First Draft: 💰 A Bank Closed Trump Accounts for ‘Anti-Money Laundering Reasons.’ So Now He's Giving Himself… a Bank?
It’s a measure of the president's staggering corruption that preliminary approval of an application for a charter by Trump’s crypto firm is just another story. Also, Hakeem Jeffries finds a new low.
On this day in 1998, President Bill Clinton admitted in grand jury testimony that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, which he then told the nation “was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”
Good morning… Martin here, delighted as ever to wish you a Happy Monday. It’s almost late summer now, but summer it still is, so Congress is still on its extremely generous holidays. Fear not: Donald Trump is here to fill the news with yet more absurd corruption.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at two aspects of the second Trump administration that go hand in hand: the financial self-dealing allowing the president’s family and associates to rake in untold riches, and the obsequious yes-men who populate his Cabinet, ready to act with complete disregard for convention and the law.
Trump looks set to turn his crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, into a bank, while his new attorney general, Todd Blanche, gets on with targeting the boss’s enemies and rigging the law in his favor, without even pretending to do otherwise. It’s staggering – as is Hakeem Jeffries, very possibly the next speaker of the House, opposing Medicare for All, a policy favored by nine in 10 in his party. We’ll look at that and more, including Trump’s continuing stalemate with Iran. Let’s read in.
‘The Most Brazen Act of Self-Dealing’
On Aug. 1, Capital One bank said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts for “anti-money laundering reasons.”
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” it said.
Two weeks later, on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national regulator whose head, Jonathan Gould, was appointed by Trump last year, granted conditional preliminary approval of an application for a bank charter from World Liberty Trust – the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.
World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff – son of Trump real estate pal turned all-purpose diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff – said: “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”
Among those crying foul, and there were plenty, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said: “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. I’m introducing a bill to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.”
Which is precisely what this is: absolutely staggering self-dealing by the president, his family, and their cronies. But this is also the U.S. under the Trumps. The staggering self-dealing story was a Friday story, Saturday too, tops. By Sunday, the torrent of Trumpist slurry was washing other threats into view.