Key Mueller Probe Witness Charged With Transporting Child Porn

This 1998 frame from video provided by C-SPAN shows George Nader, president and editor of Middle East Insight. C-SPAN via AP, File

A key witness who provided grand jury testimony to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on June 3 on federal child pornography charges.

Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, 60, was ordered by Magistrate Judge Cheryl Pollak to be held, after a federal prosecutor argued he was a danger to the community and a flight risk. Nader had faced charges of transporting child pornography in 2018, but they weren’t made public until after his recent arrest, according to the Department of Justice.

If convicted, Nader faces a “mandatory minimum of 15 years in prison and a maximum of 40 years,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The director of communications for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Joshua Stueve, didn’t respond by press time to a request from The Epoch Times for more details surrounding the investigation into Nader.

The businessman’s testimony came after he reportedly attended a December 2016 meeting at New York’s Trump Tower with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi. His name appeared more than 100 times in Mueller’s report that was first released to the public with limited redactions in April.

Mueller titled a section of his report “George Nader and Erik Prince Arrange Seychelles Meeting with Dmitriev.” According to the report, Nader had tried to arrange a meeting between purported Trump associate Erik Prince and Russian businessman Kirill Dmitriev.

Nader, a purported adviser to the United Arab Emirates, wired $2.5 million to a Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, via a company in Canada, The Associated Press reported in 2018, citing two unnamed sources. The sources claimed Nader had paid money to Broidy in an attempt to push the United States to take a hard line against Qatar, an adversary of the United Arab Emirates but a longtime ally to America.

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In January 2018, Nader had arrived at the Washington-Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, and declared to a Customs and Border Protection agent that he was in possession of three iPhones, according to court documents. He was then voluntarily interviewed by FBI agents regarding a matter unrelated to child pornography. His phones were seized as part of a search warrant.

According to a copy of the affidavit, the search warrant was administered “for a matter not involving child pornography.”

Later in February, a case agent reviewed the iPhones and “uncovered multiple files which appeared to contain child pornography.” The affidavit includes a description of 12 videos involving minors that were found on an iPhone 7, one of the three devices seized. One of the minors was just 3 years old.

In 1991, Nader had already pleaded guilty to an identical charge in Virginia, according to the Department of Justice.

Calls to attorneys who represented Nader in connection with his grand jury testimony weren’t immediately returned, The Associated Press reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.