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Ex-FBI agent Babak Broumand will be spending a long time on the wrong side of the prison bars. When you hear what he did to get there, you’ll understand exactly why Americans don’t trust the Federal Bureau of Instigation. He was convicted Tuesday of “accepting at least $150,000 in gifts and cash bribes to provide confidential information to a man with organized crime ties.”
Agent lived in luxury
As part of his duties, FBI agent Babak Broumand “handled national security issues.” In 2015, he decided to switch sides for fun and profit.
The 56-year-old resident of Lafayette, California, went on trial in Los Angeles, where he was convicted in federal court of “conspiracy, bribery of a public official and monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity.”
The former agent is going to spend somewhere between 15 and 45 years in a little box with bars but won’t learn his final fate until sentencing in January. The judge won’t take the way he leveraged his duties to cash in lightly. Broumand spent a decade working on national security investigations.
FBI Gets SLAMMED By Former Agents https://t.co/i6Et3XfbM3 via @Deep State Rabbit Hole
— Kilgore Trout (@Kilgore73862013) October 2, 2022
According to prosecutors, from 2015 to 2018, he graciously accepted “cash, checks, private jet flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, meals, and other items of value.”
In return his benefactors had him using law enforcement databases like Google search. Working for a guy who called himself a lawyer with some shady “criminal associates” Broumand was their early warning system to “learn if they were under investigation and avoid prosecution.”
The court documents refer to “E.S.” but on the ball reporters doxxed him as “Edgar Sargsyan, who earlier pleaded guilty to bribing Broumand and another federal agent and testified at his trial.”
Beverly Hills cigar club
Broumand was introduced to Sargsyan at a Beverly Hills cigar club and the rest was history. “Sargsyan has admitted making a fortune by stealing identities, making credit card charges and taking out bank loans in their names.” He lied about being a lawyer.
What he did was have an attorney friend “take the bar exam under his name” for cash. He never planned to actually argue a case in court anyway. The agent knew exactly how to help him cook their books.
“To conceal the nature of their corrupt relationship,” agent Broumand “made it falsely appear that E.S. was working as an FBI source.” To back that up, he “wrote false reports stating he was making legitimate database queries.”
#DailyBrief: Ex-FBI Agent Found Guilty of Selling U.S. Intelligence; Caruso’s Massive Mayoral Race Spending https://t.co/lqOyPQdh5U
— Los Angeles Magazine (@LAmag) October 6, 2022
For instance, one search “involved Levon Termendzhyan, whom prosecutors described as an Armenian organized crime figure for whom Sargsyan had worked.” Coincidentally, “Termendzhyan was convicted in 2020 in a Utah federal court of involvement in a $1 billion fraud scheme involving renewable fuel tax credits.”
The whole scheme unraveled one fateful day when Sargsyan was pulled over by traffic cops. The phony lawyer “who had made a fortune through identity theft,” whipped “a laminated piece of paper out of the glove box and handed it to the officers.”
It was a parking placard with the Department of Justice seal on one side and an FBI agent’s business card taped on the back. Instead of getting “him out of a minor jam,” the 2016 traffic stop “set in motion a cascade of events that led to the conviction Tuesday of a decorated FBI agent on federal charges of bribery and money laundering.“
