No wonder Trump doesn’t want to leave the White House:
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has retained forensic accounting specialists to aid its criminal investigation of President Trump and his business operations, as prosecutors ramp up their scrutiny of his company’s real estate transactions, according to people familiar with the matter.
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. opened the investigation in 2018 to examine alleged hush-money payments made to two women who, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, claimed to have had affairs with him years earlier. The probe has since expanded, and now includes the Trump Organization’s activities more broadly, said the people familiar with the matter.
Vance has contracted with FTI Consulting to look for anomalies among a variety of property deals, and to advise the district attorney on whether the president’s company manipulated the value of certain assets to obtain favorable interest rates and tax breaks, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive. The probe is believed to encompass transactions spanning several years.
Spokesmen for Vance and FTI Consulting declined to comment.
Representatives for the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, company officials have rejected the merits of Vance’s investigation, calling it politically motivated.
Headquartered in Washington, FTI provides a range of financial advisory services to clients worldwide in public and corporate sectors. “We provide the industry’s most complete range of forensic, investigative, data analytic and litigation services,” according to a corporate brochure, which also noted FTI’s “extensive experience serving leading corporations, governments and law firms around the globe.”
The analysts hired by Vance probably have already reviewed various bank and mortgage records obtained from Trump’s company as part of the ongoing grand jury investigation, and they could be called on to testify about their findings should the district attorney eventually bring criminal charges, said the person familiar with the arrangement.
Vance is engaged in a long-running legal battle to obtain eight years of Trump’s tax records and other financial information from the president’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. Those records are considered the final piece of what is already a well-developed investigation, according to the person.
Trump can’t pardon his way out of this one.
On the other hand, I think we should probably be prepared to be disappointed. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s sleazebag way of doing business is perfectly legal. What’s legal in the real estate and development business is mind-boggling. And they may have been a lot more careful with his money than they ever were with other people’s.
Trump is worried about more than this. One of the unexplored theories about his unwillingness to sign the Defense Authorization bill is very likely to be of much bigger importance to him that confederate monuments:
The National Defense Authorization Act this year does something else, though, that seems to me of far more importance to the president than the naming of military bases.
It includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.
America is currently the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company which enables them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes. The measure will pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists dug into leaked documents from FinCEN this fall, they discovered shell companies moving money for criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria.
Shell companies also mean that our political system is awash in secrecy. Social media giants like Facebook cannot determine who is buying political advertising. And, as Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted, shell companies allow “foreign bad actors” to corrupt our system even more directly. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” he reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”
We know the Trump family uses shell companies: Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off Stormy Daniels, and just this month we learned that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner approved a shell company that spent more than $600 million in campaign funds.
The new requirements in the NDAA apply not just to future entities, but also to existing ones.
Trump has also sold thousands of real estate properties to shell companies, adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of such transactions to entities widely suspected to be laundering money. It’s been a huge part of his business model.
Of all the bills for Trump to veto this seemed to be the most unlikely of all. He loves to spend massive sums on the military and brags about it as his greatest accomplishment. I think this was likely the real reason and he thought he might be able to strongarm enough of his cult followers to stop the override. It didn’t work.
Trump is facing a whole bunch of serious financial problems which is one of the reasons why he’s so intent upon staying a major political figure for as long as possible. He will be able to claim that he’s being targeted for political reasons. And a lot of people will believe it. After all, that’s exactly what they would do in the Democrats’ position.
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