Businessman who set up Putin back-channel for Trump campaign indicted on campaign finance charges: report

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that businessman George Nader, along with a California payment processing executive Ahmad "Andy" Khawaja and six others, have been indicted as part of an alleged conspiracy to conceal excessive campaign contributions to a presidential candidate.

The candidate is not mentioned in the indictment by name, but legal experts have said it is almost certainly Hillary Clinton.

Nader, who was convicted on a child pornography charge in 1991 and is already under federal indictment on charges of child sex transportation, was a key witness in former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. He helped arrange a meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince, a Trump-linked businessman who founded the private mercenary group Blackwater, and a Russian official working for Vladimir Putin.

Khawaja, whose company Allied Wallet has allegedly helped its clients in what their own employees call "very, very illegal" business transactions, has played both sides of the political fence. He donated $4 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign, and then gave $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee — which has also come under investigation as federal prosecutors scrutinize whether inaugural funds were misspent or used to pay for access to the president.