In what we can only describe as Dealbreaker’s personal version of “Avengers: Endgame,” the president and his menagerie of adult children have filed suit against whatever is left of Deutsche Bank.
In the suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, the president and his family members argue that the Democratic House committee leaders who issued the subpoenas engaged in a broad overreach.
“This case involves congressional subpoenas that have no legitimate or lawful purpose,” the suit alleges. “The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any material that might be used to cause him political damage. No grounds exist to establish any purpose other than a political one.”
As we’ve written about over at Dealbreaker more than a few times, Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans almost certainly provide a window into the Trump Organization’s habit of not being entirely honest about its finances, but some tinfoil hat types still see them as the likeliest source of Russian leverage over Trump and his family.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, Deutsche spent years being the only lender thirsty enough to bank The Donald, and also the only bank with internal controls so seemingly nonexistent that it managed to take a quasi-active role in a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme. Deutsche Bank spent the early 90s and early aughts getting so carried away that it forgot it was German and ended up lending money to people like the most consistently bankrupt man in American real estate. By numerous accounts, Deutsche knew it was taking a risk, but we have to giggle at the realization that not even the most creative actuary in the whole of Frankfurt could have conceived of a moment when the resulting debt from those loans would be the focus of a Congressional investigation into fraud and potential Russian money laundering used to exert influence over President Donald Trump. It’s a patently absurd thing to imagine, and yet… we are living it.
And speaking of unlikely, let’s talk about the Russa angle. While it has never seemed entirely likely that the Trump Organization was involved in an opaque equities trading crime (because that would require both access to the secret plot and basic level of financial sophistication), it has occurred to more than a few people that Deutsche Bank has been rather indiscriminately moving to offload its massive non-performing debt portfolio for years now, and few things in the world are more inert performers than Donald Trump’s debts.
Factoring in what we know about how European banks panicked over the past decade, how money flowed quietly through places like the Cypriot banking system, and how badly Deutsche wanted to move its bad assets after the crisis, there’s enough smoke to have fun contemplating the fire behind conspiracy theories about where Trump’s paper ended up. It’s a fun string to tie across the “Beautiful Mind” mystery board in your garage, but it’s a stretch.
We aren’t even reading into any deeper meaning of the lawsuit, to be honest, because Trump sues out of reflex. This isn’t even the first time he’s sued Deutsche Bank. The idea that Trump might not even know what happened to his debt feels not just possible, but breathtakingly likely. On the issue of whether or not Trump’s Deutsche documents will yield evidence that the Trump Family fraudulently misstated their wealth and assets depending on what the situation called for, we are more clear: They will.
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And we are 100 percent certain that Deutsche Bank will do everything it can to comply with Congress because it literally cannot afford not to.
We are not at all surprised to find that the whole thing is going to play out in a moist fritto misto of lawsuits, political theater, and Eric Trump going on Fox News to say stupid s**t about a situation he clearly only vaguely understands. What we have here is the logical conclusion to almost 30 years of bad decision-making by a litany of people who should have known better… and also the Trump Family.