Financial accounts controlled by both Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner — who is also the scion of a major New York real estate development family — were flagged by Deutsche Bank for “suspicious” activity that could be linked to international money laundering, according to a blockbuster exposé published Sunday by The New York Times . The possible money laundering activity by Trump and Kushner would not be something that took place long ago. The activity occurred in 2016 and 2017, at least partly during the time since Trump has occupied the White House.
But when Deutsche Bank employees charged with detecting suspicious activities on the Trump and Kushner accounts attempted to file reports with the United States Treasury Department, top bank executives “rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government,” The Times reported.
Following Trump’s casino bankruptcies in the early 1990s, most banks stopped extending credit to Trump, as Inquisitr has earlier reported. But there was one notable exception — the Germany-based, multinational Deutsche Bank, which took up the mantle of Trump’s chief creditor, loaning Trump more than $1 billion over about a decade starting in the mid-1990s.
During that period, perhaps Trump’s closest contact inside the bank was Justin Kennedy, son of former United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, as The New York Times reported.
The elder Kennedy suddenly and unexpectedly stepped down from the court in June of 2018, and The Times reported that his retirement may have been the result of a “quiet campaign” by Trump to create a new Supreme Court vacancy.
Former Deutsche Bank employee Tammy McFadden and five other money laundering specialists at the bank said that after computer systems flagged suspicious activity on the Trump and Kushner accounts, they prepared reports, as bank policies required, for submission to the U.S. Treasury Department. But higher-ups at the bank quashed the reports, The Times reported.
“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens. It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything,” said McFadden, quoted by The Daily Beast . McFadden was later fired by the bank for “questioning the bank’s practices,” according to the Daily Beast summary of the Times report.
Trump last month filed a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank intended to stop the bank from honoring subpoenas from congressional committees seeking financial information on Trump’s businesses, as USA Today reported.
Deutsche Bank has run into trouble over money laundering activities before. According to a CNN report, the bank was slapped with $630 million in penalties in 2017 over its role in a $10 billion Russian money laundering operation.