Donald Trump cabinet member and business associate co-owned Russian money laundering bank

| 7:10 pm EST February 27, 2017
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For the past few weeks, Palmer Report has been reporting on two separate Trump-Russia storylines. One involved a bank, which has loaned more than a billion dollars to Donald Trump, getting busted for Russian money laundering. The other involved Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev buying a house from Trump and then making the strange habit up flying into town wherever Trump goes. Now it turns out they’re two halves of the same Trump-Russia scandal.

As we’ve previously reported, Deutsche Bank has mysteriously loaned more than a billion dollars to Donald Trump and his business partners over the past few years, at a time when most other banks viewed him as too big a risk. We’ve also reported that Deutsche Bank was busted for laundering Russian money for clients in places like New York, where Trump lives, raising the question of whether its willingness to float loans to Trump was really just a cover for Russia to funnel money to him.

But as it turns out, Deutsche Bank was laundering the money through Bank of Cyprus. The two most prominent owners of Bank of Cyprus? One is Donald Trump’s associate Dmitry Rybolovlev (source). The other is Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross (source). That’s the missing link established by Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show tonight. And suddenly, you realize this is all one larger scandal.

Russia was laundering money into Deutsche Bank, through another bank owned by two Donald Trump associates, at the same time it just happened to be inexplicably loaning large sums of money to Trump even though he was a poor investment risk. Trump then rewarded one of the go-between bank’s owners by making him the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. And the other owner of the bank just happens to be the guy who does real estate business with Trump and keeps flying into whatever town Trump visits whenever he’s away from the White House.