California: Armenian Lawyer Pleads Guilty to Multiple Charges; Bribed FBI and Homeland Security Agents

….among other things!

Thanks to reader Judy for alerting me to the story at the Washington Times from yesterday entitled:

ICE, FBI agents took bribes to provide ‘protection,’ cook books on immigration cases, feds say

I’ll let you read that yourself.  LOL! The story has so many twists that I figured it would be easiest to first check out the press release from ICE, here.

LOS ANGELES – A Calabasas man has agreed to plead guilty to five federal offenses – one related to a credit card bust-out scheme, and the others related to more than $250,000 in bribes he paid to two federal agents for assistance that included sensitive law enforcement information.

Edgar Sargsyan, 39, an attorney with law offices in Beverly Hills, was charged today with conspiracy to commit bank fraud, two counts of bribing a public official, and two counts of making false statements to federal investigators. In a plea agreement also filed today in U.S. District Court, Sargsyan agreed to plead guilty to the five felony counts, which cumulatively carry a statutory maximum penalty of 50 years in federal prison.

In the plea agreement, Sargsyan admitted paying tens of thousands of dollars from the beginning of 2015 through early 2017 to a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[….]

Sargsyan paid the HSI agent at least $32,000 in checks and at least $45,000 to $50,000 in cash in return for assistance that included the HSI agent searching law enforcement databases to corruptly obtain information that he passed to Sargsyan, according to the plea agreement. The HSI agent also altered a Department of Homeland Security database to make it more likely that a foreign national who was a client of Sargsyan’s law firm would be allowed to enter the United States. In another corrupt act detailed in the plea agreement, the HSI agent prepared a document on HSI letterhead in an unsuccessful attempt to have one of Sargsyan’s relatives from Armenia admitted into the United States.

Sargsyan also admitted he paid the FBI agent monthly cash bribes of up to $10,000 beginning in 2015 in exchange for the agent providing protection, which included running queries on law enforcement databases and warning Sargsyan to stay away from certain individuals who were the targets of criminal investigations. The agent, who worked out of the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, accepted the cash payments on trips to Southern California, where he stayed at luxury hotels that were paid for by Sargsyan. The FBI agent also accepted from Sargsyan a $36,000 racing motorcycle as a bonus for running database checks on a particular person. Sargsyan also gave the FBI agent a $30,000 cashier’s check that was made to appear to be a payment to the agent’s business, according to court documents.

In his plea agreement, Sargsyan also admitted he participated in a conspiracy that defrauded financial institutions by fraudulently obtaining credit cards in the names of aliens who had previously been in the United States on J1 visitor visas. Once the credit cards were issued by the financial institutions, Sargsyan and his co-conspirator charged purchases, including more than $941,000 that Sargsyan personally charged at two businesses he controlled, Pillar Law Group and Regdalin Group.

Who is the alleged corrupt FBI agent?

His name is Babak Broumand:

From the Los Angeles Times:

Beverly Hills lawyer is at center of FBI agent corruption scandal, sources say