for three decades. He was a back-channel negotiator with Syria during the Clinton administration, reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates [Mohammed bin Zayed], and last year [2017] was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House.”54 Calling Nader a “focus” of the Mueller investigation, the Times notes that—despite Nader being a regular sight at the White House post-inauguration—federal investigators’ attention is on whether the Emiratis directed money to support Trump during the presidential campaign, a form of collusion that would violate federal law as an illegal campaign donation and could also reveal, if pursued, any covert intelligence-gathering and domestic psy-ops work Joel Zamel’s Psy-Group may have done for Trump pre-election on the Emiratis’ dime.55 The Times report goes still further, however, noting that “Nader’s role in White House policymaking” is also the subject of a federal criminal investigation. Implicit in this revelation is that Mueller is investigating the possibility that Nader, the UAE, or both have attempted to bribe Trump to alter his foreign policy—bribery being a form of “collusion” in lay terms and, more important, both a federal felony and an impeachable offense under the U.S. Constitution.56 Even worse for Trump, Nader’s new status as a cooperating witness for the special counsel’s office means, according to the Times, that Mueller is likely investigating how money from not just one but “multiple countries” is influencing policymaking at both the White House and elsewhere in Washington “during the Trump era.”57
The March 3, 2018, revelation that Nader is cooperating with Mueller makes Elliott Broidy—whom Nader used as one of several intermediaries in dealing with Trump, and who is, as of March 2018, still the Trump-appointed deputy finance chair at the Republican National Committee—a potential liability for the president. Less than six weeks later, a sudden event removes Broidy from Trump’s political orbit altogether: Broidy is forced to step down from his role at the RNC after it is revealed that he had an affair with a woman, Shera Bechard, who became pregnant, and that Broidy used Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, to pay her hush money.58 Cohen, Broidy’s co-chair on the Republican National Committee finance committee, is by this time himself under investigation for the hush money pass-through entity he had created for Trump during the presidential campaign—Essential Consultants, LLC—on the grounds of, as later recounted in the Mueller Report, “evidence that it received funds from Russian-backed entities.”59
It is unclear who told the Wall Street Journal about what Elliott Broidy had done and was continuing to do with respect to payoffs to a former mistress. In breaking the story that quickly ends Broidy’s tenure with the Republican Party, the Journal merely quotes “people familiar with the matter” who have suddenly decided to disclose what they know.60 It is likewise not clear who, if anyone—besides Broidy, Bechard, and Trump attorney Michael Cohen—knew of the payoffs. Given that the revelation of the payments causes Broidy to stop making them, it would seem Bechard had little to gain from disclosing the arrangement. Indeed, through her attorney Bechard will release the following statement after news breaks of her hush money contract with the top Republican operative: “Ms. Bechard is deeply distressed that someone has revealed information regarding her and Elliott Broidy.”61 As the Wall Street Journal will note at the time, “The nondisclosure agreement involving Mr. Broidy [and Bechard] resembles an October 2016 pact in which Mr. Cohen agreed to pay $130,000 to adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford to prevent her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006.”62 Broidy even uses the same fake name (“David Dennison”) as Trump did in his contract with Clifford.63
In 2018, additional allegations involving the Broidy-Bechard relationship will become public through the release of portions of Bechard’s legal filings contesting Broidy’s termination of their nondisclosure agreement. According to the filings, the five-year relationship between the married Broidy and the two-time Playboy centerfold began in 2013, and early in the relationship Broidy told her he loved her and promised to support her financially.64 By 2016, he had become “increasingly violent” and demanded that Bechard get liposuction to lose weight.65 According to Bechard’s allegations, Broidy refused to wear a condom and habitually pushed her to drink to excess to make her “more compliant.”66 When Bechard became pregnant, the lawsuit alleges, Broidy demanded she get an abortion and kept her pregnancy a tightly held secret.67 Finally, Bechard’s lawsuit alleges that she was afraid of Broidy, as he owned a gun and had