seeing scrutiny over meetings he had with foreign interests before the inauguration turn into him losing his top secret security clearance.
That’s not even where the Trump-UAE issues end; Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the employer of George Nader, flaunted protocol and visited Trump Tower in early 2017.
Besides the aforementioned issues, Mueller is reportedly also looking into whether or not Nader helped facilitate a flow of Emirati cash into Trump political operations here in the U.S., which would be illegal.
Through all of this, the president continues to maintain that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt, even though Mueller seems to have stumbled into a house of horrors when taking on the task of investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Most recently, Trump tried yet again to cast the Russia investigation as just a partisan hit job.
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