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Trump’s Gift to the Money Launderers
Treasury isn’t merely shutting down an anti-corruption database. It’s deleting the data so future investigators can’t use it.
DONALD TRUMP PROMISED Americans a new golden age. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a golden age for diarrhea and white-collar crime.
Biological, social, and financial parasites are all flourishing, because the Trump administration has destroyed the institutional capacity necessary to detect and eradicate them.
In the latest (non-GI-related) development, the Department of the Treasury announced this week that it would destroy the government’s registry of shell-company ownership. This is an anti-corruption database that Treasury is by law required to maintain, so that law enforcement can more easily “follow the money” when investigating crimes.
Even worse, the Trump administration will also destroy all the data it has already collected, so that no future presidential administration or local police department can use it, either.
“It’s like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI’s entire fingerprint database,” former congressman Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a champion of the 2021 law that created the corporate registry, told The Bulwark.
They’re effectively salting the earth, so that sex traffickers, scam artists, drug lords, money-launderers, and tax cheats can roam free not only through the end of Trump’s time in office but long after he’s out, too.