8 Felony Indictments: Clinton Donors Charged in Massive Campaign Finance Scheme

Among eight people indicted Tuesday in a massive campaign finance money laundering scheme are donors to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign and a witness in the Mueller investigation that sought to incriminate President Donald Trump for “Russian collusion.”

The Department of Justice announced the unsealing of eight indictments yesterday, (November 3, 2019) alleging individuals conspired to create a donation bundling network for campaign donations far in excess of federal election limitations for individual donors, “to make and conceal conduit and excessive campaign contributions,” totaling more than $3.5-million in the 2016 election campaign. Read the full announcement here.

Central to the scheme was an online payment processing firm that investigators say was used as a conduit for illegally large campaign contributions to groups allied with the Hillary Clinton campaign. The payment processor is alleged to have used a software workaround to break large donations into smaller, legally acceptable amounts in order to avoid detection by Federal Election Commission oversight, in some cases assigning the names of real people to each donation in order to cover the real source of the donation.

It’s believed that this digital “fragmentation” methodology has been extensively used by the DNC to the benefit of recent national campaigns for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to circumvent not only federal campaign donation limitations, but to conceal massive amounts of foreign cash flowing into leftist American campaign coffers. Federal election laws strictly prohibit the acceptance of money from foreign donors in American political campaigns.

Investigative journalist Shad Olson first reported on these methods in a July 2018 article, Hillary’s Billions and Obama’s Money Laundering Gift Card Loophole, revealing the pervasive use of generic credit cards and proprietary donation fragmentation software to wash potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign cash and illegally large transactions through online payment portals of major Democrat campaigns. Read more of that original source reporting here.

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia indicted Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja, 48, of Los Angeles, California, on Nov. 7, 2019, along with George Nader, Roy Boulos, Rudy Dekermenjian, Mohammad “Moe” Diab, Rani El-Saadi, Stevan Hill and Thayne Whipple.

The 53 count indictment charges Khawaja with two counts of conspiracy, three counts of making conduit contributions, three counts of causing excessive contributions, 13 counts of making false statements, 13 counts of causing false records to be filed, and one count of obstruction of a federal grand jury investigation. Nader is charged with conspiring with Khawaja to make conduit campaign contributions, and related offenses. Boulos, Dekermenjian, Diab, El-Saadi, Hill, and Whipple are charged with conspiring with Khawaja and each other to make conduit campaign contributions and conceal excessive contributions, and related offenses.

According to the indictment, from March 2016 through January 2017, Khawaja conspired with Nader to conceal the source of more than $3.5 million in campaign contributions, directed to political committees associated with a candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 election. By design, these contributions appeared to be in the names of Khawaja, his wife, and his company.

In reality, they allegedly were funded by Nader. Khawaja and Nader allegedly made these contributions in an effort to gain influence with high-level political figures, including the candidate. As Khawaja and Nader arranged these payments, Nader allegedly reported to an official from a foreign government about his efforts to gain influence.

The indictment also alleges that, from March 2016 through 2018, Khawaja conspired with Boulos, Dekermenjian, Diab, El-Saadi, Hill, and Whipple to conceal Khawaja’s excessive contributions, which totaled more than $1.8 million, to various political committees. Among other things, these contributions allegedly allowed Khawaja to host a private fundraiser for a presidential candidate in 2016 and a private fundraising dinner for an elected official in 2018.