Last month, the New York Times reported that anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank had flagged “suspicious activity” on the accounts of both Donald Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016 and 2017, advising that they be reported to a financial-crimes regulator—only to be told by higher-ups that their concerns were unfounded and to stop being so “negative.” And you’ll never believe it, but some people think that warrants further investigation!

In a letter sent to the Federal Reserve on Thursday, seven Democratic senators demanded that Fed chair Jerome Powell and John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, examine the transactions and whether Deutsche Bank complied with the law after employees raised the alarm. “Only by conducting a thorough review of the full range of this activity can we better understand what happened in these cases; what practices, procedures, or personnel may need to be changed at the bank; and what regulators should do to ensure the Federal Reserve’s ability effectively to monitor compliance with anti-money-laundering laws,” wrote Senator Chris Van Hollen. “This is a test of the Fed’s independence,” he added in an interview with the Times. “It would be gross negligence if they weren’t investigating.” Other Democrats who signed the letter include Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown.

According to the Times, just after Trump was elected president, transactions involving the Trump Organization were reviewed by the anti-financial-crimes Special Investigations Unit, resulting in multiple suspicious activity reports “involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.” Yet the bank executives chose not to file the reports with the Treasury Department, despite the fact that three former employees said it was “unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.“ A similar situation occurred the year prior, wherein the company’s software flagged “a series of transactions” involving the real estate company of [Jared] Kushner,” which were then reviewed by longtime anti-money-laundering specialist Tammy McFadden, who found that “money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals.”

McFadden concluded that the suspicious transactions needed to be reported to the government and drafted a “suspicious activity report,” along with a number of documents supporting her decision. Then, strangely, the case went not to an unbiased group of anti-money-laundering experts but instead to the private-banking division, where managers had a relationship with Kushner. From there, the executives reportedly decided McFadden’s worries were “unfounded” and decided not to submit her report to the government, a decision she and her colleagues believe was made “to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.”

Last year, months after she started raising concerns about how the German lender was scrutinizing—or in this case, not scrutinizing—the accounts of high-profile customers, McFadden was fired. (Deutsche Bank says she wasn’t processing enough accounts, but McFadden says her supervisors cut the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she started asking questions, and both she and two former managers believe her firing was retaliatory.)

Deutsche Bank has been condemned by the Fed multiple times since the early 2000s over issues ranging from poor risk management to “sloppy financial accounting.” In May 2017 the central bank fined Deutsche $41 million and demanded it strengthen its money-laundering systems which had, among other things, reportedly processed billions of dollars in illicit transactions involving wealthy Russians.

Last month, much to Trump’s dismay, a judge ruled against the president’s attempt to block Deutsche Bank and Capitol One from turning over records about the Trump family and its businesses to the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees (the case will now go to an appeals court.) So today’s news is unlikely to boost his mood!

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