OPINION — “Do the Russians continue to hold some financial leverage over the president?” That is one question Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) will be looking to get answered as he looks forward to January when he will take over the chairmanship of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
“If the president was willing to mislead the country about efforts to get a Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the presidential campaign, is he still willing to mislead the country about financial connections that continue to this day?” Schiff asked during an interview last Thursday on CNN.
I expect that Schiff, when he becomes chairman, will make it a priority for the panel to investigate whether Trump’s financial interests have impacted the direction he’s taken with regard to U.S. foreign policy.
On Sunday, during his appearance on ABC’s This Week, Schiff illustrated how the proposed Moscow Trump Tower deal would have led to compromising U.S. policy. “In order for this [Moscow Trump Tower]…deal to go through, sanctions had to be lifted on a Russian state bank…It means that the president, whether he won or lost, was hoping to make money from Russia, was seeking at the same time to enlist the support of the Kremlin to make that money.”
Making it worse, according to Schiff, was that when the deal became public through Michael Cohen’s recent guilty plea, it showed that Cohen had emailed Vladimir Putin’s top aide, Dmitry Peskov, requesting help in getting the stalled Trump Tower project moving again.
And Russia is not the only country on Schiff’s mind when it comes to President Trump’s foreign policies being influenced by his personal finances. “Was the president being honest when he said [during the 2016 presidential campaign] that he gets tens of millions of dollars from the Saudis?’ Schiff asked during the CNN interview. “Or,” Schiff said, “[is] what he’s saying now [true], when he denies having any kind of financial relationship with the Saudis?”
What about the Trump organization’s many financial ties to China, which are ongoing as President Trump carries out his off-and-on trade war with Beijing?
“The largest American office of China's largest bank [government-owned Industrial & Commercial Bank of China] sits on the 20th floor of New York City’s Trump Tower,” Forbes Magazine wrote last February. More important, the article pointed out, the estimated $2 million-a-year lease expires in October next year, and Donald J. Trump has a direct financial interest in its renewal on favorable terms.
Schiff said, “It is important, I think, that Americans can know and have reasonable confidence that the president is acting in our national interest and not in his family's financial interest.”
It’s not limited to Trump alone. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who maintains financial interests through trusts in his family’s enterprise, Kushner Companies, is dealing with Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries in his role as negotiator of a peace plan for the region. Kushner Companies has multi-million-dollar investments from Israeli banks and insurance companies, including some arranged since Jared Kushner joined the White House staff.
Another financial target Schiff mentioned in connection with Trump was Deutsche Bank, which last week, was the subject of major searches by German police and prosecutors, based on allegations of money laundering.
“We have seen Deutsche Bank within the last couple years sanctioned in the hundreds of millions by the State of New York for laundering money, and Deutsche Bank was apparently the only bank willing to do business with the Trump Organization,” Schiff said.
Deutsche Bank has said it will cooperate fully with requests from the public prosecutor's office.
“Why is it that the president's son [Donald Jr.] at various times has said that a disproportionate share of their assets come from Russia,” Schiff said, adding, “This may be a leverage the Russians have, and if it is, we need to find out about it. And if it's not true, we need to be able to tell the American people that as well.”
Mueller’s investigators have been reported as looking into one of the first Trump connections to Russian money, which involves Deutsche Bank. It was the $90 million, 2008 sale to a Russian fertilizer oligarch of a Palm Beach mansion that Trump had bought just years earlier for $40 million. In the midst of the financial meltdown that year, Trump needed the funds to pay off a personal guarantee of $40 million he had on a loan that was due from Deutsche Bank. How did that deal get put together?
In 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that since 1998, the Deutsche Bank “has led or participated in loans of at least $2.5 billion to companies affiliated with Mr. Trump.”
Schiff told CNN, “We do intend to look into the issue of whether the Russians were laundering money through the Trump organization, because that would be powerful leverage the Russians might have and it might explain why the president is behaving the way he is.”
Another early focus for the House Intelligence panel will be the run-up to the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and a group of Russians.
Schiff said there were a series of prior calls between Don Jr., and Russian intermediaries to determine whether the offer of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton was real, and worth having top campaign aides attend.
“Sandwiched in between those calls is a call from a blocked number,” Schiff said. Since Donald Trump used a blocked cellphone at that time, “the obvious question is,” according to Schiff, was that blocked call to or from Trump, and was the conversation about the Russian offer?
Schiff said the Democrats wanted to subpoena those Trump phone records, but the Republican majority refused. January will be different, “We do want to know, and that's going to be I think an early step that we take when we're in the majority,” approving subpoenas for those phone records.
An added reason for getting them, Schiff said, was “because one of the things that we learned this week was the president apparently denies to Mueller in the written questions that he knew about the Trump Tower meeting in advance.”
Schiff has been a vocal critic of his Republican colleagues' failure to pursue leads related to alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. With his expected chairmanship of the intelligence panel in January, he appears prepared to take a path not previously taken — that is to follow the money.
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