'Near-perfect ruse': Woman who pretended to be a Rothschild heiress at Mar-a-Lago faces FBI scrutiny

12 September 2022

The FBI’s Monday, August 8 search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida has been raising major national security concerns, especially in light of Washington Post reports that the FBI agents who executed that search warrant were looking for, among other things, highly classified documents pertaining to nuclear weapons. The search also raises concerns about people who have visited Mar-a-Lago, including a woman who, according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sources, pretended to be an heiress.

The woman in question, journalists Michael Sallah and Ashley Murray report in the Post-Gazette, is a Ukrainian immigrant whose real name is Inna Yashchyshyn but who, sources allege, identified herself as Anna de Rothschild when she visited Mar-a-Lago. Yashchyshyn, they note, is “not a member of the famous” Rothschild “banking family” and is “now a subject of a widening FBI investigation.”

John LeFevre, a former investment banker who says he met Yashchyshyn at Mar-a-Lago, told the Post-Gazette, “It was the near-perfect ruse, and she played the part.”

“In addition to the FBI,” Sallah and Murray report, “law enforcement agents in Canada have confirmed that she has been the subject of a major crimes unit investigation in Quebec since February. A year before the FBI’s spectacular raid of the former president’s seaside home, the woman whose real name is Inna Yashchyshyn — a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine — made several trips into the estate posing as a member of the famous family while making inroads with some of the former president’s key supporters…. The ability of Ms. Yashchyshyn, the daughter of an Illinois truck driver, to bypass the security at Mr. Trump’s club demonstrates the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background can get into a facility that’s one of America’s power centers and the epicenter of Republican Party politics.”

The Post-Gazette published a fake Florida “driver’s license” showing a photo of Yashchyshyn under the name Anna de Rothschild. The “license” listed a Miami address and gave her date of birth as September 18, 1990.

But according to Sallah and Murray, Yashchyshyn denies that she has ever called herself Anna de Rothschild. Yashchyshyn told the Post-Gazette, “I think there is some misunderstanding.”

“She said that she was meeting with FBI agents on August 19 and that passports or driver’s licenses generated with the Rothschild name and her photo were fabricated by her former business partner to harm her,” Sallah and Murray report. “‘That’s all fake, and nothing happened,’ she said. Mr. LeFevre and three other guests interviewed for this story said Ms. Yashchyshyn repeatedly told people after entering the palatial Mar-a-Lago grounds that she was a Rothschild, ‘and everyone was eating it up,’ he said.”

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