Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt has been accused by a former employee of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate of buying access to the former president. Brian Butler, a central witness in an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, spoke out in an exclusive interview with CNN.
Butler claimed that Pratt, one of Australia’s richest men and a member of Mar-a-Lago, flew in for a meeting with Trump in April 2021 and later divulged top-secret information about Russian submarines and US submarines.
According to Butler, Pratt immediately disclosed the classified information after the meeting, indicating that he was seeking access to Trump. Butler also mentioned that Pratt had spent $1 million for tickets to a Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve gala, which he believed was a way of buying access to Trump.
Pratt’s relationship with Trump has been scrutinized before. In a draft copy of a speech delivered to a Jewish group in late 2019, Pratt described how his membership at Mar-a-Lago gave him access to Trump, allowing him to see the president a few times a year.
Pratt has not responded to requests for comments about his relationship with Trump. The charges Trump faces over classified documents relate to material he took after leaving the White House in 2021, which were stored in boxes all over Mar-a-Lago, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.
They included information relating to nuclear programs and military vulnerabilities, to intelligence that should have only been shared with the intelligence heads of the Five Eyes countries, including Australia. Pratt could be one of dozens of witnesses in the trial against Trump, although the starting court date is yet to be determined.
Trump has argued that he is immune from prosecution by the Presidential Records Act and that criminal law involving the mishandling of national security secrets can’t be applied to him as a former president.
In addition to the trial related to classified documents, Trump also faces trials in Washington DC for trying to overthrow the 2020 election, in Georgia for trying to interfere in the election in that state, and in New York, starting this month, over alleged hush money paid to a porn star with whom he had an affair.
