A California billionaire and known ally of Donald Trump maintained his innocence on charges of illegal lobbying on behalf of United Arab Emirates officials while criticising the former president’s awareness on foreign affairs.
Tom Barrack, 75, stood trial at a Brooklyn federal courtroom on Monday and Tuesday, where he and his legal team are fighting off charges that he used his position as chairman of Trump’s inaugural fund to influence US foreign policy in the early days of the administration.
While taking the witness stand in his own defence on Monday, a risky move that opened the 75-year-old financier up to cross-examination by prosecutors, Mr Barrack argued that his motivation for assisting in the then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in 2015 came from his an “emotional connection” to “weave a web of tolerance” in the Middle East.
Mr Barrack, whose family is from Lebanon, explained during his testimony on Monday that those efforts, however, quickly became undercut by the near-constant “drama” being issued from the Trump White House.
Some of his clients in his private equity firm, Colony Capital, “were upset I was friends with the president,” he testified on Monday, noting that Mr Trump was viewed as someone who “could not spell ‘Middle East.’ … It was a nightmare.”
Evidence presented against the California billionaire by federal prosecutors this week has so far pushed back against that narrative being argued by Mr Barrack and his defence attorney, instead demonstrating with emails and text messages a scheme that makes the financier and his assistant, Matthew Grimes, appear as though they had entered into an agreement with the Emirates to work as the country’s agents.
In one instance, Mr Barrack’s defence attorney used one of those emails as evidence for his client’s own cause. In the spring of 2016, Mr Barrack had a meeting with UAE officials, and it was at this meeting, prosecutors argue, that he agreed to work on behalf of the oil rich nation. An email addressed to Trump aides, including senior adviser Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, reportedly discusses this same meeting taking place.
“If the purpose of your meeting with [Sheikh Tahnoun bin Mohammed Al Nahyan] was to agree with him to secretly influence the Trump campaign, would you have told [Paul Manafort] or Jared Kushner [about the meeting]?” Michael Schachter, Mr Barrack’s attorney, asked his client on the stand on Tuesday.
“Probably not,” Mr Barrack replied.
Mr Barrack, also a top donor to the Trump campaign, has painted his supposed long-time friend as being entirely inept when it came to understanding Middle Eastern politics and even accused him alienating business contacts with the administration’s controversial Muslim ban.
In sum, Mr Barrack is facing nine charges, which include acting as an agent for a foreign government and making false statements, as prosecutors claim he lied while being questioned by FBI officials back in 2019 about his working relationship with UAE officials.
In 2021, he was forced to step down as chief executive of his private equity firm, months before he was arrested and years after colleagues at Colony began calling for his departure after the FBI began investigating him in 2019.
When asked by his defence attorney during Monday’s trial whether he regretted his work with the Trump campaign, and perhaps should’ve put his money behind another candidate, Mr Barrack responded by quipping, “In hindsight, unquestionably,” before noting that his ties to the former president had essentially translated to a “death march” for the shareholders of his publicly traded company.
Mr Barrack is expected to take the stand again for part of Wednesday, when prosecutors are expected to cross-examine him, as the case enters its sixth week of proceedings.
