The embezzlement scheme that led to Le Pen's elections ban

Scrutiny of Le Pen's practices began in June 2014, when the EU's antifraud office received an anonymous tip

- Noemie Bisserbe & Stacy Meichtry

Marine Le Pen convened a meeting of her party's European Parliament lawmakers in June 2014 to discuss a vital matter: how to spend the 6.5 million euros the European Union had earmarked for them to hire assistants.

The sum was significant, more than double the entire payroll of Le Pen's far-right party, then known as the National Front. Le Pen, according to court documents, asked the lawmakers to sign off on a system that allowed the Le Pen family to hand out contracts and cut paychecks to members of her inner circle and other party officials.

"What Marine is asking us is equivalent to signing for fictitious jobs," one of the lawmakers, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, wrote in an email at the time to the party's then-treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just. "And it is the lawmaker who is criminally responsible for his or her own money, even if the party is the beneficiary of it."

De Saint-Just, a trained lawyer who had groomed Le Pen to lead the party, responded: "I believe that Marine knows all this."

Le Pen's instructions to lawmakers were at the center of an embezzlement trial that ended this past Monday with judges banning one of France's most prominent politicians from future elections, including the next presidential race.

President Trump and other nationalist leaders around the world have railed against France's judiciary over the ban, claiming that the ruling is part of an effort by leftist elites to weaponize justice systems against their political opponents and subvert democracy. Trump himself has dismissed Le Pen's trial as a witch hunt stemming from a "bookkeeping error" that "she probably knew nothing about."