Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
President Donald Trump’s official “independent” political group appears to have illicitly concealed the true identity of one of its largest donors, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog alleges.
The super PAC America First Action reported receiving a $325,000 contribution last year from a company called Global Energy Producers. But records released in federal court this week indicate that contribution came from an entirely different company. And the Campaign Legal Center says the evidence indicates the donor’s identity was knowingly misreported in violation of federal campaign-finance laws.
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It’s the latest twist involving the GEP contribution, which PAY DIRT has closely followed since last summer. GEP’s chief executive, Lev Parnas, is engaged in a long-running legal dispute with a former business partner whom Parnas still owes more than $500,000 from a years-old federal civil judgment.
That business partner is seeking to recoup that money in a federal court in Florida, where information has trickled out about Parnas’ other recent business activities.
A court filing this week contained copies of wire-transfer records to and from a company called Aaron Investments I LLC, which is run by Parnas and his wife. And those records show that Aaron Investments, not GEP, made the contribution to America First Action. That contradicts the super PAC’s filings with the Federal Election Commission, which listed GEP as the donor. Parnas too has maintained in the months since that GEP was the entity that wrote the check.
It is illegal to make or accept a federal political contribution in someone else’s name. The wire-transfer records released this week, CLC alleges in a new FEC complaint, “demonstrate that the super PAC accepted a contribution made via wire transfer from Aaron Investments I LLC, and knowingly—and falsely—attributed the contribution to another person.”
Neither America First nor a Parnas spokesperson responded to questions about the apparently misreported contribution.
The wire-transfer records also provide some clues on where the money used for that contribution originated. Those records were heavily redacted in court filings, but done so in a way that allowed the redactions to be easily removed. The full copies of those records show the Aaron Investments account at issue had received less than $56,000 in incoming transfers in the year before its America First donation.
But then, two days before that donation, Aaron Investments received a $1.26 million wire transfer from a Florida real-estate attorney named Russell Jacobs. Publicly available information indicates Jacobs’ areas of expertise include real-estate deals that require navigating international money-laundering rules.
“I’m not aware of what you are speaking about without further investigation,” Jacobs told The Daily Beast in an email. He would only say that Aaron Investments “is not and was not ever a client of our firm.”
The wire-transfer records suggest Jacobs was simply acting as a pass-through for another entity, possibly a separate client. Absent additional information, it’s impossible to know who was on the other side of that transaction with Aaron Investments.
“Taken together,” CLC writes in its complaint, “the available evidence suggests an elaborate series of deliberate transfers whose precise starting point is still unknown: An unidentified client established an attorney trust account with Mr. Jacobs, who then made a $1.26 million transfer from that account to the apparently asset-poor Aaron Investments I LLC, which two days later contributed $325,000 to America First Action, which in turn ultimately—and falsely—attributed that contribution to ‘Global Energy Producers LLC.’”
CLC filed a complaint last year alleging “reason to believe” that GEP had contributed to America First under someone else’s name, citing its recent formation—the company existed for less than six weeks before making the contribution—and the lack of a record of any business activity.
GEP denied the allegations, insisting through a spokesperson that “the amount donated to America First PAC represents only a small fraction of the operating costs of GEP.”
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