Presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump has appointed Elliott Broidy—a convicted Jew crook who bribed public officials to invest money in Israel—as his chief fundraiser.
Broidy only avoided jail after admitting guilt and paying a $48 million fine for bribing several New York pension fund managers in 2009.
Broidy, the new vice chairman of the Trump Victory Fund—set up by Trump and the Republican National Committee—has “extensive political ties in Israel,” and his appointment “comes just weeks after Steven Mnuchin, a Jewish Hollywood film producer and former Goldman Sachs executive, was named Trump’s national finance chairman,” the Israeli Haaretz newspaper reported.
According to Haaretz, Broidy decided to “combine a Zionist act and a business opportunity in establishing a major venture capital fund that would operate in Israel.”
Using his ties with Alan Hevesi, the Jew who worked as New York state comptroller at the time, Broidy raised $250 million for the fund from the New York State pension fund, which had $100 billion under its management in the time.
“The stated Zionist mission of the fund as well as Broidy’s ties meant that there was a lot of politics involved in establishing Markstone Capital,” Haaretz went on to explain, in an understatement of the facts.
The reality was that Markstone Capital was set up to make investments in Israel—by using US public money which Broidy got from the taxpayers of the state of New York.
Broidy is also close with Benjamin Netanyahu. In mid-2003, when Netanyahu—then still Israel’s finance minister—visited New York, he met with Broidy and finance officials from New York’s state government to discuss Markstone’s investments.
Following that visit, the chairman of Israel’s Histadrut labor federation at the time, Amir Peretz, approached American labor union leaders asking for their help with the new fund. That brought in an additional $50 million for Markstone, Haaretz added.
Markstone’s funding sources were however revealed in 2009 when Broidy admitted to making nearly $1 million in bribes to four top officials in the office that oversaw New York state’s pension fund, including Hevesi.
According to the Wall Street Journal, then New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo revealed that Broidy admitted that he paid at least $75,000 for first-class airfare, luxury hotel suites, a helicopter tour, a car and driver, and a security detail on foreign trips enjoyed by Hevesi, among other things.
Hevesi had long expressed a desire to stay at the historic King David hotel, which overlooks Jerusalem’s Old City, and Broidy happily paid for this and more in return for the “investments” in Markstone.
Cuomo also said that Broidy tried to conceal the money he spent on the trips abroad with Hevesi and his relatives.
“Broidy financed these expenses through charities and caused false invoices to be submitted to the comptroller’s office,” the attorney general said.
Broidy pleaded guilty to a felony charge of rewarding official misconduct, after Cuomo’s investigations focused on whether decisions about how to invest retirees’ money were wrongly influenced by bribes and politics.
Cuomo said Broidy’s payoffs to benefit state officials were an “old-fashioned case of payoff to state officials. This case is effectively bribery.”
The New York state pension made $250 million in investments with Markstone Capital, and the state’s initial $200 million investment in Markstone was announced by Hevesi at the 2003 Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations.
As part of his guilty plea, Broidy agreed to forfeit $18 million to New York state, the same amount as the management fees that his firm charged the pension fund. His guilty plea could have resulted in up to four years in prison, Cuomo said.
Broidy supported Israel philanthropically as well through his investment firm, and in 2008 received the Raoul Wallenberg Award for his support of Israel.
Broidy was appointed by former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to serve on the US Homeland Security Advisory Council, while President George W. Bush appointed him to serve on the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
He is also a member of the Board of Governors and the Endowment Committee of Hebrew Union College and is a trustee of the USC Hillel Foundation.
Source Article from http://newobserveronline.com/trumps-fundraiser-convicted-jew-crook/
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