A woman who claimed to be a member of the Rothschild banking family mingled with Donald Trump and the former president's guests in multiple visits to his Mar-a-Lago estate, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The OCCRP, a network of investigative journalists, says "Anna de Rothschild" was actually Inna Yashchyshyn, a 33-year-old Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine who was president of an allegedly fraudulent charity with possible links to Russian crime gangs, the Telegraph reports. The United Hearts of Mercy charity, founded by Russian oligarch Valery Tarasenko, is being investigated by the FBI and Canadian authorities.
Yashchyshyn, daughter of an Illinois truck driver, allegedly claimed to be an heiress, had fake IDs in the Rothschild name, and boasted about her connections to big real estate projects. "It wasn’t just dropping the family name. She talked about vineyards and family estates and growing up in Monaco," says former investment banker John LeFevre. Other guests "fawned all over her and because of the Rothschild mystique, they never probed and instead tiptoed around her with kid gloves," he says. She attended a May 1, 2021 fundraiser as a guest of Elki Adamker, founder of a New York financial services company.
The deception apparently wasn't detected until March 2022, the OCCRP reports. Music promoter Dean Lawrence says Trump insiders were startled when he told them she was an impostor. Yashchyshyn—who appeared in photos with Trump, Sen Lindsey Graham, and other politicians during visits to Mar-a-Lago in 2021—tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that she doesn't know Anna de Rothschild and she thinks there has been "some misunderstanding." Her reasons for allegedly infiltrating Mar-a-Lago are unclear. "The question is was it a fraud or an intelligence threat," says Charles Marino, a former Secret Service supervisor. "The fact that we are asking this question is a problem." (More Mar-a-Lago stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
