Special Counsel Robert Mueller is following the money, but money doesn’t always talk.
Though much of the public discussion of the Russia election meddling investigation has been on “contacts” between Trump figures and potential representatives of Moscow, recent reports show the probe now includes a focus on financial dealings.
Even Steve Bannon, the President’s former adviser, said that “You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering,” according to Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury.”
Bannon has now been summoned to testify in the Russia probe, and may be asked about what he called the “greasy” business dealings of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as his “Fire and Fury” reference to Deutsche Bank, the German lender that reportedly received a subpoena from Mueller last year.
Former campaign chair Paul Manafort has already been arrested on alleged money laundering charges stemming from his work in Ukraine, and a report from Buzzfeed on Wednesday says that Mueller is investigating suspicious transfers from the Russian government in the United States.
In one set of transfers the Russian Embassy in the U.S. sent $2.4 million in hundreds of payments to a home improvement company, though the company was viewed as too small to have done any work on the embassy and the funds soon were sluiced elsewhere.
The subpoena and wire transfer investigations suggest that investigators are probing all sides to see if any of the financial trails connect, but uncovering any potential financial crimes by Trump or his associates, if they exist, would take extensive digging by Mueller’s team.
To prove money laundering prosecutors need to prove that the source funds are illegal, and that those involved knew of the illegality, according to Chris Quick, a former FBI agent for 26 years who worked on money laundering investigations including in the Czech Republic.
“I’ve had it in a case. You say ‘I’ve got ’em now. I’ve got the big check payable to so in so going to this bank account,’ and you think that’s going to prove your case,” said Quick, who now runs North Carolina investigative firm Quick LLC.
“But all you got is a check with a big dollar amount. The check can’t testify. You need a witness to back up that check. It boils down to witnesses and testimony.”
The reported subpoena of Deutsche Bank is likely based on the progress of the Russia investigation so far, which has received guilty pleas from former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, both for lying to investigators.
Deutsche Bank is of particular interest because of its extensive relationship with Trump, who said in June financial disclosures that he owes the bank $130 million.
The Financial Times reported in August, citing sources, that the amount is more akin to $300 million.
Deutsche Bank itself has also been entangled in money laundering scheme, and was fined last year by British and New York regulators for failing to stop an elaborate “mirror-trading” scheme that moved $10 billion out of Russia.
A criminal probe from the Department of Justice into that scheme is ongoing.
It is not known exactly which documents were included in the Mueller subpoena, first reported by the German newspaper Handelsblatt, and Trump’s lawyer has denied that the request was “relating to the President.”
The Russian Embassy in the U.S., responding to the Buzzfeed report on its money transfers, said that “all the transactions which have been carried out through the American financial system fully comply with the legislation of the United States.”
But illicit international money movements, by design, functions through layers of entities such as LLCs and offshore accounts, and can include seemingly disconnected groups of people money moving around to different banks in order to make transactions look legitimate.
Beyond attention to those in Trump’s campaign, congressional investigations have focused on the people that he surrounded himself with in his business career.
One is Felix Sater, a Brooklynite businessman with a fraud conviction who played up his connections to Russia when he communicated with Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen during the campaign about a Trump Tower project in Moscow.
Investments from the post-Soviet world, including by some wealthy businessmen accused of money laundering, have also flowed into Trump and Trump-branded properties over the years.
William Fitzgibbon, an editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists who has worked on the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and the leak of Swiss bank accounts at HSBC, said that financial investigations from journalists often center around illuminating the real ties behind money movements in a shell game.
“I think the phrase ‘linked to’ is key in this kind of situation … ‘Linked to’ will often be the key to getting to the bottom of what’s going on,” he told the News.
In the case of HSBC, the account files leaked to him also contained information about other linked accounts from family members and partners.
It is not clear if accounts from Deutsche Bank would have similar information.
Quick said that potential information from the Mueller subpoena, where the target is unknown, could range from a relatively small amount of documentation dealing with publicly known loans to Trump to more extensive records on transfers in and out of a bank account if one is queried.
An expanding web of financial ties can lead to more people for journalists, or investigators, to talk to, with hopes that someone will both have insight into alleged schemes and be under the right sorts of ethical or legal pressure to give that insight to investigators.
“That’s why the FBI will work with these foreign law enforcement agencies and see if they can come up with something that will stick in that country to get that individual to cooperate or talk,” Quick said, adding that his former agency has offices all over the world.
Fitzgibbon said that the differences between countries and authorities’ speed of cooperation can be a pitfall for investigators following the scent of dirty money.
“There are a number of problems, one of which is that it can take an extraordinary amount of time, and who knows what is happening to the money or the paper trail in between the time when that request was first made to a foreign jurisdiction and when the request is granted,” he said.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing and said that Mueller looking at his personal finances would be crossing a line was reportedly told that the Russia investigation would conclude by Thanksgiving, and expressed anger that it is still engulfing his presidency.
It is not known what stage the Mueller investigation is in, though the government’s request for a May trial date in Manafort’s case was rejected and the Washington D.C. federal judge said that it could start in the fall.
