Elliott Broidy, the vice chairman for the 2016 Trump campaign’s joint fundraising committee with the Republican Party that raised over $108 million, is expected to plead guilty to violating foreign lobbying law, joining other prominent members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle, including, most infamously, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Rick Gates. Broidy’s indictment emerged from a multibillion-dollar case of global fraud that has garnered remarkably little public attention—but that is deeply revealing about the nature of international corruption in the Trump era.
Broidy’s fall was an unexpected consequence of the unraveling of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a Malaysian state fund ostensibly set up to promote development through foreign investment but whose masterminds used it to leverage loans of $4.5 billion on the global financial markets, which they then siphoned off. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, its chairman, has been arrested, as have his close associates. Goldman Sachs, which brokered these loans and whose involvement then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions dubbed “kleptocracy at its worst,” has reached a $3.9 billion settlement with the Malaysian government, though it remains under the shadow of U.S. legal penalties. Broidy’s own relatively modest role in the scandal was a result of his alleged lobbying to influence the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into 1MDB on behalf of Jho Low, the accused mastermind of the fraud. This included an unsuccessful attempt to arrange a golf game between Trump and Najib in 2017. (Malaysia didn’t just target Republicans. In 2014, Najib came under fire for engaging in what he called “golf diplomacy” with President Barack Obama while his country reeled from some of its worst flooding in years.)
