UAE hired GOP fundraiser Elliot Broidy of running smear campaign against Qatar
Top GOP donor and former Trump ally Elliott Broidy was paid over $200 million by the United Arab Emirates for an illegal smear campaign against its Middle East rival Qatar, according to the lawsuit claims.
Broidy created two fake news sites Qaterexposed.com and BoycottQatarnow.com to spread the disinformation.
The Qatar- based travel company, Mosafer, files a lawsuit claiming Broidy created a ‘disinformation campaign’, using fake news to scare off Americans from visiting or supporting Qatar and also violating FARA and other reporting obligations. This lawsuit file in this month claiming Broidy’s UAE-funded scheme with Trump campaign adviser George Nader that broke lobbying laws designed to prevent foreign influence on government officials.
In an interview with DailyMail.com, Mosafer chairman and CEO Ashraf Abdul Rahim Abu Issa described how the alleged smear campaign ‘destroyed’ his company — and his lawyer laid out their claims of the sophisticated scheme run by Broidy and Nader using advertisements and articles shared on social media.
‘The disinformation campaign orchestrated by Broidy and Nader destroyed what took me 35 years to build,’ Abu Issa said.
The CEO said his ambitions for his company, which has a flagship store on 57th street in Manhattan, ‘went up in flames after Broidy and Nader began a smear campaign portraying Qatar as an unsafe country that harbored terrorists.
The legal papers strongly pointing $200million ‘intelligence-gathering’ contract the UAE awarded to Broidy’s firm as evidence of the strong financial ties between him and the Gulf country.
Last year, the GOP donor filed a legal complaint against a cybersecurity firm Global Risk Advisors (GRA) run by ex-CIA agents, claiming Qatar paid them $100million to hack his emails and the communications of other American citizens as part of a years-long campaign of spying and blackmail.
In this March court dismissed the complaint, saying Broidy ‘adequately alleged’ that GRA had the ability to hack his emails, but failed to ‘plausibly’ show what they actually did it. Qatar has also previously denied the hacking.
It is clear from the above that Middle Eastern countries like UAE, Qatar are taking help from foreign actors to conduct smear campaign against their adversaries.
