Transcript of Trump Just Made It Easier for Oligarchs & Traffickers to Hide Money in America New

So Donald Trump's so-called Financial Crimes Enforcement Network within the Treasury Department is now deleting en masse potential evidence of financial crimes for their enforcement. Probably shouldn't shock you when we talk about the corruption of the Trump regime. This is happening in plain view, though, and it needs to get more attention. And the Treasury Department, they're just trying to play this off as Yeah, just bureaucratic rulemaking. No, you're deleting evidence of crimes and you're going to literally promote money laundering. In my opinion, what's taking place, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, like promoting money laundering. Let me show you what went down. The Treasury Department yesterday posted today, FinCEN News, that's the financial crimes, issued a final rule that permanently removes the requirement for US companies and US persons to report beneficial ownership information. FinCEN today also announced that it will delete previously reported information by US persons from the beneficial ownership information database. Like, quite literally, this isn't public information. Why in the hell would the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network literally delete the evidence of financial crimes potentially? Former Congressmember Tom Malinowski posted the following: I helped pass this law in 2020. Its purpose is to prevent drug traffickers, Russian and Chinese kleptocrats, and other international criminals from setting up anonymously owned companies to hide their money in the US.

Trump's Treasury Department is doing this to help criminals. So a Congressmember who helped pass this law is saying, what the hell, they're doing this to help the criminals now. He explains that beneficial ownership information is just a record of who actually owns a company. That's all that was being reported here so that we didn't have LLCs, limited liability companies in Delaware, laundering millions of dollars through the US and into offshore banks on behalf of totally anonymous people. Treasury deleting the beneficial ownership info it already gathered is utterly crazy. This database was not public. It was just for law enforcement to use in investigating crimes. It's like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI's fingerprint database. And hold the thought there. For all we know, they may be doing that too. Who the hell knows with these people? Why is the Trump administration— Tom Milonowski says— doing this? I don't know. But it's certainly good news for rich Russians who want to buy his condos or Gulf royals buying his fake crypto. The true identities of people he's done business with, if registered with Treasury, will now be deleted. Last but not least, this is totally illegal.

Congress passed, you know, a thing called a law with strong Republican support, by the way. This was a massive bipartisan initiative because at that time people were like, hey, we don't want money laundering. Saying Treasury had to collect and keep beneficial ownership info not— should not be a controversial thing. The Trump administration cannot just say, we're just not going to do it anymore. And as Milinowski says, this will find its way to court. It will be struck down because what the Treasury Department is doing right now is unlawful. But the deletion of data currently available to law enforcement may be irreversible. It's one of the most lawless and corrupt things this administration has done, and that is saying a lot. Congressmember Sean Casten said, we passed this law, and make no mistake, it's a law, not just an option for the Treasury Department to interpret, to ensure people wouldn't hide their identities in nests of LLCs to launder money. Treasury is protecting criminals with this action. Richard Nephew says the process for my LLC took all of 5 minutes to complete. If you got nothing to hide, it's no big deal. And Philip O'Brien says the US is run by organized crime syndicates right now.

That's destroying the evidence of their crimes. I want to bring in Tom Malinowski, the former congressman from New Jersey who helped pass this law back in 2020, whose message that you saw. And Tom, this is not nearly getting the attention it deserves. This is a very big deal in plain view deleting evidence en masse of financial crimes.

Talk to us about it, Tom.

So thank you, great to be on with you. And as you explained, beneficial ownership, it's just a fancy word for who is the real owner of a company. And amazingly, you know, we used to think that people would use, you know, crooks around the world would use Swiss bank accounts hide their tracks or they'd go to some little island state in the Caribbean like the Cayman Islands or the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. These were the places that crooks would go to to hide their tracks. But we discovered in the last decade that actually the United States is a key node in the international money laundering network because a lot of our states, particularly but not only Delaware, allowed anybody in the world to register a company, to establish a company under an anonymous name. It's called a shell company. So, well, let's say just for the sake of argument, or like a Russian oligarch, and you want to buy a condo in Florida from a guy named Donald Trump, but you don't want people to know, or he doesn't want people to know, that Russian oligarchs are buying his condos. So You find a lawyer in Miami or, or New York.

He sets up a shell company for you, registers it in Delaware under maybe his own name or a fake name. And then, you know, for good measure, that company creates 20 other companies under the same umbrella. One of those companies then sets up a bank account, maybe in the Cayman Islands, and then that entity buys the condo and nobody knows. The IRS doesn't know, law enforcement doesn't know. It just shows up as the owner of the condo is like 123 Corporation of America or something like that. That happened routinely until this law passed. This law basically just says every company registered in the United States has to report its true owner to the Treasury Department. And that database is there so that if the Justice Department is investigating some kind of crime, corruption, money laundering, terrorism, drug trafficking, child trafficking, sanctions evasion, it can look up and it finds some mysterious LLC involved in that shady business. It can look that LLC up in the registry and trace it back to the person who really owns it. So that's what this law was doing. And as you said, they're not trying to fiddle with how it's implemented.

They just said today, "We are canceling the law. We are not going to enforce it. It's over.

And all the data we've gathered is gonna be somehow erased completely, completely of all this behavior." Was the law working in the sense of, you mentioned the example where they still needed to find somebody in the States, whether it was a Miami lawyer or someone to help set it up. How were we kind of dealing with the situation where a lawyer or someone in the United States would serve as like a straw man or whatever it was? And would that happen where the LLC would designate that lawyer? But I guess they still had to put a name, which then you could kind of trace and then investigate it. So talk to us about the mechanism.

Like if you're some foreign crook and you, you want to set up a company in the United States and under this law, you can still do it, right? But your lawyer, and we're assuming here most lawyers don't want to be criminals themselves, your lawyer's now going to tell you, you can set up a company, call it whatever you want, but you also have to fill out this other form. And on this other form, which doesn't go to some public website, but it's submitted to the Treasury Department, you have to put your real name. And the expectation was that the people who were taking advantage of this system were just going to go elsewhere, um, because now it's no longer easy and safe, or at least as easy or safe as it used to be, to set up an anonymous shell company in the United States. And if you're doing it to hide some sort of criminal activity or to escape sanctions or to avoid paying taxes, then It's— you're taking a big risk now if, if you try to create a US-based company to do those things.

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So the beneficial ownership form though was just sent to the Treasury Department where they would keep a database and then they would have their Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. FinCEN would compile this. They would have the ability to reach out to the appropriate authorities, whether it was the FBI, whether it was, you know, other, uh, you know, whatever, whoever's the appropriate authority to look into this.

It wasn't like— so like, if the FBI is investigating a crime, let's say you're investigating some complex financial crime, and in the course of your investigation you find some mysterious company with a weird name that is doing the dirty business. It's, it's, it owns the bank account that has funded the child trafficking operation, just to name one possible example. The FBI now can go to FinCEN, can go to the Treasury Department and say, hey, can we look up this entity and find out who's actually behind it? Um, and then Treasury would share that with law enforcement. So that's the way, um, it was set up to work. Uh, we passed the law in 20— sorry, in 2021, and it took a couple of years for the Treasury Department to issue the rule to start implementing it. I think that wasn't until the beginning of 2024. It's been on the books now for a couple of years. And as of today, they're saying no one has to file this information.

And this is just— I'm trying to even go through my mind about what other than covering up the idea of an oligarch or someone who wants to keep it you know, utterly secret, or someone who's laundering money, or who's trafficking, or— I'm trying to think of, you know, any other example why, you know, what, why that would be. Like, I'm just trying to— who's the constituency over here that is, is, is benefiting outside of that group? I'm trying to think objectively.

There's one, there's one legitimate thing. So it— in, in order to enforce this law Now, every— everybody registering a company or LLC in the United States has to file this information. And I, I think for most people it's very easy. You can find the, the form online, you can submit it online. It asks for name, address, um, your tax ID. It asks you to upload a picture of your driver's license, and of course the name and address of the person who owns the company. That's straightforward for most businesses, but You know, in the implementation, small business owners started complaining that they're now having to pay some lawyer a couple of hundred bucks to fill out this form for them. And there were some weird examples, like I've heard from people who said like, you know, I'm a volunteer board member of my local co-op association, and we were told we have to file this form and we have to pay somebody to fill it out for us. And like, I'm sure there are real problems out there in terms of this being a burden on some people that we did not intend it to be a burden on.

But if that's your concern, you fix that through a new rule that exempts those kinds of people or that makes it even easier for them. Fine. You do not cancel implementation of the entire law. So, but I do want to be fair, there are some legitimate concerns that constituents of members of Congress have been raising with their members. It's just that those things could have been easily fixed without sending an America is welcome, welcomes now dirty money from the worst criminals in the world message that the Trump administration sent today.

And we're going to now delete the entire database and get rid of this accumulated knowledge. And that's what I appreciate about discussions like this and what we try to do here, which again, this was a bipartisan bill. I don't view this as a Democrat or Republican, an independent thing. I mean, there was a problem, a serious one— trafficking, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, money laundering in general, drug trafficking, all this stuff that was happening. It was being determined Sure, there's Cayman Islands, all these, but a lot of it's happening here. Here's how we try to fix it. Oh wait, there does seem to be a certain groups of people who may be having to be burdened a few hundred bucks, maybe a little more. That wasn't intended. Let's fix it.

Let's make it better. That's the way the system— like in a normal functioning democracy, Tom, these are the discussions that we have. When you were in Congress, you probably said, well, this is what we would debate. Maybe we do it this way is the best. Maybe it's that way. But we all want to stop trafficking. So let's figure out how we do it. Here they do this crap and then they start just saying, ah, WNBA players woke. And it's like, what are you even talking about? We're trying to solve a problem. Stop dividing us about weird shit. Let's try to figure out what the answer is to this problem.

Well, give you an example. One of my co-sponsors was then Congressman Mike Waltz, who is now Trump's ambassador to the UN. And like at the time, he's a conservative Republican who was really focused on protecting American national security from all kinds of threats around the world. He saw it as a national security bill. And, um, so that brings us back to the question, like, why do they do it? It— the, the excuse will be, we did it to help these mom-and-pop trusts and small business owners. I don't buy that, because whatever problems they were having, we could have fixed. So I think you got to see it in a bigger context. Remember, the, the IRS now under Trump is, is scaling back audits of millionaires and billionaires and, and of corporations. They're— they're fired. They fired the people that we hired under the Biden administration to ensure that the wealthy got audited as much as working-class Americans. The administration has publicly announced they're no longer going to enforce a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is a law that says that U.S. companies can't bribe foreign governments around the world. Um, white-collar crime division at the Justice Department has been absolutely gutted.

So across the board, um, and I guess maybe it has something to do with the fact that the President of the United States is himself a white-collar criminal, across the board They are just refusing to enforce laws targeting white-collar crime, crime by wealthy Americans, corruption by members of their own class. And it's, it's so blatant that it's almost hard to believe because they're not even really trying to hide it. But this is another step in that direction.

Tom, I want to thank you for joining us, first time on the Midas Touch Network. But we had so much we should be talking about. I mean, you were the Assistant Secretary of State, um, you know, I like to go do deep dives into the Middle East. Your experience in Bahrain and other areas there, especially with the MECA PAC, the security umbrella that's replacing the—

I'm just, I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts on everything that's going on.

We'll save all of that for the next interview, but we appreciate you.

Good. And we'll fix this too eventually. You know, it's just another item on the to-do list for next year when hopefully we have Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, certainly in 2029.

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