When hackers dumped a dossier of top Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy’s emails in 2018, he accused Qatar of sending in the cybercrooks. But the perpetrators have never been officially identified and according to court documents obtained by The Daily Beast, prosecutors dropped a criminal investigation into the break-in back in 2018 after a two-month inquiry.
In a declaration filed in December 2018 and obtained by The Daily Beast, Broidy attorney’s wrote that they had first reported the break-in to federal investigators in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles on March 22, 2018, two weeks after The New York Times reported that copies of purported emails from his inbox were sent to the Times and other outlets.
But after a series of meetings with Broidy and his attorneys, the FBI announced that it stayed the investigation and later told Broidy’s legal team that the investigation had been dropped altogether.
The revelation of the FBI’s termination of its criminal investigation into the break-ins surfaced as part of the legal wrangling over evidence in a separate criminal case in which Broidy pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws in order to press the Trump administration to extradite fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and drop its investigation into the 1Malaysia Development Bank (1MDB), a state-run Malaysian development bank used for corrupt payments.
By the time Broidy reported the break-in to law enforcement, a separate team of prosecutors in New York had already begun to investigate his lobbying activity, according to documents recently unsealed by the federal District Court for Washington, D.C.
In February 2018, prosecutors applied for a search warrant on the email account of Nickie Lum Davis, one of Broidy’s co-conspirators in the lobbying scheme, who pleaded guilty to lobbying charges in August 2020. Five months after the email warrant, agents executed a search warrant on Broidy’s Los Angeles office seeking evidence of his financial dealings with Jho Low, the Malaysian financier indicted for “conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled” from 1MDB.
Broidy’s attorneys originally turned over data to the FBI in the spring of 2018 as part of an attempt to prod the Bureau into pursuing a criminal investigation of the hackers who broke into his inbox. But the handover of emails allowed the FBI to claim that Broidy had waived attorney-client privilege over the materials and prosecutors later used them as evidence in Broidy’s illegal lobbying conspiracy case.
Documents obtained by The Daily Beast show that an FBI victim specialist first reached out to Broidy’s attorneys in April 2018 to notify them that their client had been “the possible victim of a crime.” Broidy’s attorneys wrote that he and his representatives met and spoke with FBI agents and prosecutors and FBI agents 10 times after their initial complaint in March in an attempt to move the hacking investigation forward.
But on June 8, Patrick Fitzgerald, the chief of the national security division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Central California, informed Broidy’s team that the investigation into the hack had been suspended. On October 3, a victim’s specialist at the FBI informed Broidy’s lawyers that the investigation into the hack had closed.
Hackers calling themselves “LA Confidential” first shared PDF files of the apparent contents of Broidy’s inbox with reporters, including The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in March 2018.
Broidy sued the government of Qatar and U.N. special envoy for Yemen Jamal Benomar that year, alleging that the Gulf country was responsible for orchestrating the hack and that Benomar had overseen the distribution of emails to the media. Broidy’s attorneys claimed that Qatar had targeted him because of his criticism of Qatari foreign policy. But a federal judge threw out the lawsuit, citing a lack of jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
In subsequent federal lawsuits, Broidy has accused the cybersecurity firm Global Risk Advisors of carrying out the hacks on behalf of Qatar. The firm and its founder, Kevin Chalker, have denied the allegations.
The incident took place amid an escalating conflict between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and its ally Saudi Arabia that saw a similar hack-and-leak operation waged against the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., Yousef al-Otaiba, by hackers calling themselves “GlobalLeaks.” Researchers believe that the Otaiba hack was similar to breaches carried out by a shadowy hack-for-hire group dubbed “Bahamut,” but the U.S. has never officially attributed either the Otaiba or Broidy breaches to any actor.
