Elliott Broidy, a Republican fundraiser pardoned by Donald Trump on his last day in office, has secured a major federal contract to deploy artificial intelligence technology inside American prisons. The Department of Justice awarded Broidy's company, LEO Technologies, a $106 million deal to monitor, transcribe, and translate inmate phone calls.
The contract represents LEO's first foray into federal prison business, though the Texas-based company has worked with state and local detention systems previously. Bureau of Prisons officials confirmed that six companies bid for the work before LEO was selected.
Broidy founded LEO and holds the title of CEO, though company attorneys told the Guardian that he sets strategy rather than managing day-to-day operations. On its website, the firm describes inmate phone calls as representing "the world's largest concentration of criminally-minded activity," all of it recorded and legally available for monitoring.
The timing raises questions about potential favoritism. Trump issued Broidy's pardon on January 19, 2021, just hours before leaving office. Three months prior, Broidy had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, admitting he secretly lobbied Trump officials on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests in exchange for millions in payments. The charges could have meant five years in prison.
LEO issued a statement claiming Broidy "played no role in the competitive bidding process or its award," and neither the company nor Bureau of Prisons has provided evidence that his presidential connections influenced the selection.
A Pattern of Scandal
Broidy's path to the pardon involved a remarkable series of legal entanglements spanning decades. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to a New York fraud scheme in which he funneled nearly $1 million to state officials to secure pension fund business. The payoffs included luxury trips to Israel and Italy, plus a $300,000 investment in a low-budget film called Chooch. A judge later reduced his felony conviction to a misdemeanor.
He emerged as a major Trump supporter by 2017, becoming national deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee. That position ended in 2018 after reports surfaced that Broidy had paid $1.6 million to a former Playboy model with whom he was having an affair and who became pregnant. Trump's then-lawyer Michael Cohen brokered the deal, mirroring Cohen's earlier arrangement of a $130,000 payment from Trump to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
The same year, hackers exposed Broidy's emails revealing collaboration with an UAE adviser named George Nader to cultivate Trump's favor on behalf of the Middle Eastern powers. Broidy denied the allegations as a "fabrication driven by hackers," though his own attorneys later argued he never worked on behalf of those nations in a legal filing.
Just before Trump's 2020 election loss, Broidy accepted a guilty plea for taking $9 million from a foreign national to lobby Trump and the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against someone and to extradite a Chinese businessman. He admitted to personally asking Trump to play golf with Malaysia's former prime minister, Najib Razak, though the game never happened.
Since Trump left office, Broidy's public profile has quieted considerably. His personal website reflects a philosophy he describes as fundamentally transactional, with posts declaring that "life is sales" and asserting that powerful people "recognize that outcomes are rarely accidental and that influence is built, not granted."
Author James Rodriguez: "A $106 million federal contract to someone fresh off a pardon for lobbying foreign interests deserves scrutiny, even if no smoking gun has emerged yet."
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