Why on E arth would President Trump’s company be posting armed guards in front of the computer servers at Trump Ocean Club Panama and shredding documents? Why would his company block access to the legitimate owners until Panamanian police forced his employees to leave the property? What could the Trump Organization possibly be seeking to hide and destroy? The answers may be in plain sight.

Connect the dots in public reporting on Trump’s financial dealings, and a business model comes to light, one based on association with crooks, money launderers — and lots of Russians.

Take Trump’s Panama tower. The project’s lead broker, Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira, was a criminal; in 2009, he admitted to money laundering and was arrested for fraud and forgery in other projects. He fled the country.

All-cash deals for condos — a red flag for money laundering — were commonplace at Trump Panama. Convicted drug-money launderer Colombian David Helmut Murcia Guzmán bought 10 condos. Suspected Russian money launderers Andrey Bogdanov and Ivan Kazanikov bought a dozen others. A former financial crimes prosecutor in Panama, Mauricio Ceballos, called Trump Ocean Club Panama “a vehicle for money laundering.”

Are financial crimes the kompromat (compromising evidence) that gives Russians leverage over him?

Panama is not an isolated instance — the business model started with his casinos.

The U.S. Bank Secrecy Act requires that the gambling industry (notorious for money laundering) keep strict records to detect and prevent “cleansing” of mobsters’ ill-gotten gains. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J., once paid a $10 million fine for willful violations of that act. It admitted doing it on purpose! What was the company hiding then?

Associations with criminals and Russians accelerated as the Trump Organization began licensing its name on hotel-condo projects.

Trump’s partners in its SoHo project in Manhattan, as in other deals, were crooks. Felix Sater, a Russian, had pleaded guilty to money laundering and stock manipulation and a stabbing with the stem of wine glass. The FBI considered partner Tamir Sapir part of a Russian mob. Financing for that hotel came from an Icelandic bank close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Three-fourths of the sales were all-cash.

At Trump Tower Toronto, the Trump Organization first partnered with Leib Waldman, who had fled the United States after pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud and embezzlement. Then a Russian-born Canadian, Alex Shnaider, replaced Waldman. Shnaider had made fast money in the former Soviet Union and dealt with a Russian bank connected to Putin. Another foreign bank, accused previously of acting as a conduit for Russian money laundering, financed the project. The project incurred excessive construction costs — a trademark of money laundering — and went bankrupt while 400 other similar condo towers in Toronto succeeded.

In 2012, the Trump Organization partnered with a family referred to as “the Corleones of the Caspian, after the fictional Mafia family in “The Godfather” films,” to launch a hotel-condo project in Azerbaijan. Duffel bags of cash were used to pay contractors. Was money laundering during construction its real purpose? One thing’s for sure: No one who intended a luxury hotel to succeed would ever locate it on the wrong side of the tracks, where this one stood. It never opened.

With evidence of so many financial crimes, the Russians may not need the salacious acts recounted in the Steele dossier to compromise Trump. A few major felonies might do quite nicely.

The FBI is investigating Ivanka Trump’s role in the Trump Tower in Vancouver, British Columbia. Surprise: Tony Tiah Thee Kian, the financial backer of that project, is a crook. He pleaded guilty in 2002 and was fined $783,000 for submitting a false report to the Malaysian stock exchange. Tiah was forced to quit as CEO of his firm and barred from corporate boardrooms for five years.

President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may have engaged in pay-to-play. After executives of Citigroup and the hedge fund Apollo Global Management met with Kushner in the White House, they gave the Kushner family business loans of a half-billion dollars. A month later, the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an investigation of Apollo.

A global trail of evidence suggests Russians and other foreign powers may know enough about crimes to compromise the president. Crimes by our leaders endanger our democracy and undermine America’s standing in the world.

Are Russians and others using their knowledge to compromise the president at our expense? We need to know.

Tom Adams and Dennis Aftergut are retired attorneys. Adams, a founding partner of Adams Broadwell Joseph & Cardozo, has experience doing due diligence analysis for real estate transactions. Aftergut was a federal prosecutor and chief assistant city attorney of San Francisco. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.

For over a year, I’ve been immersed in the Intelligence Committee investigation into the unprecedented attack on our election system by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This brazen attack happened. What’s in question is how it occurred, how we can prevent future attacks and, most troubling, why the president can’t acknowledge this irrefutable fact.

A well-sourced memorandum by attorneys Tom Adams and Dennis Aftergut provide a compelling and disturbing theory: The president is compromised, and more concerned with hiding his past conduct than with our national security. I’ve posted this memo on my website because it’s imperative that the public be informed of this critical issue, which strikes at the heart of our democracy.

— Jackie Speier represents San Mateo County and a portion of San Francisco in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Online: For Tom Adams and Dennis Aftergut’s research report, which sets out evidence in detail, go to Rep. Jackie Speier’s website at http://bit.ly/2FsuU0O.