Day 483: So much shady cash around Trump
Following a pattern of his real estate business, the amount of questionable money being thrown around Donald Trump and his team immediately after the election was staggering. In a single day, more news broke about dark money for Trump’s inauguration and Michael Cohen’s shameless solicitation of cash for access.
First, Trump raised an obscene amount of money for his inauguration.
The president’s inaugural committee, which is supposed to be a nonprofit organization, brought in $107 million in donations and used nearly all of it, far exceeding the money spent by Barack Obama in 2009 ($55 million) and in 2013 ($43 million). As has been revealed across several reports stemming from the release of the Trump Inaugural Committee’s tax return, the excess of funds may have been used for more than just trying and failing to convince Paul Anka to perform “My Way” at the Inaugural Ball.
Where the money has come from has drawn the eyes of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Interest in the inauguration money was reinvigorated last Friday, when ABC News revealed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating foreign donations to Trump’s inaugural fund, particularly those coming from individuals with ties to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Those questioned by investigators — including billionaire Thomas Barrack, who chaired the inaugural committee — were reportedly asked about specific donors, including Andrew Intrater, the CEO of Columbus Nova, one of the companies that paid Michael Cohen’s LLC for “consulting” advice in 2017. Columbus Nova is an affiliate of a larger company owned by Intrater’s cousin, Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration, and both he and Vekselberg were in attendance, as were several other figures with close ties to Russia.
The biggest question remains: where did the money go exactly?
Greg Jenkins, who oversaw George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural committee, was similarly perplexed about how Trump’s committee could have spent $107 million on inaugural events. “It’s inexplicable to me,” he told ProPublica. “I literally don’t know. They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did. So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.”
Some donors purposely hid where the money came from, opening questions as to why. With lax oversights on inauguration fundraising, it’s likely that some of these questions will remain obfuscated forever. A mind boggling amount — $26 million — flowed to Melania Trump’s friend via her event-planning business that just so happened to start weeks before the inauguration.
As if that wasn’t enough, Cohen was busy selling access to anyone who had a checkbook big enough. Among a variety of companies solicited, Cohen reportedly asked a Qatari investor for a cool $1 million while being intentionally opaque about where the money would go or what the access would do. The money grabs got so murky that banks were reporting Cohen’s transactions to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.
The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
But suddenly, other reports are suspiciously missing.
The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions — triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”
Whether the reports have been restricted by Mueller or the FBI — or whether something far more nefarious has happened — remains unclear.
What has become unequivocal this week — if it hadn’t in the previous 480-plus days — is that Trump and his team were keen to take money from virtually anyone at any time for any purpose. They haven’t drained the swamp. They are the swamp.
483 days in, 979 to go
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