Donald Trump owns 17 golf courses, mostly in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Dubai, according to Golf Monthly . And now, those golf courses appear to be under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of Mueller’s probe into Trump’s connections to Russia and whether Russians illegally helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
While Mueller and his investigators do not comment publicly on any aspect of their investigation, outside of official court documents, on Saturday the New York Daily News reported that the FBI is now investigating alleged immigration violations at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The allegations against the club — that club officials gave out fake green cards and Social Security numbers to undocumented immigrants, enabling them to work at the Bedminster course — were referred to the FBI by Mueller.
An attorney for two undocumented immigrants who allege that they worked at the Trump golf course using the counterfeit documentation provided by club officials called Mueller’s office and was told that the immigration matter was not part of their investigation, according to the Law and Crime blog.
The attorney later received a call from FBI agents, who told him that Mueller’s office had referred the immigration matter to the Bureau.
While it remains possible that Mueller’s office simply acted on the attorney’s phone call in making the referral, one expert on the Trump-Russia scandal believes there is more to the story behind the Mueller referral. According to Seth Abramson, who as Inquisitr has noted is author of the book Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America , the Mueller referral may have resulted from a wider investigation into Trump’s golf course operation.
“Yesterday we learned something significant: Robert Mueller is looking at Trump’s golf clubs,” Ambramson wrote on his Twitter account in a post that is now deleted. “It seems likely that this is because, several years ago, Eric Trump told a Golf Magazine reporter that Russians are (secretly) funding ‘all’ Trump’s golf courses.”
Abramson’s reference was to an incident in 2014 in which Trump’s younger son, Eric Trump, spoke to golf journalist James Dodson, who as Vanity Fair reported, was visiting the Trump National Golf Club in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“When I got in the cart with Eric as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course,” Dodson said in an interview with WBUR Radio . “You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”
Whether Eric Trump’s statements about Trump’s golf clubs receiving finding from Russia sparked an investigation by Mueller, or whether that possible investigation may be connected to the immigration referral has not been confirmed. But Ambramson believes that a connection exists.
“What many would conclude — I do — is Trump’s courses are in Mueller’s ambit, in Mueller’s view; Mueller didn’t quickly reject Romero’s referral because he needed to see if it connected to his probe; he went above/beyond by referring the case to the FBI,” Abramson wrote on Twitter .