Discussion: Treasury Financial Crimes Dept. To Share Trump Team Records For Russia Probe

That’s the bad news.
The good news: they’ll be rehired immediately by the Trump organization since they’re so familiar with the business model.

5 Likes

so this is what a drained swamp looks like

8 Likes

Pond scum and lifeboats.

7 Likes

They didn’t get Capone for killing people. They got him for not paying taxes.

5 Likes

Mmmm…except that it doesn’t say anything about actual money laundering. The fines are for failures to audit and report (as required by law).

2 Likes

More bad news for Hair Furor

14 Likes

His tax records probably won’t reveal much, except maybe expose his claims of great wealth, which would be embarrassing.

Expect little about Russia.

1 Like

Wow. It took awhile for the cats vs. dogs outcome to sink in but now to find out that you don’t like roller coasters? It’s almost as if I don’t know you at all, mattinpa…

:wink:

4 Likes

Not holding my breath. Unless there was already an ongoing criminal investigation, FinCEN probably won’t have any relevant records. Chances that they have a criminal investigation that just happened to overlap with the timeframe of the 2016 elections and also the players in Trump’s campaign/transition teams seem small to me.

Edit to add: What’s really needed here is a targeted investigation, not the shreds of unrelated ones. Run money flows and transactions data for the past five years through a big-data number crunching effort to find patterns that relate to Trump and his shell companies. Run inet traffic patterns, phone and travel records as well. These agencies run in well-worn tracks. Unless they happen to drive right over top of something (or receive a tip), they don’t find it.

3 Likes

Correct…though it should be added, we shouldn’t expect his tax returns either.

Auditing all of Trump Org’s shell companies on the other hand…will reveal quite a bit. Its a badly kept secret that Trump Org has been in the business of laundering Russian money for at least a decade.

4 Likes

I think I read the casino paid a $10 or $15 million civil fine because of money laundering.

1 Like

If what you say is true, then he would be in jail by now.

I think I read the casino paid a $10 or $15 million civil fine because of money laundering.

No, they paid a fine for not reporting as required under the Bank Security Act.

1 Like

10 Likes

President Hatch, anyone?

3 Likes

What’s sad is that President Hatch would be a Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge improvement.

7 Likes

Well, here’s the press release. Maybe it’s technically a failure to report as required but there seems to be an underlying pattern where they escaped any criminal violation by inches. Question of how you read and interpret it and I don’t know much about this stuff but that’s a lot of money for being bad with paperwork.

5 Likes

There was a willfully and repeatedly included. That was nice.

4 Likes

As unpalatable as that sounds, it sounds a hellava lot better than President Pence or President Ryan.

I’m old enough to remember when Hatch was on the far right fringe of the R’s. Now he seems downright moderate - for them. He’s still a wingnut in the real word but, compared to other R’s, he skews to the middle or even slightly left.

9 Likes

Not really. First off, its difficult to prove that Trump Org is doing anything illegal. Money from Russia that goes through dozen holding companies in half a dozen countries, can be quite difficult to trace back to its source. And, depending upon when the laundering took place (ie before or after sanctions), it may not even be illegal to take their money. Secondly, there aren’t a infinite number of agents, or resources, dedicated to policing money laundering operations. Just consider Miami during the 80s…where banks had literally TOO much money, physically, to handle…vast amounts of it coming from money laundering schemes to clean money for drug barons and cartels. It didn’t spark a massive wave of crackdowns.

2 Likes
Comments are now Members-Only
Join the discussion Free options available