Biden’s now-defunct campaign and several other Democratic politicians and committees have frozen or returned donations from an Indian national who allegedly duped a foreign businessman into believing he was connected to the CIA, defrauding him of millions of dollars.
Gaurav Srivastava donated more than $1 million to Democratic causes, including the 81-year-old president’s former campaign, after allegedly swindling a prominent Dutch trader into forming a business partnership that would ostensibly allow him to trade sanctioned Russian oil, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Srivastava allegedly pressured Paramount Energy & Commodities SA founder Niels Troost to sell him half of his company, loan him $51 million through an Indonesian middleman and move his Switzerland-based company to the United States as part of the scheme – which Troost said Srivastava claimed was a plan supported by his “boss” at the CIA.
“He never showed what that money was for,” Troost told the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently this money was spent on Democrats.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Srivastava gave the Senate Majority PAC, which supports Democratic candidates, $500,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
According to the Journal, the green card holder and college dropout also gave more than $200,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) that year, as well as five-figure contributions to the campaign committees of Reps. Pat Ryan (D-NY) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.).
In 2023, Srivastava donated nearly $290,000 to the DCCC; made the maximum allowable individual contribution to the Biden campaign; and gave an additional $50,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.
Project Brazen, the media group that first exposed Srivastava’s false CIA ties, also unearthed a photo of the alleged conman meeting with President Biden.
Disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) also received money from Srivastava.
So did the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank for which Srivastava provided $1 million in funding for a food security conference in Bali, where Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) appeared in a video discussing the food crisis.
Politico reported earlier this year that the Biden campaign and the DCCC were freezing Srivastava’s donations — which also included fictitious personal information — after information about his alleged fraud emerged.
The Journal also noted that those entities, along with the Senate Majority PAC, have “frozen or returned” Srivastava’s donations.
Srivastava’s alleged scam is being investigated by the FBI, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Srivastava’s lawyers have denied the allegations reported by the media outlet.
