George Nader, a Lebanese-American business executive and a key cooperating witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, was arrested Monday on child pornography charges.
Witness turned suspect
Armed with a search warrant, authorities stopped Nader en route from Dubai at the Washington-Dulles International Airport in Virginia in January 2018.
An iPhone in Nader’s possession contained “multiple files which appeared to contain child pornography.”
Although the warrant leading to the 60-year-old’s indictment remains under seal, a criminal affidavit states that he was originally stopped by Mueller’s agents for “another matter” not connected to child pornography.
Altogether, law enforcement discovered 12 different videos depicting bestiality and “minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct” on one of three iPhones in Nader’s possession.
Federal prosecutors in Virginia kept the charges quiet until Monday, when Nader was arrested at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Convicted pedophile
This isn’t the first such charge for Nader. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to a federal child pornography charge in Virginia, but the judge issued a light sentence after government officials wrote letters asking for clemency. A similar charge in 1985 was dismissed after the judge decided the search warrant was invalid.
According to a 2018 AP report, Nader was sentenced to a year in a Prague prison in 2003 on multiple charges of abusing boys in the Czech Republic.
If convicted this time, Nader faces a minimum of 15 years in federal prison.
Key Mueller witness
Mueller’s investigators were looking into whether the United Arab Emirates, through Nader, was trying to influence the Trump campaign by providing backdoor political contributions, according to a New York Times report in 2018. Nader was reportedly working as an adviser for Mohammed bin Zayed, leader of the United Arab Emirates, in 2016.
Nader ended up becoming a major cooperating witness in the Mueller investigation, which ultimately found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Nader’s name is mentioned in Mueller’s final report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections more than 100 times.
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