Trump has a huge history of Money Laundering. Big. Really fabulous. According to CNN, "[t]he Trump Taj Mahal Casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in the first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s." We know this is fact because there was a settlement agreement with the IRS. CNN reported:
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said.At the time of that 1998 settlement between Trump and the government, the Associated Press called it the largest ever fine for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Then, the Trump Castle failed to report Trump's dad sending a lawyer into the casino with a $3,350,000.00 certified check and exchanged them for casino chips. The Trump Castle paid a fine for that as well.
This proves that Trump didn't care much for Federal rules used to alert on Money Laundering, but these wouldn't prove, by themselves, that Trump was involved in Money Laundering.
As for our friend Dimitry Rybolovlev, neither he nor his company show up in the Office of Foreign Assets Control website as a sanctioned individual or entity. It is claimed that Rybolovlev was going through the divorce at the time and may have wanted to hide assets from his spouse. That might be a crime, but did Trump know about it? That's a big assumption.
Still, the sale is very suspicious, especially given that Rybolovlev didn't inspect the property, didn't have it appraised, paid twice market value, and has never lived in it. It could have been a Putin operation, but we don't know.
On the other hand, we do know of somebody quite famously criminal who purchased a property from Trump using Ukrainian (nee Russian) money. That would be Paul Manafort. We also know that both Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, have spent a lot of time being interviewed by FBI agents and testifying before grand juries.
To prove the specialized intent of Trump to take in illegal money or evade taxes, prosecutors will likely need an informant who was there. Putin and Rybolovlev are unlikely to provide that evidence. Manafort and Gates are much likely to have done so.
The Special Counsel's office has already proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Manafort was involved in bank fraud. Did he engage in similar fraudulent actions when purchasing his Trump Tower suite? I think that's a pretty good assumption.
Another potential trove of evidence can be found in Germany. Deutsche Bank paid New York a fine of $425,000,000.00 for a Money Laundering scheme that resettled $10,000,000,000.00 of Russian money. This occurred last year. Other countries have also fined the bank for similar problems in the last few years.
Just recently, the offices of Deutsche Bank were raided.
Finally, it has to be noted that Donald Trump, Jr. has been quoted as saying that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." Eric Trump explained that "We have all the funding we need out of Russia."
We know that the Trump Organization was happy to work with (or at least closely associate with) the sanctioned Russian VEB bank. They supposedly had financing through it for the Trump Tower Moscow project. The VEB bank also provided financing for the Trump hotel in Toronto. This is important because that bank is on the sanctions list, and it is a known Money Laundering conduit for Putin and other Russian oligarchs.
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