But Schiff told me Friday that the committee had been unable to follow this roadmap, because Republican members are not interested. He noted that the committee had gone to court to force Fusion GPS to turn over its own bank records. “They're only interested in financial transactions that involve Fusion GPS, apparently,” Schiff said.
Of all the questions surrounding Trump and Russia, the question of whether the Kremlin could have laundered money through the Trump Organization in order to blackmail Trump has not often held the spotlight, obscured behind more direct connections, like discussions between Russian officials and Trump campaign officials like Donald Trump Jr. or George Papadapoulos, or more lurid ones from the Trump dossier.
Schiff, however, has long been interested in the idea. “The allegation that concerns me most is ... the issue of money laundering, and not money laundering alone by Mr. Manafort but whether the Russians also laundered money through the Trump Organization,” he told me in October. “I mention that because when most people think of kompromat, they think of the salacious video. But if the Russians were laundering money... that would be a very powerful lever the Russians would have over the president of the United States.”
Schiff noted that Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff in Fire and Fury that he believed money-laundering investigations were a real threat to the Trump administration.
“Before we looked into the allegations that Trump campaign people were surreptitiously meeting with the Russians it was only an allegation, but it proved to be all too true,” Schiff said. “Before we looked into allegations that Mike Flynn was having secret communications with the Russians and that the Trump transition might be seeking to undermine the sanctions imposed on Russia over its interference to help the Trump campaign, that was only an allegation, but that proved to be true. There's simply no way to either verify or be able to dismiss these serious allegations without looking into them.”
Schiff said his first priority would be to obtain records from Deutsche Bank, which did business with Trump when most banks would not. Last year, New York state fined Deutsche Bank $425 million over a scheme that laundered $10 billion out of Russia, one of several hefty fines levied on the bank by regulators worldwide in recent years.
Though relations between the Republican and Democratic members of the intelligence committee remain contentious, they seem to have improved since Chairman Devin Nunes stepped aside from the investigation amidst a bizarre escapade, in which the White House appeared to be feeding Nunes claims of ethical lapses by the Obama administration in handling intelligence information.
But the partisan tensions bubbled over again Friday, with a skirmish over a report apparently produced by a splinter faction of Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee led by Nunes. The GOP majority voted Thursday night to share the report with colleagues, but not to release it to the general public. By Friday morning, however, Republican members of Congress were demanding the memo be made public—with their calls being amplified by Russian-linked Twitter accounts.