A group of Senate Democrats is urging the Federal Reserve, a finance industry regulator, to investigate Deutsche Bank’s relationship with President Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The seven lawmakers, all members of the Senate Banking Committee, sent a letter to Fed leadership Thursday in response to a recent report in the New York Times claiming Deutsche Bank executives ignored red flags from employees in 2016 and 2017 on accounts associated with Trump and Kushner.
“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,” the Democrats wrote.
According to the Times, an anti-financial crimes team at Deutsche Bank compiled suspicious activity reports involving entities owned or controlled by Trump and Kushner, a senior White House adviser, after transactions were flagged by the lender’s software.
In one instance, an anti-money laundering specialist working for Deutsche in Jacksonville, Fla., discovered money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russians and determined the Treasury Department should be informed.
The suspicious activity reports were ignored by Deutsche Bank executives, however, and never passed on to Treasury regulators.
Deutsche Bank has a long relationship with Trump and has been the only major financial institution willing to work with him over the past two decades.
Those ties have prompted intense scrutiny from congressional Democrats who are investigating Trump’s business dealings and finances. The House Financial Services and Intelligence committees subpoenaed Deutsche Bank in April for Trump’s financial records, but the president sued to block the bank from complying.
A federal judge ruled last month that Deutsche Bank should turn over the records, a decision that Trump’s legal team is appealing.
“This overdependence on Deutsche Bank and the heightened potential for conflicts of interest it poses is made more troubling because the president has refused to make any effort to address conflicts of interest or disclose his extensive financial ties, as other presidents and candidates have done in the past,” the Democrats wrote.
The Banking Committee Democrats argued the financial institution’s deep ties to Trump and previous misconduct make its compliance with anti-money laundering laws ripe for review by the Federal Reserve.
Days after Trump took office, the bank was fined $425 million by the state of New York over a money-laundering scheme that regulators said improperly moved $10 billion out of Russia. British regulators fined the lender 163 million pounds, roughly $204 million.
The same month, the bank agreed to a $7.2 billion settlement over claims it misled investors about mortgage-backed securities, the declining value of which in the late 2000s was widely blamed for the 2008 financial crisis.
