Trump-pardoned Weinstein faces fresh fraud charges

On Friday, November 14, Weinstein is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey. In the current case, the 51-year-old Lakewood native faces up to 50 years in prison for a series of schemes involving investor funds.

According to federal prosecutors, between 2021 and 2023 Weinstein and his partners told investors their money would be used to buy scarce medical equipment, baby formula, and medical kits that would then be shipped to Ukraine. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion, the story sounded convincing, so investors kept putting fresh money into the project. In reality, investigators say, the funds went toward gambling, luxury real estate, expensive watches, and payouts to earlier investors using money from new ones.

What makes this story even more striking is that Weinstein was caught in almost the same type of fraud about twenty years earlier. In the early 2010s, he twice pleaded guilty in multimillion-dollar cases involving real estate and securities. A New Jersey court put total losses for victims at more than 200 million dollars, and Weinstein received a 24-year prison term along with hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution. Supporters of the businessman later pushed for leniency, arguing that he had repented and become a model inmate. Weinstein received clemency from Donald Trump in January 2021, in the final days of Trump’s first term in the White House, and by December 2021 a fresh round of the old scheme was already underway.

To hide his past, Eliyahu introduced himself as Mike Konig and worked with several accomplices through a new company called Optimus Investments. They tried to keep his real biography away not only from new investors but also from some business partners, at least until those people had become deeply entangled in the scheme.

In the summer of 2023, federal authorities brought new charges against Weinstein and his co-defendants and announced their arrests, and in April 2025 a jury found Weinstein guilty of fraud and money laundering. U.S. regulators and law enforcement officials describe the structure he built as a Ponzi scheme that relied on hiding the true identity of its key organizer.

Alongside the criminal case, Weinstein and his associates are also facing civil lawsuits from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and from individual investors. For prosecutors, the case is a vivid reminder that people behind major financial crimes can return to old tactics almost immediately after walking out of prison. For politicians in Washington, the Weinstein verdict is likely to feed a new round of debate over how the presidential clemency process should work.