The United States Office for Government Ethics has released ninety-eight pages of details about Donald Trump’s finances, which demonstrate that he’s directly profiting from the presidency in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and that he’s still massively in debt to foreign and domestic banks. But one detail stands out above the rest, and points directly to his Russia scandal.

Earlier this year German-based Deutsche Bank was busted for prolonged pattern of laundering Russian money into the hands of clients in places like New York City (link). It’s also long been established that Deutsche Bank has continued to float huge long-term loans to Donald Trump, even after he became a bad credit risk due to his continual business failures, and even after Deutsche fell on hard financial times itself. The question has been whether these “loans” have been mere cover for laundering Russian money into Trump’s hands.

All the way down on page fifty of the financial disclosure form (which you can download here), it’s confirmed that Donald Trump currently has four separate loans from Deutsche Bank. Three of them were taken out back in 2012. But the fourth was taken out in 2015, just as the presidential race was getting underway, for the purpose of building what would become the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. The hotel ultimately opened for business in October of 2016.

So now we’re looking at the specter of a Russian money laundering bank having floated a massive long-term loan to Donald Trump just as he was launching a presidential campaign which went on to hire at least half a dozen senior advisers who had close ties or contacts with the Russian government during the course of the campaign. That doesn’t prove Russia laundered the money to Trump in exchange for him running for president and doing Russia’s bidding, but it sure is eye-popping.



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