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It is very likely that there will be no smoking gun in the Mueller
investigation as far as "collusion" is concerned but Trump is anxious to
shut it down because it will lead inevitably to a look at his finances,
which are almost certainly enough to lead to his impeachment.
Furthermore, if he used his authoritarian powers to remain in office,
the contradictions will become much more intractable than they are today.
---
From:
https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/swamp-chronicles/where-did-donald-trump-get-200-million-dollars-to-buy-his-money-losing-scottish-golf-club
Instead, Trump turned to a new source of other people’s money. He did a
series of deals in Toronto, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan,
and Georgia with businesspeople from the former Soviet Union who were
unlikely to pass any sort of rigorous due-diligence review by pension
funds and other institutional investors. (Just this week, the Financial
Times published a remarkably deep dive into the questionable financing
of Trump’s Toronto property.) He also made deals in India, Indonesia,
and Vancouver, Canada, with figures who have been convicted or
investigated for criminal wrongdoing and abuse of political power.
We know very little about how money flowed into and out of these
projects. All of these projects involved specially designated
limited-liability companies that are opaque to outside review. We do
know that, in the past decade, wealthy oligarchs in the former Soviet
Union and elsewhere have seen real-estate investment as a primary
vehicle through which to launder money. The problem is especially
egregious in the United Kingdom, where some have called the U.K. luxury
real-estate industry “a money laundering machine.” Golf has been a
particular focus of money laundering. Although the U.K. has strict
transparency rules for financial activity within the country, its
regulators have been remarkably incurious about the sources of funds
coming from firms based abroad. All we know is that the money that went
into Turnberry, for example, came from the Trump Organization in the
U.S. We—and the British authorities—have no way of knowing where the
Trump Organization got that money.
The goal of laundering money is to take the proceeds of a criminal
activity—government corruption, tax fraud, drug trade, or many
others—and to disguise its origin. Many oligarchs in the former Soviet
Union who made their money by expropriating the state’s wealth want to
move their money into a more stable nation with greater rule of law.
This presents a challenge: How can one insert illegally obtained funds
into a system that requires due diligence? The answer, quite often, is
to use shell companies to disguise the flow of funds. Although we cannot
say that Trump himself knowingly engaged in money laundering, we do know
with certainty that much of his business in the past decade was in the
industries most known for money laundering, in the locations most
conducive to money laundering, and with people who bear the key
hallmarks of money launderers.
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