A career Department of Justice prosecutor on January 21 dismissed a criminal case against a major Democrat donor alleged to have engaged in a $150 million fraud involving a green-energy firm. The dismissal came one day after President Donald Trump took office, but before he could install his own U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California.
Ibrahim AlHusseini, who has fashioned himself an environmentalist star and Hollywood playboy, gave more than $300,000 to Democrats and was a lead investor in a “socially conscious” finance firm backed by actor Leonardo DiCaprio called Aspiration Inc. The longtime CodePink board member had been heralded as proof that “reversing the climate crisis can be profitable.” But the FBI said AlHusseini falsified financial documents to inflate their value by nearly $200 million.
AlHusseini was arrested at the Los Angeles airport on October 7 and held in jail due to the “serious risk [the] defendant will flee” after his alleged victim said he’d transferred $300 million to his native Saudi Arabia. He was released in December because wealthy environmentalists, including the co-founder of CodePink, Jodie Evans, put up their homes as his bail.
But Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph McNally used the window between the resignation of Joe Biden’s U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California and the installation of Trump’s replacement, which has not yet occurred, to make the case go away without explanation.
A one-paragraph filing said “the Acting United States Attorney having moved for a dismissal of the complaint by the presentment of this Order, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that said Complaint be dismissed as to defendant IBRAHIM AMEEN ALHUSSEINI only without prejudice and that … bond, if any, be exonerated.”
Without prejudice means that Trump’s Justice Department could resurrect the charge. But ending the bond means AlHusseini could leave the country first — without causing prominent left-wingers to lose their homes. Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, where AlHusseini recently claimed an address, do not have extradition treaties with the United States.
A lawyer for AlHusseini, John Lambert, said that the Justice Department had gone even further, claiming that “our client’s record has been dismissed pursuant to court order and all records related thereto have been destroyed.”
The dismissal by McNally undermines the narrative that career prosecutors are nonpartisan. Several have resigned this month over their unwillingness to carry out directives from Trump officials, though they did not do so when the Biden Justice Department engaged in politically-tinged investigations. In this case, even Biden’s prosecutor appeared unwilling to dismiss the case against the Democrat donor, but McNally did.
The FBI’s criminal complaint provided substantial evidence that AlHusseini committed large-scale fraud. It included a table of 24 purported financial statements that he used to secure a funding deal, compared to what the FBI said were real bank documents. For example, a February 2023 statement claimed an account contained $181,582,018.43, when it actually contained $14,726.29. All 24 of the statements had balances ending in 43 cents, suggesting it was a sloppy cut-and-paste job.
Relying on those financial statements, an investment firm entered into a deal resulting in “losses in excess of $150 million, including interest and penalties, and AlHusseini personally received more than $12 million in ill-gotten gains,” the FBI said. “There is probable cause to believe that AlHusseini has committed securities fraud.”
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