Donald Trump's so-called financial crimes enforcement network within the Trea...
is now deleting in mass potential evidence of financial crimes for their enforcement.
“Probably shouldn't shock you when we talk about the corruption of the Trump regime.”
This is happening in playing view though and it needs to get more attention. In the Treasury Department, they're just trying to play this off as just bureaucratic rule-making. No, you're deleting evidence of crimes and you're going to literally promote money laundering in my opinion what's taking place. The financial crimes enforcement network like promoting money laundering.
Let me show you what went down. The Treasury Department yesterday posted today, Fins and News.
That's the financial crimes, issued a final rule that permanently removes the requirement
for U.S. companies and U.S. persons to report beneficial ownership information, Fins and
“today, also announced that it will delete previously reported information by U.S. persons”
from the beneficial ownership information that was quite literally- this isn't public information. Why in the hell would the financial crimes enforcement network literally delete the evidence of financial crimes potentially? Former Congress member Tom Millenowski posted the following, "I help pass this law." In 2020, it's purposes to prevent drug traffickers.
Russian and Chinese collect a crats and other international criminals from setting up
anonymously-owned companies to hide their money in the U.S.
Trump's Treasury Department is doing this to help criminals, so a Congress member who will pass this law as saying what the hell they're doing this to help the criminals now.
“He explains that beneficial ownership information is just a record of who actually owns a company.”
That's all that was being reported here, so that we didn't have LLC's limited liability companies in Delaware laundering millions of dollars through the U.S. and into offshore banks on behalf of totally anonymous people, Treasury deleting the beneficial ownership info. It already gathered is utterly crazy. This database was not public. It was just for law enforcement to use and investigating crimes.
It's like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI's fingerprint database and hold the thought there for all we know they may be doing that too, who they'll know is with these people. Why is the Trump administration? Tom Milinowski says doing this. I don't know, but it's certainly good news for rich Russians who want to buy his condos or golf royals buying his fake crypto. The true identities of people he's done business with if registered with
Treasury will now be deleted. Last but not least, this is totally illegal. Congress passed a thing called a law with strong Republican support, by the way. This was a massive bipartisan initiative because at that time people were like, "Hey, we don't want money laundering." Saying Treasury had to collect and keep beneficial ownership info. Not be a controversial thing. The Trump administration cannot just say, "We're just not
going to do it anymore." And as Milinowski says, this will find its way to court. It will be struck down because what the Treasury Department is doing right now is unlawful, but the deletion of data, currently available to law enforcement, may be irreversible. It's one of the most lawless and corrupt things this administration has done. And that is saying a lot, Congress member Sean Castan said, "We passed this law and make no mistake. It's a law." Not just an
option for the Treasury Department to interpret, to ensure people would and hide their identities in nets of LLCs to long-term money. Treasury is protecting criminals with this action. Richard Nephew says, "The process for my LLC took all the five minutes to complete. If you've got nothing to hide, it's no big deal." And Philip O'Brien says, "The U.S. is run by organized crime syndicates right now." That's destroying the evidence of their crimes. I want to bring in Tom Milinowski,
the former Congress member from New Jersey, who helped pass this law back in 2020, who's message that you saw and Tom, this is not nearly getting the attention it deserves. This is a very big deal in plain view to leading evidence and mass of financial crimes. Talk to us about it, Tom. So thank you very to be on with you. And as you explained, beneficial ownership. It's just a fancy word for who is the real owner of a company. And amazingly, you know, we used to think that
people would use, you know, crux around the world would use Swiss bank accounts to
Hide their tracks, or they'd go to some little island state in the Caribbean,...
from the Seychelles and the Indian Ocean. These were the places that crux would go to to hide their
“tracks. But we discovered in the last decade that actually the United States is a keynote in the”
international money laundering network, because a lot of our states, particularly, but not only Delaware, allowed anybody in the world to register a company, to establish a company under an anonymous name. It's called a shell company. So, well, let's say just for the sake of argument, or like a Russian oligarch. And you want to buy a condo in Florida from a guy named Donald Trump, but you don't want people to know where he doesn't want people to know that Russian oligarchs are buying this condo.
So, you find a lawyer in Miami or New York. He sets up a shell company for you, registers it in Delaware, under maybe his own name, or fake name. And then, you know, for good measure, that company creates 20 other companies under the Seychelles umbrella. One of those companies then sets up a bank account, maybe, in the Cayman Islands. And then that entity buys the condo. And nobody knows the IRS doesn't know, law enforcement doesn't know. It just shows up as the owner of the
condo is like one, two, three corporation of America, or something like that. That happened routinely
until this will all pass. So, this will basically just says every company registered in the United
States has to report is true owner to the Treasury Department. And that database is there, so that if the Justice Department is investigating some kind of crime, corruption money laundering terrorism, drug trafficking, child trafficking, sanctions of Asian, it can look up and it finds some mysterious LLC involved in that shady business. It can look that LLC up in the registry and trace it back
“to the person who really sounds. So, that's what this one was doing. And as you said, their base,”
they're not, they're not trying to fiddle with how it's implemented. It's just said today, we are canceling the law. We are not going to enforce it. It's over. And all the data we've gathered is going to be somehow erased, completely, completely, all of us be. Was the law working in the sense of, you mentioned the example where they still needed to find somebody in the States, whether it was a Miami lawyer or someone to help set it up,
how were we kind of dealing with the situation where a lawyer or someone in the United States would serve as like a straw man or whatever it was. And when that happened where the LLC would designate that lawyer, but I guess they still had to put a name, which they did in the States and then invest to get it. So, talk to us about, then make it. There's some foreign crook and you want to set up a company in the United States and over this volume, you can still do it, right?
But your lawyer, we're assuming here most lawyers don't want to be criminals themselves. Your lawyer is now going to tell you, you can set up a company, call it whatever you want, but you also have to fill out this other form. And on this other form, which doesn't go to some public website, but it's submitted to the Treasury Department,
“you have to fit your real name. And the expectation was that the people who are taking advantage”
of this system were just going to go elsewhere. Because now it's no longer easy and safe, or at least as easy or safe as it used to be, to set up an anonymous child company in the United States. So, if you're doing it to hide some sort of criminal activity or to escape sanctions or to avoid paying taxes, then it's, you're taking it the grass canal if, if you try to create it, the US-based company to do this. I've been on a mission to find snacks that
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including the protein pastries at magic spoon dot com slash minus. That's magic spoon dot com slash minus for $5 off. That's N-E-I-D-A-S. So the beneficial ownership form, though, was just sent to the treasury department where they would keep a database, and then they would have their financial crimes enforcement network, fin sen, would compile this. They would have the ability to reach out to the appropriate authorities, whether it was the FBI, whether it was, you know, other, you know,
whatever, whoever's the appropriate authority to look into this. It wasn't like around. So like
if the FBI is investigating across, let's say you're investigating some complex financial harm. And in the course of your investigation, you find some mysterious company with a weird name that is doing the dirty business. It's, it owns the bank account that has funded the trial trafficking work operations to make them one possible example. The FBI now can go to fin sen, can go to the treasury department, and say, hey, can we look up this entity and find out who's
actually behind? And then treasury would share that with one person. So that's the way it was set up
to work. We passed the law in 2021, and it took a couple of years for the treasury department
“to issue the rule to start implementing it. I think I wasn't until the beginning of 2024,”
it's been on the books now for a couple of years. And as of today, they're saying, no one has to file this information. And this is just, I'm trying to even go through my mind about what other than covering up the idea of an oligarch or someone who wants to keep it utterly secret, or someone who's laundering money, or who's trafficking, or I'm trying to think of any other example why that would, like I'm just trying to who's the constituency over here,
that is being his benefit, I don't have that group. I'm trying to think, check this out, there's one legitimate thing. So in order to enforce this law, now everybody registering a company or LLC in the United States has to file this information. And I think for most people, it's very easy, you can find the form online, you can submit it online, it asks for name, address your tax ID, it asks you to upload a picture of your driver's license, and of course the name and address
as a person who owns the company. That's straightforward for most businesses. But, you know, in the implementation, small business owners started complaining that they're now having to pay some lawyer a couple of hundred bucks to file out this form for them. And there were some weird examples, like I've heard from people who said, like, you know, I'm a volunteer board member of my local co-op association, and we were told we have to file this form, and we have to pay somebody to fill it
out for us. And like, I'm sure there were real problems out there in terms of this being a burden on some people that we did not attend it to the a burden on. But, if that's your concern, you fix that through a new role that extends those kinds of people, where that makes it even easier for them, fine. You do not cancel implementation of the entire law. So, but I do want to be fair. There are some legitimate concerns that constituents of members of Congress have been raising with their members.
It's just that those things could have been easily fixed without sending a America is welcome welcomes now dirty money from the worst criminals in the world message that the Trump administration sent today. And we're going to now delete the entire database and get rid of this accumulated.
“And that's what I appreciate about discussions like this and what we tried to do here, which I”
again, is this was a bipartisan bill. I don't know if you this has a Democrat or a public in an independent thing. I mean, there was a problem, a serious one, trafficking, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, money laundering in general, drug trafficking, all this stuff that was happening. It was being determined. Sure, there's Cayman Islands, all these, but a lot of it's happening here.
Here's how we try to fix it.
who may be having to be burdened a few hundred bucks, maybe a little more. That was an intended.
“Let's fix it. Let's make it better. That's the way the system like in a normal functioning”
democracy time. These are the discussions that we have. When you were in Congress, you probably said, well, this is what we would debate. Maybe we do it this way as the best. Maybe it's that way. But we all want to stop trafficking. So let's figure out how we do it here. They do this crap. And then they start just saying, uh, WMBA players, whoa. And it's like, what do you even talking about? We're trying to solve a problem, stop dividing us about weird shit. Let's try to
figure out what do you would be with the answer. Yeah, so let's go. Give you an example. One of my co-sponsors was then Congresswoman Mike Walsh, who is now Trump's ambassador to the U.N. And like at the time he's a conservative Republican who was really focused on protecting American national security from all kinds of threats around the world. He saw as a national security bill. And so that brings us back to the question, why do they do it? The excuse will be,
we did it to help these mom and pop trusts and small business owners. I don't buy that because
“whatever problems they were having we could have fixed. So I think you got to see it in a bigger”
context. Remember, the the IRS now under Trump is is scaling back, um, audits of millionaires and billionaires and, and of corporations. They're the fire. They fired the people that we hired under the Biden administration to ensure that the wealthy got audited as much as working class Americans. Um, the administration has publicly announced they're no longer going to force a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is a law that says that U.S. companies
can't bribe foreign governments around the world. Um, with white-collar crime division at the
“Justice Department has been, um, absolutely gutted. So across the board, um, and I guess maybe”
has something to do with the fact that the president of the United States is himself a white-collar criminal across the board. They are just refusing to enforce laws targeting white-collar crime by wealthy Americans corruption by members of their own class. And it's it's so blatant that it's almost hard to believe because they're not even really trying to hide it, but this is another
step in that direction. Tom, I want to thank you for joining us. First time on the
Midas Touch Network, but we had so much we should be talking about. I mean, you were the Assistant Secretary of State, um, you know, uh, I like to go do deep dives into the Middle East, your experience in Bahrain and other areas there, especially with the Mecca Pack, the Security and Brella, that's replacing the, I'm just, I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts on everything that's going on. We'll save all of that for the next 10 years. But, uh, we appreciate you.
Good. And we'll fix this too, eventually. You know, it's, it's just another item on the to-do list for, uh, next year when hopefully we have Democratic majorities in the House and Senate
certainly in 2019. I mean, I, everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 70 million things for watching.
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