In the days following Kraft’s arrest, pictures will emerge online of Yang posing with Trump himself, as well as numerous Trump friends, family, and allies, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Kellyanne Conway, Melania Trump, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican senator Rick Scott, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Sarah Palin, Fox News host Jesse Watters, pro-Trump Twitter personality Dan Bongino, actor Jon Voight, and former Trump administration adviser Sebastian Gorka.344
In April, the Palm Beach Post reports that there is “no trace of the money raised” from Trump’s Asian Pacific American Presidential Inaugural Gala. Corporate donors for the event included, per the Post, “an embattled Saipan-based casino later raided by the FBI … [and] a Guam-based shipyard and a handful of Pacific Island hotel operators, all of which benefited from a foreign labor bill signed into law by Trump” in early 2018.345
Congressional Democrats quickly call for criminal and counterintelligence investigations of Yang’s online claims that she has successfully sold access to Trump.346 An April 5, 2019, Miami Herald story will carry the startling headline, “Cindy Yang Helped Chinese Tech Stars Get $50K Photos with Trump. Who Paid?”347 By law, notes the newspaper, “Selling tickets to campaign fundraisers without disclosing the buyer to the Federal Election Commission is illegal. Selling tickets to foreign nationals, who are banned from donating to American political causes, would be an additional violation of U.S. law.”348
Meanwhile, U.S. media begins covering Erik Prince’s new overseas venture, the Hong Kong–based Frontier Services Group (FSG), which in early 2019—just weeks after Prince has stepped down as chairman, while retaining a 9 percent stake and deputy chairman position within the business—holds a “signing ceremony to build a training center in far western China, where the Chinese government has detained as many as a million Uighur Muslims in political camps.”349 Prince had reportedly secured, by 2014, support for FSG from China’s CITIC investment conglomerate, an entity holding assets of nearly $1 trillion.350 Tellingly, one of the chief investors in Prince’s FSG is, according to Fast Company, “Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Court”—in other words, MBZ.351
In a March 2019 interview with Al Jazeera, Prince denies participating in the construction in China of what the media outlet calls “basically concentration camps,” falsely saying that FSG has only contracted with the Chinese for “construction services” when, as Al Jazeera notes, the company’s own press release, which names Prince multiple times, advertises the creation of “training facilities” for the camps’ guards.352 In fact, as BuzzFeed News first reported in 2017, Prince “is setting up a private army for China,” a project similar to the one he had already executed in the United Arab Emirates and has been seeking to undertake in Afghanistan, he has also proposed such as project—with an idea for an “army of spies” controlled by Trump—in America itself.353
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When a March 2019 ProPublica report reveals that Elliott Broidy’s California offices were raided by federal agents in the summer of 2018—on suspicion of Broidy having committed “conspiracy, money laundering, and violations of the law governing covert lobbying on behalf of foreign officials”—the Trump-China connection once again enters the news, as it is Trump whom Broidy has primarily directed his bribery efforts at, if anyone, and China, along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, is noted by ProPublica as one of the foreign nations with whom Broidy is suspected of covertly dealing.354 One particularly telling email exchange between Nader and Broidy revealed as a result of the raid sees the former praising the latter for “how well you handle Chairman”—since revealed as a code name for Trump.355
That the Broidy case is in the Northern District of California underscores that cases involving Trump and collusion—in this case, collusive behavior undergirding potential bribery and money laundering charges—persist even after the termination of the special counsel’s investigation in D.C. in March. Indeed, the total number of federal and state entities still investigating Trump, his family, his aides, and his business associates after the end of the special counsel’s probe is twenty.356
Additional evidence that investigations into possible money laundering by Trump and his business will continue beyond the completion of the special counsel’s work appears in early April, when two congressional committees not only subpoena Deutsche Bank for Trump’s banking records but also issue subpoenas to eight other banks for information related to Russian money laundering.357
ANNOTATIONS
The same week, Qatar—an old U.S. ally left out of Trump’s new Middle East axis—announces that it may depart OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) due to its