Senate Begins to Look at Trump’s Businesses

“A Treasury Department unit that specializes in combating money-laundering will share financial records with an expanding Senate probe into possible ties between Russia and President Trump and his associates,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the intelligence committee, said “that he is particularly interested in information about shell companies, money laundering and the use of property transfers that may be germane to the committee’s Trump investigation.”

New Yorker: “Casinos can make it remarkably easy to allow people, like drug dealers or corrupt oligarchs, to use funds they obtained illegally… Money launderers can avail themselves of other methods, such as buying expensive real estate through shell companies or slipping their ill-gotten money into cash-heavy business, like laundromats or pizza shops, or large banks. But those retail methods work best for relatively small amounts of money, and in the past two decades, government regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere have moved to prevent money laundering through the banking system. So casinos have become increasingly popular for the large-scale money launderer.”