Donald Trump tries to bribe Russian money laundering bank; instead it gives records to Robert Mueller
Last week Donald Trump rather blatantly tried to bribe Germany-based Deutsche Bank into covering for him. He had his Labor Department waive harsh penalties that had been levied primarily against Deutsche Bank, even as Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been trying to get the bank to turn over the financial records of Trump and Jared Kushner. Now it turns out that move has backfired rather spectacularly.
Not only has Deutsche Bank floated suspicious loans to Trump and Kushner, it’s also been busted for having helped launder billions of dollars in Russian money into the United States. That’s led to the rather obvious theory that those “loans” may have been cover for the Kremlin to funnel dirty money into the hands of the Trump family. Trump seemed to think that by giving Deutsche Bank a reprieve on its other violations, he could bribe the bank into keeping his family’s financial records hidden. Instead this prompted a series of events that took things in the opposite direction.
In what appears to have been a direct result of Trump’s move, the German government has cracked down on Deutsche Bank, forcing it to turn over “questionable transactions involving President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, or people or businesses near him” according to major German publication Handelsblatt Global (link). It goes on to spell out that not only has the bank turned over the records to the German government, it’s also turned over the records directly to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
In other words, Donald Trump took things too far in trying to protect himself in the Trump-Russia scandal and now it’s backfired. Robert Mueller would have ended up with those financial records eventually one way or the other. But now he’s getting the records sooner than he otherwise would have, as a direct result of Trump’s overreach. Trump is desperate and flailing, and it’s backfiring on him.
