A key Mueller probe witness was just indicted with new felony sex trafficking charges

George Nader is a name that comes up more than once in former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation: the Lebanon-born businessman and lobbyist met with Mueller’s office and answered questions about his interaction with President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Mueller’s team in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) considered Nader a cooperative and helpful witness.

But now, the 60-year-old Nader is feeling the wrath of federal prosecutors in the form of sex trafficking and child pornography charges.

A federal indictment unsealed on Friday, the Daily Beast is reporting, shows that prosecutors for the Eastern District of Virginia are charging him for allegedly sex trafficking a 14-year-old boy he brought to the U.S. from Europe. The indictment includes counts of transporting child pornography as well, and Nader pled “not guilty” to all charges.

These new charges are in addition to separate child pornography charges Nader was indicted on in the Eastern District of Virginia in June, according to the Daily Beast.

In 2016, Nader met with members of Trump’s campaign several times, and the things they discussed ranged from regime change in Iran to ways in which the campaign could use social media manipulation effectively. Donald Trump, Jr. was among the campaign officials he met with, and one of the things Nader had in mind was using fake avatars to drive support for the campaign — although allies of President Trump who worked on the campaign have denied that they ever considered Nader’s proposal.

Nader, according to Mueller’s report, also helped put together a January 2017 meeting between Russian oligarch Kirill Dmitriev and Erik Prince, former CEO of the controversial private security firm Blackwater.

The sex trafficking and child pornography charges Nader is facing in the Eastern District of Virginia aren’t the first time he has been accused of sexual misconduct. In the early 2000s, Nader he was convicted on charges of sexually abusing minors in the Czech Republic and served one year in prison in that country. And according to Newsweek, Nader was convicted of bringing child pornography into the U.S. from Germany in the early 1990s. Those charges, Newsweek reported, stemmed from two videotapes found in his luggage at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C. in July 1990; according to a February 1991 indictment, those videotapes depicted a “minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”