quick sales, russian figures coming in to buy properties at an inflated rate and then selling them at a real loss. he says there s this effort to disguise the identity of those properties and then separately we can look at what simpson describes as a real effort. there s been some new reporting that suggests mueller s team is looking into this. of russian figures to really infiltrate conservative organizations like the nra. they targeted these various conservative organizations, religious or otherwise, he says. and why is this important. this is because as some of the democrats on the committee asked simpson, is this really enough evidence to say there s a link between the president and potential financial leverage that vladimir putin has on him and what simpson tells them is that basically all these oligarchs, are agents of the state now, everyone works for putin, he says. a pattern of off market real estate sales. those sales to foreign investors with shell companies. that sure sou
think i want to make here is that it could provide an explanation for why trump and the ecosystem of people around trump behaved the way they did. if there s indebtedness or some level of gratitude or some current obligations that are due which could be called, they have to look at that to understand whether or not there is a motive for the collusion allegation. so it is basically money laundering 101. i ve said that when i was chief of the money laundering section in the justice department if any one of my lawyers didn t follow this lead, we d have a conversation about why not. and i think that s what mueller is doing here. he s trying to figure out what the relationship is between prior business dealings potentially and current collusion allegations. bob, do you see anything that could be considered off the table when it comes to the purview of this investigation? oh, i agree with michael, absolutely not. you ve got to go way back. even before the campaign. you have to look at th
failure. and the only way they survived was from russian money coming in through private sources and from deutsche bank which itself is under investigation for its dealings with russian money. so that has to be looked into. there may be nothing at the end, but that has to be looked into. basically money laundering 101, when i ran the justice department s money laundering section, this is what would have been the first step in our money laundering situations. carol, on top of all of this overnight, we re learning that the president s private legal team is shaking up and marc kasowitz taking on a diminished role and john dowd, he is going to take over, does the shift in personnel denote a shift in strategy? is this an attack on robert mueller s team the first part of that? i think it s a great question, but i think it s a little more subtle than that. i think as everything is true with donald trump s advisors,