As President Donald Trump’s inner circle is summoned one-by-one to appear before federal prosecutors, Special Counsel Robert Mueller eyes the president’s offshore accounts. Reuters reports Deutsche Bank (DB) received a subpoena from Mueller’s office requesting information on Trump’s financial transactions. The special counsel, sources told the outlet, is investigating whether Deutsche Bank sold the president’s mortgage and loans to Russian banks. Specifically, the FBI wants to see if there’s a correlation between Trump and Russian state development bank VEB.
“One obvious question is why Trump and those around him expressed interest in improving relations with Russia as a top foreign policy priority, and whether or not any personal considerations played any part in that,” one source said.
Now under U.S. and European Union sanctions, VEB partnered with Deutsche Bank in 2006. But this past January, New York’s Department of Financial Services fined the bank $425 million for corroborating “a corrupt group of bank traders and offshore entities to improperly and covertly transfer more than $10 billion out of Russia.”
In a feature documenting the president’s relationship with the German bank, The Financial Times reported that Deutsche Bank lent money to Trump in the 1990s after Wall Street firms were turned off by the developer’s bankruptcies. Deutsche Bank owns Trump’s debts for a $170 million loan to finance the construction of the Trump International in Washington, D.C, mortgages worth more than $55 million on a Florida golf course, and a $25 million-plus loan on Trump’s Chicago ventures.
Last week, Mueller’s office charged former Trump advisor Mike Flynn with lying to the FBI. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted by a grand jury in late October, and the campaign’s junior advisor George Papadopoulos is collaborating with Mueller.
