House Democrats May Investigate Alleged Trump Ties to Russian Money Laundering

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/house-democrats-may-investigate-alleged-trump-ties-to-russian-money-laundering/

Rep. Adam Schiff has said he wants to look into whether "this is the leverage that the Russians have over the president."

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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has signaled plans to use his newly won subpoena power to aggressively investigate whether Russian interests laundered money through Donald Trump’s businesses and used the connection as leverage over the president, a line of inquiry sure to enrage Trump.

Schiff and other committee Democrats have recently said they do not intend to launch an entirely new Russia probe but will instead pursue investigative angles that other inquiries have not delved into. Schiff has repeatedly asserted that the question of whether Trump’s businesses relied on laundered Russian funds tops that list.

“No one has investigated the issue of whether the Russians were laundering money through the Trump Organization and this is the leverage that the Russians have over the president of the United States,” Schiff said at a Brookings Institution panel discussion last month, before Democrats regained control of the House in the midterm elections. He reiterated that sentiment in an NPR interview on Wednesday.

In a report issued in March after Republicans abruptly ended the Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Russia probe, committee Democrats said they want to gather more information on Trump’s past financing by Deutsche Bank, which in 2017 was hit with $630 million in fines from US and UK regulators over its involvement in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme. “We have only begun to explore the relationship between President Trump and Deutsche Bank, and between the bank and Russia,” the lawmakers wrote. They said they hope to ask: “Did the Russian government, through business figures close to the Kremlin, seek to court Donald Trump and launder funds through the Trump Organization; and did candidate Trump’s financial exposure via Deutsche Bank or other private loans constitute a point of leverage that Russia may have exploited and may still be using?”

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