Sberbank:
www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2017-08-28
The next one we learned about was I think the biggest Russian bank of all, a bank called Sberbank, which announced in March that they have hired new counsel to represent them in a big complicated civil case that was filed in the federal court of New York in which Sberbank was accused basically of rigging the granite mining industry in Russia.
Why is that a federal civil case in New York? Its a long story, but in March, Sberbank in the middle of this case, they kind of surprised everybody. They made a lot of eyebrows arch in the legal news when they announced that they had chosen their new counsel for that long complicated and presumably very expensive case and they said their new counsel was going to be Donald Trumps personal lawyer, Marc Kazowitz, right?
Marc Kasowitz supposed to be heading up President Trumps legal representation on the Russia investigation. If youre the lead lawyer coordinating legal defense for the president of the United States, who is facing a major counterintelligence and criminal investigation from the FBI while he is serving as president, you are in charge of that.
You think he`d be too busy to take on other clients, right? But, you know, looking at it from another angle, if there were Russian interests who are particularly concerned to know what was going on in the Trump-Russia investigation.
It may be handy to have conversations undercover of attorney-client
privilege with the lead lawyer for the president on the Trump-Russia
investigations so who knows? Maybe that was just a coincidence too.
Whats that big Russian bank doing with the presidents Russia lawyer? So, maybe the Alfa Bank thing was just a coincidence. Maybe the VEB-Jared Kushner meeting was a coincidence. Maybe the Sberbank thing, hiring Donald Trump`s Russia lawyer, maybe it was all just a coincidence.
Maybe none of this has anything to do with President Donald Trump and whether or not he has some sort of illicit relationship financial or
otherwise with Russia that explains why Russia attacked our election and tried to rig it on his behalf, right?
Maybe none of those bank connections, Alfa Bank, VEB Bank, Sberbank, maybe none of those have anything to do with the question of whether Trump and his campaign knew about or were involved with the Russian effort to disrupt our election.
I mean, if you want to talk about Donald Trump personally and specifically, honestly until today the only so big and sort of suspicious banking relationship weve known about him at least recently isnt with any Russian bank, it`s with Deutsche Bank, right?
Which as the name implies is not Russian, Deutsche Bank still to this day is the bank that Donald Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to. Deutsche Bank is the bank that dealt with Donald Trump in business terms for years when no other major banks would.
Deutsche Bank is the bank that continued to lend President Trump hundreds of millions of dollars for various deals even after he was unable to pay them back on some of his earlier loans.
Even after he went so far as to file lawsuits against Deutsche Bank because he failed to pay them back, which is a certain kind of hubris. There are aspects of the Donald Trump-Deutsche Bank relationship that have always seemed unexplained by the bounds of normal financial business dealings.
Deutsche Bank at least on the surface appears to have been uncommonly generous to him and forgiving of him. Deutsche Bank also, it turns out, gave Jared Kushner several hundred millions of dollars in loans in October of last year, right before the election.
Loans that Jared Kushner personally guaranteed, which made it all the more unusual that he failed to disclose those loans from Deutsche Bank on his financial disclosure statement, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Deutsche Bank has also been plagued over the last year by its legal
liability for a multibillion dollar Russian money laundering scheme that was operated out of Deutsche Bank offices in Moscow, London, and elsewhere.
But you know after today, the Deutsche Bank Russian money laundering case will no longer be seen as the most concerning Deutsche Bank connection for President Trump when it comes to the Trump-Russia investigation.
Because there was Alfa Bank with the server thing, VEB Bank with the Carter Page connection and then the Jared Kushner meeting. Theres Sberbank hiring Trumps Russia lawyer.
Theres all of these Russian banks getting strange new storing roles in American politics. Theres another one, Alfa Bank, VEB Bank, Sberbank. There`s another one called VTB Bank.
It is a very large Russian bank. Its not as big as Sberbank, but its
really big. VTB Bank is sanctioned by the U.S. government because of
Russia invading Crimea.
This bank got sanctioned by the U.S. government as punishment for Crimea because this bank is seen as the Russian government. Its an arm of the Russian government and thats how the U.S. government views them.
In fact, if you go to VTB`s website tonight, click on about VTB and they will tell you in exact mathematical terms how they are controlled by the Russian government.
The Russian government owns and controls 60.9 percent of the VTB bank, the majority shareholder of the VTB Bank is the Russian government, which owns 60.9 percent of the voting shares.
What that means in plain English is that Putin runs VTB. Putin controls the bank and what it does and what it spends on. And today, we learn that up until last year, up until the middle of the presidential campaign VTB Bank was lined up and committed to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in financing to build Trump Tower Moscow.
The Russian government was going to do that deal. Actually, even without the knowledge that the financing for this deal was going to come from the Russian government, its still a heck of a bombshell. This is not some old deal that happened back in the past that people may have forgotten about. This is not something that Trump worked on in the 90s and it fell apart.
This is what he was working on during the campaign after he announced that he was running for president, months into his presidential campaign when he was full on running for president, he was trying do this deal with the Russian government in Moscow.