Anyone who watched Rachel Maddow Monday night got a glimpse of how much is known, and how much is left yet to be discovered with regard to Trump’s financial relationship with Deutsche Bank, VTB Bank of Russia, and the Russian government, personified in Vladimir Putin. Maddow reviewed the book “Dark Towers,” written by David Enrich, the New York Times financial editor, and revealed some shocking developments that will demand answers.

In the most compelling segment, Maddow reviewed details from the book about a Deutsche Bank auditor based in Jacksonville Florida, who had several “suspicious transactions” triggered by the bank’s internal automated system referred to her. They all involved money moving from the Kushner family to Russian oligarchs and companies in 2016. These transactions occurred at the exact same point that Russia was working to get Trump elected as president in his race against Hillary Clinton. The Deutsche Bank employee filled out company forms recommending that the transactions be reported to the federal government as suspicious activity.

The report got buried by the bank, and the woman was fired in 2018.

The Guardian reviewed “Dark Towers” and called it a “must read,” follow the money mystery.

The review makes clear that it is almost impossible to separate Trump from Deutsche Bank and Russia. It also forces one to remember the damning words of Steve Bannon in “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff; “This is all about money laundering … It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit.”

It sounds true.

So how are the Trumps and Kushner getting away with it? They may not. The bank and tax records have been subpoenaed, and a decision by the Supreme Court should be out by summer, if the SCOTUS rules that the records must be turned over, only then does the public stand a chance of discovering just how deep Trump goes with the Russians and illicit money from Eastern Europe.

Eerily, the danger in illicit banking and powerful oligarchs has left a trail of death, three Deutsche bank executives have committed suicide in the last 4-5 years. As with every “suicide” under these circumstances, questions arise as to whether the deaths were pressured in some way, or hastened. There is no evidence that there was foul play.

Still, three?

Sadly, Broeksmit’s death is not the only notable Deutsche suicide. Also in 2014, Charlie Gambino, an in-house bank lawyer, hanged himself at his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. At the time, Gambino was attempting to navigate Deutsche through its Libor rate-fixing nightmare.

This past November, Tom Bowers, a banker who worked on Trump’s account, killed himself. Bowers was an Enrich source with firsthand knowledge of the bank’s $640m loan on Trump International Hotel & Tower, Chicago.

The book has no direct evidence implicating Trump in a financial crime with Russia, but it does raise questions that absolutely demand answers, including why it was that the information Maddow raised got buried and not sent it to be reported. These questions now lay squarely in the hands of the United States supreme court, and we can only hope that the SCOTUS is still “free” to make decisions on the merits of cases, and not “controlled” as we suspect some other branches might be.

The single biggest question requiring a definitive answer is why Deutsche Bank was the only major bank in the world willing to touch the Trumps, and Enrich may have the answer, transcript via Rawstory:

“Now the theory was that one of the reasons Deutsche had been willing to take such risks on loans to Trump was that it wasn’t actually taking the risks at all: VTB had agreed to secure the loans; if Trump defaulted, Deutsche could collect whatever it was owed from the Russian bank,” he explained.

“In effect that meant that VTB was the one lending to Trump — a direct financial connection between the Russian government and the American president,” Enrich wrote. “Deutsche executives insisted this was false.”

Yes, of course Deutsche Bank executives are going to insist this was false, lest they lose their charter in one day. But there are so many sweetheart deals, and so many “coincidences” that it conjures a line in a famous book that I once authored: “Young man, you will soon learn that near all of history’s ‘great coincidences’ were the product of patient and thorough planning.” My novel is fictional, but still …

The proof is out there, and there are too many red flags waving right in front of our faces. If our Supreme Court denies the public the right to see the financial conflicts that our “president” may have with our greatest adversary, then we will have forfeited the democratic civic heritage that we inherited.

This book could play an important role in the demand for answers.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom