In June 2017, a Republican donor posed for a photo with President Trump and Melania Trump at a ritzy dinner supporting his re-election at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Admission cost $35,000 per plate.
The donor did not come alone.
According to federal prosecutors, the donor, Sherry Xue Li, had arranged for a dozen foreigners to attend alongside her, charging them each more than $90,000, including admission to the soiree.
Foreigners cannot make campaign contributions, but she nonetheless passed the money along to the fund-raiser’s organizers and used the photo, prosecutors said, to raise even more from unwitting investors who thought they were buying into an educational institute. She spent the money on more contributions — and herself.
The dinner was a small part of a nearly decadelong scheme in which Ms. Li, along with her business partner, Lianbo Wang, solicited more than $30 million from roughly 150 foreigners who thought they were investing in the educational institute. In exchange, the donors were promised political access and a pathway to citizenship.
Ms. Li, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republicans and Republican causes, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Mr. Wang had pleaded guilty to related charges in 2024 and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Ms. Li “attempted to corrupt a fundamental institution in this country — fair and transparent elections free from unlawful foreign influence,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a news release.
Ms. Li faces up to 20 years in prison when she is sentenced. A lawyer for Ms. Li did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Ms. Li and Mr. Wang, who were arrested and charged in July 2022, donated a total of more than $1 million to Republicans and Republican causes between 2016 and 2019. In 2017 alone, the pair contributed a combined $600,000, which came from the foreign donors, to a joint fund-raising effort of Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee.
Starting in 2013, according to federal prosecutors, Ms. Li, Mr. Wang and a third defendant, Guo Xuefeng, took millions from international investors, including Chinese citizens, who were told they were investing in a development project in upstate New York, the Thompson Education Center.
The money was funneled into bank accounts that Ms. Li and Mr. Wang then tapped to make illegal campaign contributions to Republican candidates, as well as to pay for lavish dinners, vacations and gym membership fees. Prosecutors said Mr. Wang also used the funds to make a payment to his former wife.
More than half of the investors’ money, prosecutors said, came from people who were promised green cards in exchange for their contributions, through a program known as EB-5, which grants permanent residence to foreigners willing to invest as little as $800,000 in American businesses. Developments like Hudson Yards in New York City and Trump Plaza in Jersey City, N.J., have been financed in part through the program.
But according to prosecutors, no investor ever received a green card. In fact, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services started issuing denials to the donors’ visa applications in 2017 because it did not find the Thompson Education Center’s business plans to be credible.
Mr. Trump, who was not accused of any wrongdoing in the case, has sought to replace the EB-5 program with a system in which foreign investors would pay a far higher price tag of $5 million to stay in the United States.
Mr. Trump said in February that the program, called the “Trump gold card,” would give “very high-level people” a “route to citizenship.” Last month, Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, told The Financial Times that nearly 70,000 people had joined the waiting list for the gold card.
Before pleading guilty, Ms. Li had argued that the case was politically motivated. In a January hearing before Judge Gary R. Brown in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., Ms. Li claimed that her photo with Mr. Trump had made her “a target hit,” and that the case contravened an executive order signed by Mr. Trump that banned “political persecution.”
Judge Brown did not entertain her request. Later in the hearing, he cut her off so she would not incriminate herself.
“Here, in court, everything is written down, and something you say might hurt you in the future,” Judge Brown said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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