“A Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family has been outed as a fraud after she allegedly infiltrated former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate,” the New York Post says (see story here).
Her Florida driver’s license gives her name as Anna de Rothschild, and her address as 1240 S. Venetian Way, Miami Beach. The name is fake, the address is real, a mansion Redfin values at $20.5 million (here), but she’s never lived there. Her real name is Inna Yashchyshyn, a Ukrainian-born multilingual daughter of an Illinois truck driver, and her partner is a Florida-based Russian oligarch whose name doesn’t matter (at least not here).
The Rothschilds were the world’s richest family during much of the 19th century, and while the family’s fortunes have substantially faded, their name is still synonymous with extreme wealth (details here).
“She appeared at numerous Mar-a-Lago functions mingling with the likes of Trump, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham,” the Post says (photo below). While president of a Florida-based charity founded by her Russia partner, which was suspected of fraudulently soliciting donations.
She previously “worked in a suburban Miami business connecting pregnant Russian women to Americans looking to adopt a child,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Mention of Russian adoptions raises my antennae, and may raise yours, too, if you’ve been regularly reading this blog (see my posting here).
“Yashchyshyn, 33, is now the subject of several federal investigations,” the Post says. “She’s additionally under investigation by Canadian authorities for alleged financial crimes” there. By a major-crimes unit of Canadian police. The Post-Gazette, which looked into her background, provides details here.
Why should readers of American newspapers and this blog care if a slick hustler adopted a pose to gain entry to Trump’s club and rub elbows with the rich and famous, in order to make contacts and maybe scam them? Under normal circumstances, this would be a pedestrian case for a local police department’s bunko unit.
Because Trump stashed highly sensitive government records there, and his club leaks like a sieve.
As the Post-Gazette explains, “The ability of Ms. Yashchyshyn … to bypass the security at Mr. Trump’s club demonstrates the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background can get into a facility that’s one of America’s power centers and the epicenter of Republican Party politics.”
The authorities are going to nail her. There’s no question she broke laws. Fake passports, fake driver’s license, probably embezzled or stole money, and lied to investigators, too. They’ll get her for that.
But the FBI doesn’t investigate that kind of stuff. I suspect what they really want to know is whether she’s a spy, like the Chinese women who walked into Mar-a-Lago, storehouse of government secrets, equally unquestioned and unimpeded.