...Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.
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.
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.”
Consider who has access to that enforcement network, maybe Treasury, maybe Justice Department, maybe the White House. Someone in one of those offices - now under sway of donald trump and anybody else tied to Cohen - was actively scrubbing evidence out of a database nobody should be tampering with in the first place.
Remember the words from All The President's Men - the line itself was never directly spoken by Mark Felt, AKA Deep Throat, but Woodward condensed the warnings from Felt into a coherent phrase - about "Follow the Money." The one constant in every real scandal is the money. In trump's case, it's money coming from his questionable ties to foreign businesses and oligarchs looking to launder money and buy favors.
This is serious criminal shit here, folks.
Whine all you want about whether or not trump got help from Russia to steal the 2016 elections - by the by, HE DID - but you can't hide from the reality that trump and more and more of his fellow Republican toadies are selling themselves and this nation out to corrupt powers on a global scale.
We are so very royally goddamn fucked.
Update (5/19/18): Apparently the disappearance of those two SARs didn't mean they were deleted, they were placed under more restrictive access. This is still troubling as this may be an attempt to hide these documents from investigators. I may have jumped the gun about the possibility of trump's people destroying evidence, but the threat is still there...
3 comments:
Another possibility is that Mueller or the SDNY blocked access to those two documents in order to protect their investigations from any of the other hundred thousand or so people with access to the FinCEN database, who might have ideas about using that information in ways they believe would protect the targets of said investigations.
The source was right to freak out, either way, and it's somewhat reassuring that someone was on the ball enough to notice and try to expose what could be a Watergate Tapes level attempt at the destruction of evidence.
-Doug in Oakland
I've seen a followup that the documents in question were placed on a restricted viewing list, which seems better than just someone outright destroying that evidence... but the way it was done and apparently without anybody else knowing about the move suggests someone in the chain of command was trying to hide it from the investigators. Otherwise that security officer who leaked the third one would have known.
This is still a fishy situation, and considering how serious the likelihood Cohen - with trump's knowledge/support - was money laundering and seeking bribes, there still needs to be a question of who actually made the decision to hide these SARs and if that person was acting on someone else's orders.
Two or three weeks ago Avenatti was stressing the importance of releasing the SARS. He knows something, probably a lot of somethings. I know he wants access to them in some form and the latest revelations point out the urgency. Whether Mueller was already on the case with them remains to be seen, although the notion of Mueller blocking access seems to be quite the coincidence. Initially I wondered if Avenatti was trying to catch Mueller's ear regarding the SARS, but with his constant presence on the media plus his tendency to be correct with his predictions I suppose he could have a more direct way to contact him.
The corruption is so patently obvious that I worry about our country in a big way.
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