Trump may have just laid down the boundary, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller is already crashing through.
The U.S. special counsel investigating possible ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia in last year’s election is examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates, according to a person familiar with the probe. …
FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, the person said.
Another area of the investigation is looking into the banks that routed all the Russian funds into the United States—banks that just happened to have another Trump connection.
Agents are also interested in dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman before he became commerce secretary, as well as the efforts of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and White House aide, to secure financing for some of his family’s real estate properties.
That Trump Tower meeting starting Donald Trump Jr and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually a meeting of four large international real estate firms discussing how to keep the pipeline open for moving funds into the United States. Cyprus is a critical node on that money laundering pipeline.
Will Trump use this expansion as an excuse to carry through on his threats against Mueller?