Meet Trump’s Russian money-laundering buddy!
We can’t believe we missed this post to The Palmer Report from Tuesday, but if we missed it, you might have:
Over the past weeks, Palmer Report has been reporting on the mysterious round-the-world gallivanting of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who spends most of his time at his home in Monaco but has a habit of flying into whatever city Donald Trump happens to be visiting at the time. And thanks to an exposed multibillion dollar money laundering scheme on the part of a bank that’s closely tied financially to both Rybolovlev and Trump, we think we know why.
As we’ve been documenting this month, whenever Donald Trump has left the White House and ventured anywhere, Dmitry Rybolovlev (aka the “Russian King of Fertilizer”) has tended to show up in the same city. It happened during Trump’s victory tour in Concord, North Carolina, a place Rybolovlev had no legitimate reason to be. It happened again when Trump vacationed in West Palm Beach, even though that required Rybolovlev to fly all the way in from Switzerland. That was also the time that Trump deposited reporters in a semi-submerged basement of his resort with black plastic covering the the windows.
That only leaves two possibilities. One is that Trump and Rybolovlev just happen to have a remarkably coincidental travel schedule, and that while Rybolovlev was in West Palm Beach, Trump went out of his way to make sure the press couldn’t see what was going on at his resort for no real reason. The other is that Trump and Rybolovlev have been meeting up whenever Trump ventures away from the White House. The latter possibility has long been bolstered by the fact that Trump sold Rybolovlev a mansion a few years ago that neither of them lived in nor cared about, suggesting the sale was mere cover for shifting money from Russia to Trump. And that theory just got bolstered significantly, thanks to a new breakthrough.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has also been all over this story:
You should also check out Quartz‘s giude to Trump’s Russia ties. Yes, you do need a scorecard!
