Feds tie Donald Trump to new international money laundering scheme
Robert Mueller and the Feds are already hot on the trail of investigating Donald Trump and his family’s ties to Russian money laundering, pay-to-play schemes with the United Arab Emirates, and other international financial crimes. Now it turns out the Feds have also tied Trump to yet another money laundering scheme, this time directly involving a foreign leader, and bringing a new nation deeply into the conversation for the first time.
The Feds have been investigating the Prime Minister of Malaysia for money laundering, and that’s a problem for Trump, because the Feds were seizing the Prime Minister’s assets even as Trump was hosting the Prime Minister at the White House. Where did the Prime Minister stay while in Washington DC? Trump’s hotel. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Rachel Maddow has reported on a massively complex scandal and investigation which strongly suggests that Trump has been helping the Prime Minister of Malaysia to launder that money. So now what?
We’ll see how much or little media traction this story gets – but at this point that may not matter. The key here is that Mueller and the Feds are on the case, which means it isn’t going away. Several months ago the media exposed that Trump associate Erik Prince met with Russia in the Seychelles, allegedly to try to negotiate some kind of shady backchannel between Trump and the Russian government. That story quickly faded from the headlines. Then this week it was reported that Mueller has stayed on it all along, and now he has a cooperating witness who was deeply involved in the meeting, meaning that Prince is going to have to answer for whatever he did.
This new money laundering story about Donald Trump and the Prime Minister of Malaysia will play out the same way. If the media leads dry up, we may not hear about it again for a bit. But since we know that Robert Mueller is onto it, and we’ve seen that he meticulously pursues every one of these threads until he unravels it, we’ll hear about the Malaysia thing again later once Mueller has flipped someone. In the mean time, how many corrupt world leaders are going down as part of Trump’s scandals?
