This is a story from GQ that got by me during the holidays but now that I’m temporarily living in Hothworld, I’ve had a chance to catch up with it. It seems that Ivanka Trump once owned a jewelry company that may well have been involved in an international conspiracy to fluff and fold.

In late June, the Commercial Bank of Dubai sought—and later received—permission to subpoena Ivanka Trump’s now-defunct fine jewelry line, claiming its diamonds were used in a massive scheme to hide roughly $100 million that was owed to the bank, according to filings at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The story is complicated, as most alleged money-laundering schemes are. Among other principals, It involves various emirs and their banks. But, as Tim O’Brien points out in Bloomberg, it certainly falls neatly into the way the Trump Organization has been doing business as an alleged laundromat for dubious money from around the world, especially Russia.



The Trump family has had longstanding real estate and licensing dealings with questionable business associates, some of them Russian and some of them not, as I and reporters like the late Wayne Barrett have written about for years. The family's recent departure from its ill-fated Trump SoHo hotel project, and its partnership with career criminals like Felix Sater, are reminders of how problematic some of those deals will be in the context of Mueller's investigation. While Trump allies have recently targeted Mueller's probe as ill-founded, tainted with prosecutorial bias, and the work of a conspiracy orchestrated with Democratic partisans and the "deep state," the reality is that Mueller — a well-regarded, veteran prosecutor — has been running a by-the-books investigation. It's an investigation that is likely to continue examining matters beyond political collusion — which Mueller's original mandate allows for — and will continue to involve explorations of financial dealings by the Trump family and members of the Trump campaign (particularly those involving Russia).

It always has been the money. The money is the key to everything, including the president*’s massive and infinitely fragile self-image. If he is not seen as rich, he is nothing, so he must be seen as rich, no matter what that takes, no matter with whom he had to do business. The threat Mueller poses to the money is the most lethal threat of which this president* could conceive. And if, as he should be, Mueller is looking into the Why of the Russian ratfcking, this is probably the most logical motive of them all.

If the Trump Organization has been running the spin cycle for dirty Russian money, the quid and the quo would be so close as to be completely indistinguishable from one another. It always has been about the money, as even Steve Bannon seems to know, if his quotes to Michael Wolff are accurate. It always has been about the money, because that’s really all that’s left of a president*’s illusions.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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