Troubles are continuing to mount for Elliott Broidy, the former vice chairman of Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. A federal grand jury is probing whether the top Republican benefactor, who’s been under federal investigation for the better part of a year, exploited his connections to Trump to score business deals with foreign governments. The probe, reported by the Associated Press Monday, comes out of the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, and appears to be separate from a similar investigation into Broidy launched last year by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Broidy has been embroiled in an array of scandals since Trump took office, beginning in April 2018, when the Wall Street Journal reported that ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen brokered a $1.6 million deal in 2017 to pay off a former Playboy model who said she became pregnant during an affair with Broidy. Broidy immediately resigned his post at the RNC, but his problems only grew from there. By the summer, the Department of Justice had launched an investigation into his possible horse trading as the vice chair of the Trump Victory Committee, which included offering inauguration tickets to strongmen and promises of access to the incoming administration—a prime example, as the New York Times put it in March 2018, of how Trump’s “unorothdox approach to governing has spawned a new breed of access peddling in the swamp he vowed to drain.” Indeed, Broidy, who pleaded guilty in a 2009 pay-to-play scheme in New York, was a proven swamp creature when Trump tapped him. After Trump’s inauguration, he paid former deputy Trump campaign manager Rick Gates for consultation about navigating the new administration, even after Gates became entangled in Robert Mueller’s probe.

The new investigation is likely to compound his problems. According to the AP, the Brooklyn US attorney’s office recently subpoenaed Trump’s inaugural committee for records “relating to 20 individuals and businesses” all with connections to Broidy, including Angolan President João Lourenço and two Romanian officials. Broidy’s attorneys told the AP that he hadn’t made a deal with the Romanian government and that his dealings with the Angolan president had nothing to do with his position on the Trump inaugural committee. “Any implication to the contrary is completely false,” the lawyers said in a statement.

Still, the latest probe underscores the ongoing legal scrutiny facing those in Trump’s orbit—and the political pressure such inquiries continue to pose for the president. Trump spent years lashing out at Mueller, claiming that there was “No Collusion, No Obstruction!”. And though the Mueller report didn’t quite back him up, his handpicked attorney general, William Barr, let him off the hook. Even after getting Mueller out of his hair, Trump and those around him, like Broidy, are still under the microscope of federal authorities and congressional committees. And though none of those are likely to fulfill Trump critics’ fantasies of the president being escorted from the White House in handcuffs, the probes could continue to highlight how Trump has worsened a culture of corruption in Washington that he vowed to clean up.

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