A second foreign national is under investigation by U.S. authorities for gaining access to Donald Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, which is at the center of an FBI investigation into missing classified documents, raising fears of security lapses both during and and after his presidency.
According to an article by the Organized Crime and Corruption Research Project (OCCRP), a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is under investigation after she infiltrated a private members’ club under false pretenses.
Inna Yaschishin, 33, allegedly lied to members that she was a Rothschild heiress and interacted with Trump, US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others at Mar-a-Lago events.
OCCRP, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Gazette, reported that Yaschishin demonstrated “the ease with which a person with a false name and a dubious background” can bypass security at Trump’s club.
Earlier this month, the FBI obtained a search warrant in Mar-a-Lago as part of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized possession of state secrets by Trump and his aides, who failed to return the documents in question despite repeated requests.
On Saturday, members of Congress Adam Schiff and Carolyn Maloney — respectively chairs of the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees — stated that the director of intelligence of the United StatesAvril Haynes, confirmed that her subordinates, together with the Department of Justice, will assess whether the improper storage of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago threatened or caused any damage to national security.
The search comes a month after the heads of the FBI and Britain’s MI5 homeland security service issued a scathing warning about the systemic problems Chinese espionage poses to Western economies and governments.
Yashchishin, the daughter of an Illinois truck driver, claimed she was a Rothschild heiress when she served as president of United Hearts of Mercy, founded by Florida-based Russian oligarch Valery Tarasenko in Canada in 2015.
OCCRP and Post-Gazette reported that “both the FBI office in Miami and the provincial police of Surte-du-Québec in Canada have launched an investigation into her activities.”
Although the FBI declined to comment, his Canadian counterpart confirmed that his Serious Crime Unit had opened an investigation into Yashchishin earlier this year.
Rumors of an investigation into Yashchishin’s case came three years after a Chinese national approached a Secret Service agent outside Mar-a-Lago and claimed to be a member who wanted to use the pool. After passing through the security checkpoint, Yujing Zhang told the receptionist that she was attending an event hosted by the China American Association of the United Nations.
But no such event was on the calendar, and agents later discovered that she had two Chinese passports, $8,000 in cash, four mobile phones, a laptop, an external hard drive, a flash drive with computer malware, but no swimsuit.
She also claimed that she did not speak English well, although agents later testified that Zhang spoke and read English well.
Zhang was charged with making false statements to federal agents and illegally entering a restricted area. Zhang was later sentenced to eight months in prison and deported to China after being found guilty of trespassing and lying to secret service agents.
The security breach at the club, involving Zhang and Yaschishin, was reminiscent of an episode at the start of Trump’s presidency, when he spoke to then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the patio about the reaction to North Korea’s missile tests as attendees watched.
In a particularly stupefying moment, the guest who photographed Trump and Abe later took a selfie with a military aide carrying a black leather bag containing the codes needed to launch a nuclear strike, nicknamed “football.”
“It’s unheard of,” Joe Biden’s deputy national security adviser at the Obama White House said at the time. “These people are working behind the scenes.
I don’t think this team understands what kind of vulnerabilities they create for themselves and how dangerous it is.”
At the time, Trump’s White House press secretary Sean Spicer later insisted that no classified information was discussed and the leaders’ discussions focused on the logistics of the press statements they were to make.
Abe, who left office in 2020, was killed during a campaign speech in the Japanese city of Nara last month in a different case.
New details of the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid emerged Friday, when a heavily redacted sworn document justifying the search explained why investigators believed highly sensitive national defense information and obstruction of justice evidence were in the ex-president’s possession.
The document details how the FBI’s review of materials Trump returned to the National Archives in May 2022 concluded that he held sensitive state secrets in Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department said that among the documents found by the National Archives, 184 documents were classified. Some of them were stamped “SI” for special intelligence, “HCS” for intelligence obtained from clandestine sources, and “NOFORN” for “Not to be disclosed to foreign nationals”.