The only major bank that President Donald Trump has been able to count on for financial backing was among those that were issued subpoenas Monday by House Democrats.
The House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees both demanded that Deutsche Bank—one of Trump’s most reliable creditors—as well as Citigroup and Bank of America turn over records pertaining to the president’s personal and corporate finances.
“The potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern.” —Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)
Last year, reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating Trump’s financial dealings with Deutsche Bank led to the president to call for Mueller’s probe to be shut down. But Deutsche itself opened an investigation into Trump shortly after he entered office to determine whether its loans to the president had any links to Moscow.
Over the past two decades, Deutsche Bank has been the only financial institution to continue giving credit to Trump. It loaned more than $2 billion to Trump over those years, $300 million of which Trump still owed to the bank when he took office.
As Common Dreams reported last year, German police raided Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt headquarters in November in connection with the Panama Papers money laundering investigation. The subpoenas issued by the House committees reportedly pertain to possible money-laundering in Russia and Eastern Europe.
“The information that could bring down Trump,” wrote John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus, at Common Dreams last year, “may be somewhere in the Deutsche Bank files. The relevant documents would link the bank’s two most questionable financial activities—lending to Trump and washing Russian money.”
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