house is unusual; in 2018, Politico will reveal that Nader’s lenient sentence was the result of an extraordinary arrangement between him and federal prosecutors.78 “The court proceedings [in 1991] were far from typical,” Politico writes. “While the charges were pending, Nader made at least five trips overseas with court permission: four to Beirut and one to Moscow. Prosecutors also agreed with the defense to put the entire case under seal ‘due to the extremely sensitive nature of Mr. Nader’s work in the Middle East,’ court records show. Later filings make clear that the trips and delays in the case were due to Nader’s involvement in negotiations to free U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon.”79 At the time, Nader’s attorneys represented in filings to the court that “no one else” could do the negotiations in the Middle East that Nader was then doing, and that his work was therefore “essential” to America’s interests.80 Oddly, the federal prosecutors working on Nader’s case told the court that the defendant’s overseas work was even “opaque to the State Department and other officials.”81
Nader’s conviction and brief halfway house stint appear to have had no effect on the operation of his newspaper. Indeed, though prison records document that Nader completed a six-month stint in a Baltimore halfway house in June 1992, a video “aired on C-SPAN in March 1992 shows him [Nader] hosting a discussion in his capacity as editor” of Middle East Insight.82
As the 1990s wear on, high-profile D.C. politicians publicly express gratitude for the service Nader’s work provides to the Washington political establishment. For instance, in 1996 Congressman Nick Rahall (D-WV) praises Nader on the floor of the House, lauding him as a “recognized expert” on the Middle East, noting that he has “remarkable access to key political and business leaders throughout the region,” and praising Middle East Insight for publishing the viewpoints of powerful Egyptians (Hosni Mubarak), Israelis (Yitzhak Rabin), and Palestinians (Yasir Arafat).83 A former top diplomat in the State Department who knew Nader in the 1990s, Frederic Hof—a specialist in Middle East geopolitics and affairs relating to Syria, Israel, and Lebanon particularly—will tell the New York Times in 2018, of his experiences with Nader during the Clinton administration, “He always struck me as a person who really thought he should be in the eye of the storm trying to make things happen” in the Middle East.84 Nader’s activities in the 1990s would seem to confirm Hof’s observation, as according to the Times Nader had, by the end of the decade, “convinced the Clinton administration that he had valuable contacts in the Syrian government and took on a secretive role trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria.”85 The newspaper notes that Nader had “contacts in both capitals [Damascus and Jerusalem]” who were sufficiently highly placed to “try to negotiate a truce” between the two nations.86 Indeed, Nader is so well connected to government officials in Israel and several of its neighbors that Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, will tell the Times that “in the 1990s, George was a very effective under-the-radar operator in the peace process” between Israel and several Muslim nations.87 Indyk reports that Nader traveled to Syria with Lauder, the future president of the World Jewish Congress, “16 times” in 1998 alone to try to “advance an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement.”88 In 2001, Nader again proves his deep connections to the Israeli government by organizing an event whose featured guest is the prime minister of Israel at the time, Shimon Peres. The event is held at the home of Mark Penn, a former top adviser to President Bill Clinton. At least one congressman, Darrell Issa (R-CA), attends the event, as do a number of “Arab American businessmen.”89
In June 2019, at a time when Nader is a cooperating witness in federal law enforcement’s investigation of foreign influence on the 2016 presidential election—including possible payments by the Saudis and Emiratis to the Trump campaign—Nader will be arrested yet again on child pornography charges, this time on a federal arrest warrant issued by the Eastern District of Virginia; given Nader’s status as a cooperating witness, the charges, which could imprison Nader for a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of forty years, strongly suggest that either he has breached his 2018 partial-immunity deal with the FBI or that the FBI has discovered new information about what Nader was doing in the United States and abroad in the run-up to Trump’s victory.90