In the long grind of sketchy political stories, we've now got enough straight-up corruption news piled up to last the rest of Donald Trump's remaining life. It's still not clear anything will actually come of it, because it's also been demonstrated that you can do ab-so-lute-ly anything, so long as you are willing to pay for more lawyers than state or federal governments are willing to pay for theirs—but we have a general picture. The citrus-tinted blowhard has for decades been part of an American subclass that dabbles in everything from money laundering to tax cheating to boosting international oligarchies to sex trafficking to immigration fraud to take-your-pick, all of it backed by banks whose bottom lines depend on looking the other way and an American political class that will write new laws faux-legalizing pretty much anything you ask them to in exchange for a handshake and a four-figure check.
Then there's the stories that are just ... odd. Maybe there's something crooked afoot, maybe there's not, but there's an inherent weirdness to them that can't easily be explained away. So, for example, we've got this weird, weird NBC News story about the company that refinanced Trump's flagship Trump Tower.
Trump Tower's $100 million mortgage was the subject of some heated speculation after Trump launched a coup against the U.S. government that left people dead in the U.S. Capitol building, with some innocent souls wondering if Trump could ever find a bank sleazy enough to work with a seditionist. Things looked grimmer still when, at the beginning of the year, Donald Trump's longtime auditors severed all ties with Trump and announced that they were no longer standing by the Trump Organization's last 10 years of financial statements—the Wall Street way of announcing that they found something going on so sketchy that they absolutely do not want any part of it, whether Trump's checks are clearing or not, and that they don’t intend to go to jail over it.
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But the Trump Tower's mortgage, as it turned out, was a non-issue for Trump. Mere days after Trump's auditors cut him loose and announced that his company's financial statements were, screaming-between-the-lines, “Extremely Likely To Be Crooked,” Trump Tower got a $100 million refinance inked with Axos, a smallish bank previously known as the "Bank of Internet USA" and which is currently headed by an ex-Indymac executive who migrated to the company just before the whole "we nearly broke the entire world economy" Wall Street debacle of 2008.
Okay, fine, it's a little weird that the mortgage for Trump Tower was taken on by a bank with an internet presence but no actual branches, one headed by an executive that managed to land on his feet despite his prior institution not just collapsing, but cratering so spectacularly that its failures will be a permanent mention in new U.S. history textbooks. But what we can glean from this, probably, is that none of the banks Trump had previous relations with wanted to deal with him despite the pile of money involved, while the new company figured he’d still be worth that extra risk.
But the NBC News investigation also revealed some other weird things at play here. Things that all look a bit sketchy to us laypeople, but which may also plausibly be just the way everything in Wall Street tends to roll these days—at least, that's how the company is trying to sell it.
Weird things ranging, for example, from the two ex-employees suing the company after they were fired for flagging sketchy behavior ranging from allegedly hiding problems with shaky loans ...
... to offering "cash recapture" loans of a sort that can facilitate international money laundering ...
... to joining up with other companies to offer the small business equivalent of "payday loans," loans that evade typical regulations limiting how much interest those companies can charge.
Which, okay, sounds a bit weird! The ‘hiding problems with shaky loans’ bit is straight out of the 2008 financial crisis, but I imagine none of us are really expecting that banks are not diving right back into the break-the-economy behaviors that gets the breakers big bonuses before everything goes to hell.
It's a bit weird that the company has been accused of making things too easy for money launderers, given that Trump Tower and Trump's other real estate ventures have been noted for decades to be hubs of Russian money laundering. But again, real estate laws have been very carefully crafted to facilitate money laundering, so can we even count it as "weird" anymore? Or is it just business as usual?
And the last one, the charging grotesque interest rates through loopholes in laws barring such things, which NBC refers to as an alleged "rent-a-bank scheme," is a bit weird only because it turns out it was the Trump administration that put the rule allowing it in place, and it’s already being rescinded by the Biden administration for being obviously sketchy. So, um, extra points to them for managing to squeeze some profit out of a fleeting rule change that was pretty much destined to be yanked back again the second a non-sketchy administration took charge. I guess.
But it doesn’t even end there. NBC News also notes that the company has a history of going after anonymous bloggers who call attention to their weirdness and that the company head responded to an auditor's whistleblowing by suing him and the auditor's mother for taking "confidential" information, which, ok, bringing in the guy's mom definitely ranks high on the old financial company weird-o-meter but in a world with Elon Musk, Peter Lawsuitguy, and a man who hand-stuffs each of his famously crappy pillows with sedition-promoting conspiracy theories, it barely rates. We just have to live with the knowledge that our rich betters are super, super not-pleased with our common rabble opinions these days.
The question NBC News is raising with all of this is what the hell we outsiders are supposed to be making of all of it. Donald Trump had his bacon saved mere days after his company's auditing firm publicly told the world that there was Something Extremely Sketchy Going On with his bookkeeping, and a look at the low-profile company that bailed him out suggests both that they're a company that specializes in loans that are a little sketch and has ex-employees who claim that they got fired for pointing out the sketch, which makes the company sound like it went to prep school with Eric Trump or something.
The company's defense to ex-employee charges that it's being too permissive with potential money-laundering behavior, by the way, is an assertion to NBC News that such loans are subject to "a full, know-your-customer investigation" before approval, which ... okay. Sure, that would be responsible behavior. It’s difficult to imagine a company staying in business very long if they didn’t do such things.
I'm not sure how a company like that would miss a red flag as big as "mere days before we signed this paper, the company we provided a loan to was fired by its own auditors for up to ten years of misleading or fraudulent financial statements" but none of us here are bankers, and we don't know how this stuff works. It's all just a bit weird.
It’s gonna be even weirder if some company that once called itself "Bank of Internet" ends up foreclosing on Trump Tower if and when Donald Trump’s finances collapse yet again, but we’re not going to put odds down on that one, either.
