President of the United States from 2017 to 2021
The eight-count indictment unsealed Monday charges Luft with offenses related to willfully failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations and making false statements to federal agents. He was arrested on February 17 in Cyprus based on the U.S.
Senator Ron Johnson, one of several prominent Republicans to tout Luft as a whistleblower witness, also suggested in a July 9 tweet that the Justice Department case against Luft is connected to his alleged interest in exposing Biden family corruption. In May, Comer was forced to acknowledge that the House committee had lost track of its whistleblower. And three days before the criminal charges were unsealed, Comer told the conservative Newsmax media outfit that Luft was “[who] provided incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the DOJ in a meeting in Brussels in March 2019.
Luft also acted as a broker or middleman to find both buyers and sellers of certain weapons and other materials, without a license to do so as required under U.S. law, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. That included working to broker a deal for Chinese companies to sell certain weapons to Libya, including anti-tank launchers, grenade launchers, and mortar rounds, which Luft and his associates referred to in coded language as “toys,” according to the Justice Department.