Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.
This month, we learned that Capital One Bank closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?
We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.
But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?
While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.
And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.
Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.
Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.
This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on U.S. persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.
This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.
And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in a report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:
“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”
Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the U.S. was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.
And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.
Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he wasted the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that the Treasury will no longer be looking at.
In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.
Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:
“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:
“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)
Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.
And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.
Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.
And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”
So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.
The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.
So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.
For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.
And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.
Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.
This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.