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Foreign. From Capitol One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Instead, it stated the accounts were closed for for anti money laundering reasons. It said transaction patterns had triggered the review. President Donald J. Trump has maintained that banks refused to do business with him after January 6, 2021, for political reasons. As Alison Morrow of CNN reported yesterday, Trump and his supporters, including cryptocurrency Ventures, have used the idea that they were being debanked because of their political beliefs to claim they are vict. Last year, Trump and the Trump Organization sued Capital One in federal court in Florida, saying they had sustained considerable financial harm after the bank closed about 385 of their accounts. Observers note that the story of Trump wanting immunity from IRS audits and the revelation that his bank activity mirrored that of money launderers might well be the same story. That story recalls the work of national security specialist Natasha Bertrand in 2018, when she reported in the Atlantic that Trump's rabid attacks on FBI and Justice Department officials centered on those with extensive experience in investigating money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they interfaced with Russia. Trump went after officials he claimed were Democrats who were part of a witch hunt against him as they examined the ties of his 2016 campaign to Russian operatives. But Bertrand pointed out that his primary targets Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Andrew Weissman, Andrew McCabe all specialized in investigations into organized crime and money laundering. She noted that the probe into the Trump campaign's ties to Russian operatives was primarily a counterintelligence investigation, and that Russia's criminal syndicates and intelligence services had become increasingly intertwined. In July 2017, Trump told the New York Times that it would be unacceptable for those investigating his campaign's ties to Russia to look at his or his family's personal personal finances. That would be a red line, he said. I have no income from Russia. I don't do business with Russia. This denial contradicts Donald Trump Jr's 2008 statement that Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets and Eric Trump's 2014 boast, we don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. Bertrand noted that Trump's links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters were documented and that his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J. was repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money laundering controls. Financial irregularities surrounding Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein are also in the news today. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon who is famous for following money trails, doggedly released a report saying that JPMorgan Chase, bank of America and Deutsche bank held off on filing required suspicious activity reports in transactions associated with Jeffrey Epstein. The report, titled Looking the Other Way How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein's Sex Trafficking came out of a multi year investigation. Investigators found significant evidence that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche bank and Bank of America violated anti money laundering laws by failing to screen and report Epstein's suspicious financial transactions in a timely manner. It describes how top banks enabled Epstein's sex trafficking operation by ignoring suspicious financial transactions by those associated with him, appearing eager to use Epstein's connections to other wealthy individuals. The report explains that Epstein's lawyer Darren Ndyke and his accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller executed thousands of suspicious cash withdrawals and wire transfers, perhaps potentially in furtherance of human trafficking. Disturbingly, federal prosecutors have never even questioned them in connection with criminal investigations. Federal law designed to prevent money laundering requires banks to notify the treasury with a Suspicious Activities Report or SAR within 60 days of detecting activity. That raises red flags. The investigators found that the three banks most closely associated with Epstein put off reporting suspicious activity for years, filing reports of more than $1.4 billion retroactively only after Epstein was arrested for the second time in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking. The suspicious transactions included thousands thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash payments to women and girls and correspondent banking in high risk foreign jurisdictions including Russia. They also include tens of millions in payments to his co conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. The report concludes that top executives at major Wall street banks were aware of Epstein's suspicious financial activity for years, but withheld information from the US Government protecting Epstein from federal scrutiny as they sought access to his money, which generated millions in fees every year, and to the money of his friends. Top of the list of those friends was billionaire Leon Black, the former chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management Inc. The report concludes that Black was overwhelmingly the largest source of funding for Epstein's sex trafficking, providing Epstein's primary source of income between 2012 and 2017. Those payments amounted to about $166 million. Bank of America took five to seven years to report those transactions, even though bank officials thought they had no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose. Black told the Republican dominated House Oversight Committee the that he paid that money to Epstein for tax, estate planning and other related services and was not aware of Epstein's nefarious activity. The report concludes that bank of America likely violated federal anti money laundering laws by failing to properly screen and report those payments. The report also covers already released SARs from JPMorgan Chase, showing that the bank waited years to file those suspicious activity reports, despite the fact that bankers flagged more than a billion dollars of transactions as suspicious, including payments to women in many countries and large cash withdrawals. It explains how Deutsche Bank AG as well delayed for years reporting more than $250 million in suspicious transactions tied to Epstein. The report notes that JPMorgan Chase cut ties to Epstein as a client in 2013 out of concerns he was engaged in money laundering. This is an interesting mirror of the recent news from Capital One since Trump also sued JPMorgan Chase and its Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon for $5 billion, alleging they debanked him after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Wyden, who is the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, chastised Republicans for not working with him on this project. He noted that Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican of Tennessee who is currently running for governor, refused to join him in subpoenaing records in the Epstein banking matter, even as she publicly complained that Democrats were hampering the investigation into those records. The report also pointed out that Republicans have blocked Wyden's measure that would require the Treasury Department to produce copies of all suspicious activity reports related to Epstein and his co conspirators for congressional committees. And it singled out U.S. treasury Secretary Scott Bessant for refusing to produce those records to the Senate Finance Committee. The report called for the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Comptroller of the Currency to conduct thorough investigations of the activities laid out in this report and levy fines or criminal penalties as appropriate. The report emphasized that such an investigation should include looking at the behavior of individual bankers as well as the banks themselves. Investigations into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein have thus uncovered an important finding that extends beyond Epstein himself. Wall street banks have been willing to turn a blind eye to the suspicious transactions of ultra wealthy clients, even if the failure to scrutinize and report these transactions runs directly afoul of federal law, the report said. If federal prosecutors are serious about preventing the next Jeffrey Epstein, they must hold Wall street accountable. Congress passed federal securities laws and banking regulation in the 1930s after it became clear that a small group of wealthy investors had manipulated the markets and misused bank funds. Pressure to clean up Wall street came from entrepreneurs and small investors who knew they could business or make gains in the market if the system was rigged against them. A healthy economy depended on a level playing field for everyone. Now it appears we are watching the dismantling of those protections and not only the long term skewing of our system toward the very wealthy but also a dramatic skewing in real time. On Saturday, Trump began selling access to his social media posts on to Wall street trading firms milliseconds before they go public, permitting them to buy and sell with insider information. The cost for this service, according to Marina Dunbar of the Guardian, is up to $100,000 a month. Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law, an expert in government conflicts of interest rules, told Bernard Condon of the Associated Press that this scheme is yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Mike Michael Moss.