In other news, the Ford Motor Company says it's cutting 7,000 more jobs worldwide including 2,500 here in the U.S. to cut costs and save $600 million per year. Trump's tariffs have cost Ford at least $1 billion.
Meanwhile, Trump's big idea for peace in the Middle East is apparently to build a Starbucks in Gaza. I'm barely kidding.
Trump’s Middle East team, led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and regional envoy Jason Greenblatt, appears intent on focusing initially on potential economic benefits, despite deep skepticism among experts that they can succeed where decades of U.S.-backed efforts have failed.
“We think this is an opportunity to take the economic plan that we’ve worked on for a long time now and present it in the region,” a senior Trump administration official said.
Finally, the New York Times reports that Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank flagged suspicious activity in accounts controlled by Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016 and 2017, meaning some of this activity was flagged while Trump has been in office.
And Deutsche Bank executives covered it up.
The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.
But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government. [...]
Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals. She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.
Shares of Duestche Bank dropped to a record low value this morning.