Ibrahim AlHusseini, a left-wing venture capitalist who invests in “climate-restoring technologies” and donated more than $300,000 to Democrats, has been arrested on suspicion of securities fraud, The Daily Wire has learned.
According to allegations in civil and criminal court papers, he swindled investors in a deal involving $150 million in stock in Aspiration, a progressive banking app and carbon-credits company with the tagline “clean rich is the new filthy rich,” and which has faced probes from the government and others for alleged “greenwashing.”
Investors say they lost $150 million due to the fraud, while AlHusseini transferred $300 million to Saudi Arabia to avoid his debts.
AlHusseini, who was raised in Saudi Arabia by Palestinian parents and says he has raised half a billion dollars in capital, largely for green energy firms, leads the investment firm FullCycle and was a board member of CodePink, which stakes out the U.S. Capitol to harass lawmakers who support Israel and which calls the Gaza war the “US-Israel Holocaust.”
He was arrested on October 7 and jailed until December 21, when federal prosecutors agreed to release him on $3 million bail put up by a who’s-who of wealthy liberal activists and environmentalists, including CodePink’s founder, Jodie Evans.
AlHusseini, whom the government deemed a flight risk, was also required to surrender his Saudi and American passports, turn in his guns, and wear a GPS monitor.
In a previously unreported criminal complaint that said “there is probable cause to believe that AlHusseini has committed securities fraud,” an FBI agent said that the green energy magnate sent investors falsified bank statements that made it seem like he had assets “worth between approximately $80 million to $200 million.”
“In fact, AlHusseini’s brokerage account during this period held between approximately $2,000 and $15,000,” the complaint read.
As a result, 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 criminal complaint said.
AlHusseini’s lawyer, Jessica Nall, told The Daily Wire that he has not been charged with a crime.
The arrest emerged from a civil lawsuit in New York involving Aspiration Inc., a company backed by actors Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio and co-founded by Andrei Cherny, who worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and ran for Congress last year. “Cherny also served as a financial fraud prosecutor alongside Elizabeth Warren on what became the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” according to a profile in Forbes.
Cherny said Aspiration aimed to be a bank whose investments aligned with progressive ideology.
“When people move their money out of Chase, or Wells Fargo to Aspiration, they are saying, ‘I don’t want those dollars to fund the Dakota Access Pipeline or a gun manufacturer,’” he told Forbes. AlHusseini—the gun-toting alleged financial fraudster—was an Aspiration investor and board member.
