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Head of Anti-Money Laundering Agency Tells Senate Hearing He Hasn’t Read the Times Bombshell on Trump, Kushner and Deutsche Bank

Courtesy of Pam Martens

Kenneth Blanco, Director of FinCEN

Kenneth Blanco, Director of FinCEN, Testifying at a Senate Banking Committee Hearing on May 21, 2019

Reading the New York Times is apparently now seen as being disloyal to the President of the United States if you’re a Federal employee. Just holding the newspaper in one’s hands might be enough to become an early pensioner in the Trump administration. Yesterday it became crystal clear at a Senate Banking hearing just how terrified people are in the Federal government of getting on the wrong side of the President and ending up being publicly bashed on his Twitter page.

The Senate Banking hearing on Tuesday was called to get answers from the witness panel on how to combat money laundering in the United States by shell companies that keep their real owners a secret. But it quickly became a hearing also about the bombshell report from the New York Times on Sunday. That article, by David Enrich, describes how a Deutsche Bank whistleblower, Tammy McFadden, and four of her colleagues had their efforts blocked by the bank when they tried to file suspicious activity reports on bank accounts affiliated with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump. Those reports should have gone to the Federal agency that oversees potential money laundering activity, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or FinCEN, but they were quashed by a unit of the bank that manages money for the super wealthy.

The Director of FinCEN, Kenneth Blanco, was on the witness panel for the hearing. When Blanco was asked by Senator Bob Menendez if he had read the article in the New York Times, Blanco said that he had not, adding that he had simply been “briefed” on it. This statement appeared to be little more than an effort to appease the anger of Trump toward the New York Times (the President regularly calls it “Fake News”) since it would be negligence on the part of the Director of FinCEN not to read a whistleblower’s account of what went on inside Deutsche Bank – especially given Deutsche Bank’s 2017 fine of $630 million for laundering $10 billion out of Russia.

Blanco also refused to answer any questions as to whether he was or was not opening an investigation as a result of the report in the Times. That elicited a stern statement to Blanco from Senator Chris Van Hollen, who told him that “If FinCen has not already been in touch with that whistleblower, in my view, that’s gross negligence.”

Senator Sherrod Brown

Senator Sherrod Brown


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