House Democrats plan to launch a wide-ranging probe of President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — with a focus on alleged money laundering.
The Democratic majority intends to hold a series of public hearings that would take place during the 2020 campaign to examine the president’s financial ties to Russian oligarchs, and to question the interpreter present during Trump’s face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin, reported Axios.
The aggressive plans were laid out Tuesday by a Democratic lawmaker during a roundtable discussion with reporters, and that congressional member said the majority plans interviews with new witnesses and follow-up interviews with witnesses that Republicans allowed to “stonewall.”
At least three committees are involved in the planned hearings.
The House Intelligence Committee will coordinate with House Financial Services to investigate possible money laundering, and Axios reporter Jonathan Swan told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that congressional investigators were particularly interested in the $400 million in cash Trump spent on real estate in the 2000s.
“In the nine years before he ran for president,” the Washington Post reported in May 2018, “Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described ‘King of Debt.’”
Democrats are also considering investigations into Trump’s private meeting with Putin, and may subpoena the interpreter or the interpreter’s notes, and they intend to probe the president and his family’s dealings in Russia during the 2016 campaign.
“If we didn’t look at his business,” the Democratic lawmaker said, “we wouldn’t know what we know now about his efforts to pursue what may have been the most lucrative deal of his life, the Trump Tower in Moscow — something the special counsel’s office has said stood to earn the family hundreds of millions of dollars.”