(RoyalPatriot.com )- Former President Donald Trump is facing yet another serious federal investigation over what is now being considered potential money laundering.
On Wednesday, The Guardian reported that the media company that Trump owns is being investigated into “whether it violated money launder statutes in connection with the acceptance of $8 million with suspected Russian ties.” The company was already under a federal investigation that started in 2022.
Hugo Lowell, the reporter who wrote the story, said that prosecutors began looking at two different loans late last year that totaled a combined $8 million. They were wired through the Caribbean to Trump Media, and came from two different “obscure entities that both appear to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”
The first payment was for $2 million and happened in December of 2021. It happened when Trump Media was close to collapsing once the DWAC planned merger ended up being delayed. That happened once the SEC started investigating the merger to figure out whether the two entities were breaking regulatory rules.
A bridge loan was needed by Trump Media so the company could remain afloat, but they weren’t able to land financing. That is, until Patrick Orlando, the chief executive of DWAC, found a $2 million loan and got it wired from a bank in Dominica.
The criminal investigation into Trump Media – which is the parent company of the Truth Social social media platform – started back in June of last year, when, as Lowell wrote, it was preparing to merge “with a blank check company called DWAC that was also the subject of an earlier probe by the SEC.”
That investigation now has apparently expanded in nature to more than just the relationship between Trump Media and DWAC. Those merger plans were already quite messy, and haven’t gone through yet. If they were to somehow go through, they would net Truth Social almost $1.3 billion in capital to use. It would also be listed on the stock market.
Now that the investigation into possible money laundering has become public knowledge, though, it could significantly limit the ability of the company to raise more capital. In his story, Lowell says that “the extent of the exposure for Trump Media and its officers for money laundering remains unclear.”
If prosecutors wanted to have a case for money laundering, they would have to prove that the defendants in the investigation knew in advance that the money they were receiving was a part of unlawful activity of some kind. They also would have had to know that the transaction they were engaging it was designed specifically to conceal the source of it.
As Lowell explains in his story:
“Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions, the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024.”
