Thomas Barrack is accused by prosecutors of acting as an undisclosed agent for the government of the United Arab Emirates.
A lawyer for Thomas J. Barrack Jr., an informal adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, told jurors Wednesday that accusations that his client was an illegal foreign agent were “nothing short of ridiculous” — and that prosecutors had inflated “inconsequential acts” into a supposed plot in which Mr. Barrack agreed to betray his country.
“He did things because he wanted to,” the lawyer, Michael Schachter, said on the first day of Mr. Barrack’s trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on charges that he acted secretly at the direction of the United Arab Emirates. “The idea that Tom Barrack was controlled by anybody is nonsense.”
In opening statements on Wednesday, prosecutors and lawyers for Mr. Barrack faced off in a case that could shed light on the Trump administration and on efforts by foreign governments to gain influence or push for favorable positions in the United States.
Mr. Barrack is one of several people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including some who served in his administration, who came under legal or ethical scrutiny for their connections overseas. Michael T. Flynn, who briefly was Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, admitted in 2017 to having been a foreign agent for a Turkish businessman.
Prosecutors have accused Mr. Barrack, a Los Angeles-based private-equity investor, of using his sway with Mr. Trump to advance the interests of the Emiratis, serving as a secret back channel for communications without disclosing his efforts to the attorney general, as the government contends he should have.
U.S. law requires anybody “operating under the control of foreign governments or foreign officials,” other than diplomats, to register with the U.S. attorney general. Mr. Barrack faces a charge that the Justice Department has described as “espionage lite,” because it typically involves “espionage-like or clandestine behavior.”
He faces nine counts in all, including acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, obstruction of justice and making false statements: Prosecutors say Mr. Barrack repeatedly lied to F.B.I. agents when questioned in 2019 about his dealings with the Emiratis.
He is on trial alongside his former assistant, Matthew Grimes, who was charged only on the lobbying counts. Both were arrested in July 2021.
The government’s first witness in the case, an expert on the Gulf States, is expected to continue testifying Thursday.
Wednesday’s opening statements hinted at the story each side hopes to tell the jury at the trial, which is expected to last several weeks. In Mr. Schachter’s telling, Mr. Barrack is “his own man,” a hard-working father of six who built a towering career in finance from middle-class roots.
Mr. Barrack has worked for decades in real estate finance, which is how he did business — and became friends — with Mr. Trump in the 1980s. Mr. Barrack stepped down last year from his role as executive chairman of Colony Capital, the investment firm that he founded in 1991 and that has since been rebranded as DigitalBridge Group Inc.
In 2010, Mr. Barrack met Mr. Grimes, then 16, when the teenager was hired as the D.J. at Mr. Barrack’s son’s eighth-grade graduation party, Mr. Grimes’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in his opening statement. Mr. Grimes secured a high school internship at Colony and climbed the ladder with Mr. Barrack’s support. His lawyer portrayed Mr. Grimes as a devoted “gofer” who fetched smoothies for his boss and operated only at Mr. Barrack’s direction.
In the government’s opening statement, a prosecutor, Hiral Mehta, said that Mr. Barrack “illegally provided a foreign nation with access and influence at the highest levels of the United States government.” Mr. Barrack, he said, tried to influence U.S. policy and agreed to pass on sensitive intelligence to the Emiratis “in the corrupt pursuit of money and power.”
Mr. Barrack — an Arabic speaker of Lebanese descent — did not notify the attorney general, because it would have made him useless to the U.A.E., Mr. Mehta said. The effort “would have been outed for what it was: a foreign influence and intelligence campaign,” the prosecutor said.
“The actions they took were not business; they were crimes,” he said.
Mr. Mehta said Mr. Barrack’s agreement with the Emiratis began when Mr. Trump was a candidate, in 2016, and escalated as Mr. Trump moved toward the Oval Office and Mr. Barrack became more useful.
In one May 2016 instance cited by Mr. Mehta on Wednesday, Mr. Barrack drafted a speech for Mr. Trump in which he praised, by name, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Emirati ruler who was at the time the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
As the speech went through revisions, Mr. Barrack protested when the name was cut and worked with campaign officials to ensure the remarks kept a positive reference to Persian Gulf allies, prosecutors said. (According to the indictment, after the speech, a senior Emirati official emailed Mr. Barrack to say “everybody here are very happy with the results.”)
Opening statements on both sides Wednesday touched on a central contention of the government: that Mr. Barrack, while serving the Emirati government, also sought money from the Gulf nation’s leaders for investment funds. Mr. Schachter said his client’s interactions with those leaders — including a biking excursion “in the searing desert heat” with a member of the Emirati ruling family — were entirely normal for the head of an investment firm.
A third defendant, Rashid al-Malik, an Emirati businessman who left the United States in 2018 after federal agents interviewed him, remains at large, prosecutors said.
Mr. Lowell told the jury that his client had never agreed to serve as an agent for the U.A.E. “A person cannot become a foreign agent by accident,” he said.
Instead, Mr. Lowell said, Mr. Grimes, 29, was an eager young man who had been doing his job as Mr. Barrack’s assistant — a job that included buying coffee, stocking the Colony Capital plane with food, coordinating meetings and drafting pitches — but did not, for example, include traveling with Mr. Barrack to meetings in foreign countries.
He compared the prosecutors to desperate prospectors. “The prosecutors thought there was some offense to be uncovered by this 22-year-old assistant, and they dug and they dug,” said Mr. Lowell. “There’s no gold here,” he added, “only rocks.”
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