ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A Lebanese-American businessman who worked to advance Saudi Arabia’s agenda to the Trump administration and who later provided grand jury testimony to special counsel Robert Mueller has been arrested on charges of transporting a dozen images of child pornography and bestiality.
Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia announced that George Nader, 60, was arrested Monday morning at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The charges were initially filed in April 2018 but were not made public until his arrest.
Nader’s name shows up more than 100 times in Mueller’s recently released report. His testimony to the grand jury came after he attended a December 2016 meeting at New York’s Trump Tower with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, former chief strategist Steve Bannon and Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
A second meeting occurred a month later in the Indian Ocean archipelago of Seychelles and involved Nader, bin Zayed, former Blackwater boss Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian banker close to President Vladimir Putin.
In April 2017 Nader, working as an adviser to the United Arab Emirates, wired $2.5 million to a top Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada, The Associated Press reported last year.
An affidavit filed in support of the child porn charges against Nader says investigators found 12 separate videos after his phones were seized in January 2018 at Dulles International Airport in Virginia in connection with a search warrant.
The affidavit states that the search warrant, which remains under seal, was in connection with “another matter” unconnected to child pornography.
Joshua Stueve, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, declined to comment on whether the investigation of Nader spun off from Mueller’s investigation.
Calls to attorneys who represented Nader in connection with his grand jury testimony were not immediately returned Monday.
Nader pleaded guilty to an identical charge in Virginia in 1991.
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