Trump Kills Marco Rubio's Anti-Money-Laundering Law, Likes His Russian Crime-Boss Money Shiny And Clean :D
Can presidents just stop enforcing any laws they don't like? If they're Republicans, yes!
Back in the Olden Days of the Before Times — 2020, if anyone can remember that far back — then-Senator Marco Rubio had a vision for cleaning up corruption and money laundering, and he sponsored the “Corporate Transparency Act.” The CTA, passed with bipartisan support, was a bold new law aimed at shining the light of truth onto the shadowy dealings of anonymously owned shell corporations, forcing such companies to disclose to the government “who is the real, natural person (aka beneficial owner) who owns and controls an entity at the point of formation.” It was frankly shocking that it had ever been legal to keep company ownership secret even from the government, but we guess it made it easier for Russian crimebosses to shovel money to Trump Tower. Anyway, for a minute it was a very good law.
Shell companies do have their legitimate purposes, we hear, but they were also being used to conceal a lot of hinky crimey stuff too, to the point where even some Republicans were worried. The CTA got praise from the usual good-government and transparency types, and even the Trump administration was on board in 2019 as the House version of the bill moved through Congress. After it passed the House in late 2020, both then-President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden supported it. Trump ultimately signed it into law on January 1, 2021, a few days before inciting his crime droogs to attempt to kill cops and overturn the 2020 election.
An overview by the nonpartisan Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition explained in 2020 why the bill was a terrific way to fight financial crimes:
Anonymous companies are the vehicle of choice for the criminal and the corrupt to launder illicit funds with impunity. Drug cartels, human trafficking rings, purveyors of counterfeit and pirated goods, rogue nations evading sanctions, corrupt officials stealing from state coffers, and others use anonymous corporate structures to move and hide illicit wealth.
Shell companies had to disclose to relevant agencies the identity of those “beneficial owners” — anyone owning more than 25 percent of a company, or with substantial control over the company — and Rubio was very proud of his achievement, as he posted to what was then Twitter and is now a sewer.
But now Rubio is making excuses for murder on the high seas and Donald Trump’s Treasury Department this week issued a final rule that dismantles the CTA, making permanent a “temporary” pause on the reporting requirements that the administration put in place in March 2025. The reversal prompted the previously mild-mannered FACT Coalition, the folks a couple paragraphs up who praised the CTA back in 2020, to say this week that the rule “Sides with Fentanyl Pushers, Human Traffickers, Fraudsters, and Tax Cheats.” And that was just the headline.
Trump has gone and radicalized the good government transparency nerds.
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Going forward, the rule drops the requirement for US companies and US persons to disclose the identities of the people who actually own shell companies, although foreign companies and mutual funds still have to, for foreign owners, at least. That means it’s a free-for-all for around 33 million US-based corporations, which are now free to go back to buying real estate and doing deals without anyone ever knowing who’s behind them. That’s about 99 percent of the entities that Congress intended to regulate when it passed the CTA (and Trump signed it) in 2021.
On top of that, the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) will delete all the identity records of US owners that it had collected under the CTA during 2024, when the law was actually in effect.
In a statement, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that the most transparent administration in history had to eliminate corporate transparency by “eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.” As we all know, it’s practically impossible to conduct legitimate business if your accountants make you sign a form saying who you are, oh, the pain, the pain.
And if those anonymous businesses aren’t so law-abiding, well, just trust them, OK? Besides, money laundering remains illegal, but now the administration has erased the basic reporting requirements that briefly made it harder to get away with.
The new rule was slammed in a statement by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who called it “a gift to cartels, criminals, and U.S. adversaries that exploit shell companies to move millions through our financial system.” Warren said the administration had ignored warnings from law enforcement and the abundant evidence from public reporting and the Justice Department that shell companies have been used to cover up criming by “Sinaloa cartel operatives, Iranian sanctions evaders, and those stealing technology for China’s military.”
You know who else used shell corporations to hide his activities? As Warren points out, Trump’s old pal Jeffrey Epstein set up dozens of shell LLCs and “exploited U.S. Virgin Islands-registered shell companies to facilitate sex trafficking after bank officials raised concerns about his constant cash withdrawals.”
Oh hey, remember how Donald Trump’s family business has more than 400 shell companies, too? But they’re probably all very legitimate and not involved in tax fraud shenanigans, for which Trump can’t be prosecuted or even investigated anyway, at least not with his personal attorney now running the DOJ.
Also too, as Stephen Prager points out at Common Dreams, Trump pal and DOGE hustler Elon Musk is a big fan of anonymous LLCs too:
The New York Times found that in Texas alone, there are over 90 different companies and other legal entities tied to Musk, with others in California, Delaware, and Nevada, which he has used to buy property, structure business deals, hold assets, and pay for political activity—including more than $80 million in super political action committee spending to support Trump in 2024—without putting his own name on the transactions.
Earlier this year, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was joined by Senators Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) in calling for an investigation into Musk’s role, if any, in gutting the transparency law. They noted that last year, Treasury issued its temporary rule suspending enforcement of the CTA “one day after Elon Musk, who at the time served as the head of DOGE, announced that he would ‘look into’ the law.”
OK, but that was probably just a complete coincidence, like the coincidence of Musk’s happy wave looking like a Hitler salute, the coincidence of Homeland Security messaging quoting directly from Nazi slogans, and the coincidence of the Trump family getting filthy rich from Great Leader’s second term (too many examples to pick one link).
Sure seems like we need to elect a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress if we actually want to crack down on financial crimes. Republicans have mostly gone over to the side of moneyed criminals, leaving Dems the party of Law and Order.
[The Fucking News / Miami Herald (2022) / FACT Coalition / Tech Times / Treasury Department / Elizabeth Warren / Common Dreams]
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It is also alarming that the Treasury can "suspend enforcement" indefinitely of a law that is on the books.
Goddammit, I hate all these mother fuckers so much.