AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this, when it comes to Vancouver. And specifically, just having read your piece, talk about Felix Sater and who he is.
JAMES HENRY: Right. Felix Sater is a convicted felon. He also happened to run a company with a partner, called Bayrock, which was a big investor in the project called the Trump SoHo, which basically went belly up. Bayrock no longer exists; it went bankrupt. But Felix and his partner, you know, have been accused of being a conduit to former Soviet Union money that was flowing into these projects. You know, that’s a matter of litigation that’s before the courts now.
But it is the case that the farther you look into Felix and his partners, the more curious the situation becomes. He was convicted and then had a very generous plea deal in 2000 from our former attorney general, Loretta Lynch, despite the fact that he had been convicted of felonies for a huge $40 million financial scam. He never served a day in jail. He then did a kind of very big plea bargain with the Justice Department. And essentially, we think he may have been helping the CIA repurchase Stinger missiles in Afghanistan with the help of his Russian friends. Anyway, that’s another whole smoking gun we need to investigate. But Sater, to this day, has been involved in—his latest thing was to propose a kind of a relaxed sanctions on Russia with respect to the Ukraine, just in January, using Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, as a conduit. So, this guy—the fact that these kinds of people are floating around the Trump Organization, just in and out of the door, is very disturbing. And, you know, my piece goes into a lot of the different networks and the extensive—
AMY GOODMAN: But staying on Felix, you actually show the business card of Felix Sater, which we will show right here—
JAMES HENRY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —which says, "Felix H. Sater," and on top it says, "Trump," "The Trump Organization."
JAMES HENRY: That’s right. I mean, he was, at a certain point, an adviser to Trump. He was meeting with him in his office. They were scheming to do projects all over the planet. You know, he was making campaign contributions to the Trump Organization this summer. They have distanced themselves from him. I mean, he has a—you know, this is a fellow who’s been convicted of slashing somebody with a margarita glass.
So, you know, the issue, more broadly, just beyond Felix Sater, is: How do we get to the bottom of all of these allegations? I think that David’s point about needing some kind of independent investigation, maybe a national commission, on this whole issue, just to clear the air, is essentially the way to go.
But the most recent report that I’ve been doing, I wanted to just turn to that, because, you know, the Sater story has been done. We know it’s out there. It still needs work. But, you know, the most interesting thing I’ve come up with lately is about our new secretary of commerce investing in a Russian-owned bank that’s basically, up to the minute, involved in money laundering. And he’s got, you know, three partners in that bank who are wealthy oligarchs, one of whom was a KGB agent, appointed by Putin to the bank. This is the Bank of Cyprus. And at least 50 percent of that bank is Russian-owned. So, Wilbur Ross is the fellow we’re talking about. We presented our report over the weekend. Several U.S. senators took the material there and asked Ross questions about all of his connections with these folks. But he never responded. And on Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 72 to 27 in his favor. I just find this, you know, outrageous, Amy. It’s something that—
AMY GOODMAN: Well—
JAMES HENRY: You know, yet another case.
AMY GOODMAN: But talk more specifically about Wilbur Ross, again, the wealthiest, I believe, of the Cabinet members.
JAMES HENRY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Your subtitle, "There’s Still Time for Senators"—well, this is before Wilbur Ross was confirmed—"to Examine Wilbur Ross and His Mysterious Russian-Controlled Bank in Cyprus." Talk more specifically about this and the money he made—
JAMES HENRY: Yes, exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: —and why this matters right now.
JAMES HENRY: Well, he invested in this bank, which is the largest bank in Cyprus. It has a long—Cyprus is a big offshore haven, especially for Russians. Most of the direct investments that go into Russia are going through Cyprus. And his first partner in the bank, his co-vice chairman, was a guy who was a KGB agent, appointed to that position by Putin because there were a lot of Russian shareholders in the bank after it went belly up.
A second partner was the potash tsar of Russia, worth about $8 billion, a guy named Rybolovlev. And Dmitry Rybolovlev not only sold Donald Trump his house—bought Donald Trump’s house in 2008 for $95 million in Palm Beach, but he was also tagged as bird-dogging the president on the campaign trail, you know, intersecting with his landings in places like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Concord and Las Vegas, all over the campaign trail, and flying his Airbus 319 on these same routes. So, what was he up to? Why was Rybolovlev, you know, intersecting with the president’s campaign?
And the third partner was a fellow named Vekselberg, who is another big garch, Russian investor. He has four companies in Switzerland, one of which has been implicated in intelligence spying, for, you know, tapping people’s internet connections. So, you know, this is kind of unacceptable.
The final thing is that Wilbur Ross personally nominated as the CEO of this Bank of Cyprus, this Russian haven bank, the former head of Deutsche Bank, which was just, as David said, implicated in something like $10 billion of Russian money laundering. And Josef Ackermann was there for 10 years. All of this happened on his watch. His reward is to become head of the Wilbur Ross-run Bank of Cyprus.
AMY GOODMAN: He was fined $650 million for helping launder Russian money through Deutsche Bank offices in Moscow, New York and Cyprus. Deutsche Bank, as you point out, is Trump’s largest known lender, having extended him more than $300 million of loans that remain outstanding.
JAMES HENRY: That’s right. So, anyway, all this nets out to, you know, a whole lot of smoke, a few fires breaking, more and more contradictions in the administration’s position. And I would say, if you were looking at this statistically, you know, we’re now out—up to maybe the odds of this being happening just by probability is like one in 10,000. You know, there is something going on with this administration. It’s the only way, for example, you could really explain all of the positions that Donald Trump takes that are perfectly aligned with those of Vladimir Putin—on NATO, on the EU, on pipelines, on human rights, on immigration. I mean, it’s like they’re kissing cousins. So, you know—
