Erdogan-tied businessman granted access to Trump through donor
by Rebecca Jacobs and Eli Lee
CREW.org, November 7, 2019
Excerpt...
Political access and backroom diplomacy
In January 2017, Wadie Habboush was the CEO of the Habboush Group, a family investment and construction company based in New York and Istanbul. That month, as Donald Trump prepared to assume the presidency, Habboush’s father, R.W. Habboush, gave two large political contributions totaling exactly $1 million.
On January 6, FEC records show that the elder Habboush gave a total of $334,000 to the Republican National Committee. Then, less than two weeks later, on the day before President Trump’s inauguration, he contributed an additional $666,000 to then-president-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee.
A review of FEC records by CREW indicates that before 2017, neither Habboush had ever reported any prior political donations.
Following his father’s gift to the inaugural committee, Wadie Habboush reportedly attended an inaugural dinner thrown by Tom Barrack, the committee’s chairman. According to the Washington Post, internal documents from the dinner listed Habboush as a guest of “DJT.”
Three weeks later, he and Gentry Beach, a Texas businessman who is a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., met with National Security Council officials and then-presidential advisor Steve Bannon at the White House. According to reports, Habboush and Beach pitched “a plan to build new relations between the United States and [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro” and sought to end United States sanctions against Venezuela.
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Although Habboush’s attempt to conduct backroom diplomacy was eventually unsuccessful, his access to White House national security staff, seemingly gained through political patronage, raised major ethical concerns at the time.
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https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/turkish-businessman-access-trump-donor/
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