If Michael Wolff’s reporting is to be believed, Stephen K. Bannon’s assessment of the most dangerous threat posed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation is not the one you might have assumed.
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon reportedly told Wolff. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to f—ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner. … It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner s—-.”
Two quick explanations. Weissmann refers to Andrew Weissmann. He was one of Mueller’s early hires, although not the first, and does have a lot of experience prosecuting financial crimes. Deutsche Bank is a German financial institution that has been an apparent focus of federal prosecutors, although not necessarily by Mueller’s team, because of a loan of more than a quarter-billion dollars issued to Kushner’s firm a month before the 2016 election.
Bannon’s argument is that Mueller’s team is focused not on Russian meddling but on unearthing money laundering by Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner that can then be used as leverage against Trump. Manafort already faces money-laundering charges from Mueller. Those charges may involve property purchased by Manafort in New York and Virginia through shell companies based in Cyprus.
Real estate, it seems, is central to the charge Bannon made, given the involvement of Kushner and Trump Jr. in the industry. In light of that, we contacted Chris Quick, a retired FBI special agent who specialized in financial crimes and now runs a private investigative firm in South Carolina. He walked us through how money laundering works in the real-estate industry and how others may be implicated in that criminal activity.
“With any money laundering, you’re trying to make the illegally gotten money look legitimate,” Quick said. “So in the simplest terms, if you have real estate, you’re going to buy a piece of property with the illegal funds, hang on to it — or have rental income from it, so that rental income is legitimate — and eventually when you sell the real estate, you get your proceeds out of it and by all accounts it appears to be a legitimate transaction.”
According to U.S. law, any financial transaction of more than $10,000 involving illegal funds counts as money laundering.
