One of the backbones of the German financial services industry, Deutsche Bank, has already found themselves involved in the ongoing Russia investigation by Robert Mueller’s special counsel, with the former Intel pro himself looking into Trump’s transactions at the bank, according to multiple reports in the New York Times and other outlets.
Now the rest of the family is about to be subjected to that same scrutiny, after the bank’s administrators have notified authorities that they observed “suspicious activity” on accounts tied to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, according to Manager Magazin, a German-language publication. German Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin also intends to notify Mueller himself of the activity, tied to real estate investments in Russia and around the globe.
The bank had previously refused to answer questions about millions of dollars in loans to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization when queries from the United States Congress first reached their desks in June of 2017. Deutsche Bank relied, in fact, on US bank secrecy laws in order to keep Trump’s financial obligations to the bank confidential, although there is no specific law governing international denials of information in a Congressional case.
And it’s not the amounts that were in question in the case of Trump assets — the bank willingly revealed that Trump owed in the neighborhood of $340 million in loans. What the bank would not reveal was whether or not any of the money was secured with guarantees with the Russian government, who have underwritten numerous real estate transactions in the former Soviet state for both Trump and his son-in-law.
The peek into Kushner’s ties to Russia via Deutsche Bank, however, is brand new to the investigation for financial regulators, Congress, and the Mueller team.
The investigation appears more and more to be one that will end in charges of money laundering, as many legal experts have been speculating for some time. The connections between Team Trump and Russia are well-established at this point, and the recent release of the Fusion GPS testimony from the House Intelligence Committee investigation only supported them further. Add that to the details we have gathered so far about the quid-pro-quo that took place in the infamous “secret meeting” at Trump Tower between high-ranking members of the Trump campaign and Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and it looks like Mueller has what could amount to a spy novel’s worth of intrigue when the charges finally cross a judge’s desk.
Featured image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images
