‘Special Counsel Is Taking an Overarching Approach’
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has expanded his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election to include the business transactions over the past decade of the Trump family’s businesses.Â
“FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008,” Bloomberg Politics reports, noting the “special counsel is taking an overarching approach.”
The financial dealings of President Donald Trump, his son-in-law and Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort are all being examined.
The news comes just hours after the president, in an interview Wednesday with The New York Times, threatened Mueller to not investigate his family’s finances. Asked if that would be crossing a “red line,” Trump said “yes.”
The FBI is “also interested in dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman before he became commerce secretary, as well as the efforts of Jared Kushner,” Bloomberg reports, “to secure financing for some of his family’s real estate properties. The information was provided by someone familiar with the developing inquiry but not authorized to speak publicly.”
Trump’s firing of the U.S. Attorneys, notably New York’s well-known and well-regarded Preet Bharara, is also coming into play.
“The roots of Mueller’s follow-the-money investigation lie in a wide-ranging money laundering probe launched by then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara last year,” which might be why Trump fired him after promising he could keep his job.
The Bloomberg report follows a report in The New York Times Wednesday that reveals banking regulators “are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele.”Â
The Times adds that Deutsche Bank “is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia,” and notes “Deutsche Bank has also lent money to Jared Kushner.”
The Times on Wednesday also published a separate report on Paul Manafort.
“Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016,” the Times revealed. “The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions.”
RELATED STORIES:
Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner Scheduled to Testify Before Senate Committees
To comment on this article and other NCRM content, visit our Facebook page.