In its closing argument, Thomas Barrack’s defense team wants the jury to simply dismiss the fact that the sovereign fund of the United Arab Emirates invested more than a third of a billion dollars in his company was just a coincidence and not a payment for influencing Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign and into the Trump administration.
Instead, according to Reuters, Barrack was just an honest businessman, not an undeclared foreign agent for the wealthy Arab nation, as prosecutors allege. Barrack’s lawyers attempted to dismiss the two meetings their client had with the UAE’s National Security Director, including one on an isolated path where the two met while biking.
“The theory of the government is that they have come to some sort of supersecret spy agreement during this first meeting, and during the second meeting they’re going to firm it up,” lawyer Randall Jackson told the jury in federal court in Brooklyn. “No one, if they want to have a serious discussion about an illegal arrangement with a 70-year-old man, says ‘Let’s do it on a bike ride.'”