The man touted by Republicans as a “whistleblower” who claims to have incriminating information about President Joe Biden is, turns out, a brazen international arms and oil dealer working on behalf of Communist China and the Republic of Iran.
Go figure, that.
Gal Luft, 57, was charged on Monday in an eight-count indictment that includes offenses related to willfully failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations and making false statements to federal agents.
Luft, the director of a Washington, D.C., think tank called the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, was arrested on the charges from the indictment on Feb. 17 in the Republic of Cyprus.
He subsequently fled after being released on bail while extradition proceedings were pending and remains a fugitive, according to the Department of Justice.
Political prisoner?
That thing about him being an international fugitive would probably be why, looking back on it, Luft has not been available to appear before a House Republican-led panel that has weaponized “oversight” to try to dredge up political talking points to use against the president ahead of the 2024 election cycle.
It’s basically the same claptrap that ended up being the focus of the first Donald Trump impeachment – Hunter Biden, Burisma, the laptop, the rest.
What’s missing is something that can tie it all together and make it a crime.
Republicans have been talking for months about an unnamed whistleblower who could do that for us, who we now know to be this Luft guy, and who a couple of months ago, surprise, turned up missing.
The chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, let slip on Fox News in a May interview that little tidbit.
“We’re hopeful that we can find the informant,” Comer told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “Remember, these informants are kind of in the spy business, so they don’t make a habit of being seen a lot or being high profile or anything like that.”
Key words there from Comer: “these informants are kind of in the spy business.”
Seems that he knew more about Luft than he otherwise let on, doesn’t it?
In a video reported on last week by another Republican-sympathetic news organization, The New York Post, Luft, predictably, advanced the claim that he was arrested in order to prevent his testimony against the president.
“Instead of showing appreciation for my whistleblowing, I became public enemy number one,” Luft said in the video.
Arms, oil deals
The case laid out by the Department of Justice paints a different picture than the one of political prisoner that Luft and his enablers in the right-wing media want you to believe.
According to court documents, Luft, on behalf of Chinese agents, agreed to covertly recruit and pay an unnamed former high-ranking U.S. government official who was an advisor to former president Donald Trump “to publicly support certain policies with respect to China,” including dialogue with the Trump advisor on U.S. support for Chinese government positions on public policy that ended up being published online by a Chinese newspaper.
Luft named the unnamed former high-ranking U.S. government official in the video reported on by the Post – it was former CIA Director James Woolsey, who indeed served as an adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
He also claimed in the video that all he did was ghostwrite the article that ended up on the website of the Chinese newspaper with Woolsey’s name on it.
Shortly after the 2016 election, according to the court documents, Luft and an unnamed co-conspirator discussed possible roles the Trump advisor might have in his administration, and discussed having the advisor take a “silent trip” to China.
“We are debating about his role in the new admin,” Luft wrote in a message in this conversation, according to the indictment. “There are all kinds of considerations . . .We should talk ftf [face-to-face] as there can be a supremely unique opportunity for china.”
Ultimately, Woolsey ended up stepping away from his advisory role to Trump before Trump took office, so, no “supremely unique opportunity for china” ever materialized.
The indictment also details efforts by Luft to broker arms deals for Chinese companies to sell weapons to Libya, including anti-tank launchers, grenade launchers and mortar rounds, to sell bombs and rockets to the United Arab Emirates, and to broker deals for a Chinese company to sell strike UAVs to Kenya.
Luft, according to the indictment, worked on the arms deals on a commission basis, and traveled to meetings and received and passed on documentation needed to secure the deals.
He claimed in a voluntary interview with U.S. law enforcement that he had just been checking prices for a friend and had not sought to engage in or profit from arms deals.
Of course that’s what he was doing.
Checking prices for a friend.
Luft is also accused of attempting to broker deals for Iranian oil, which runs afoul of U.S. sanctions against Iran, again involving Chinese companies.
In the voluntary interview with law enforcement, he tried to brush this off, not as checking prices for a friend, but in this case, he was trying to prevent the oil deals with Iran from happening.
So, see, he was the good guy there.
Comer, shockingly, doubles down
This Comer guy from House Oversight seems to think the news of the indictment of this Luft fellow proves his points about Biden, somehow.
Commenting last week on the video from Luft, Comer told Newsmax that he’d been vindicated.
“He’s very credible, and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now,” Comer said. “This is their worst nightmare, because, again, this is a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview and sent several agents to interview. This is someone that knew about CFC in detail long before the laptop ever became public. So, we feel that this is a very credible witness.
“We feel that this is someone that we need to talk to in our investigation, someone we will communicate with in our investigation. We’re going to request the notes from the FBI meeting from the FBI. That is forthcoming. We want to know why the FBI has never made public this interview,” Comer said.
As it turns out, the FBI has made public this interview, and what Luft had to say led to him being indicted for arms trafficking and brokering oil deals for China and Iran.
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Chris Graham
