Dept of Treasury
blank 7/18
mike benz
SCOTT BESSANT
see mnuchin, 501c4 social welfare, money launder, russian collusion
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an 9 26
A very wealthy donor to President Donald Trump scored a deal with a Russian state-owned bank that would normally be off-limits due to sanctions, the International Consortium of Independent Journalists reported.
Konstantin Sokolov is a Russian-American businessman and a major donor to Trump's political groups. In 2025, he gave $11 million to MAGA Inc., the president's super PAC, and also contributed to Trump’s White House ballroom project.
Trump signed off on new sanctions last week. The new sanctions would target Russian officials, financial institutions, energy and defense sectors and oil-shipping networks. It also authorizes tariffs of up to 100 percent on major purchasers of Russian oil and gas, one explainer outlined.
But already, Trump's funder is exempt, according to a Treasury Department decision. Sokolov will be able to buy a major copper mine in Armenia from the Russian state-owned bank.
"The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as OFAC, can grant a license to individuals or companies to complete transactions that would otherwise be prohibited by sanctions," the ICIJ explained. "OFAC states on its website that it may grant a license to do business with sanctioned Russian entities when it is in the interest of the applicant and the U.S. government."
Sokolov's spokesperson confirmed that such approval was given.
Sokolov was also appointed chairman of a new $200 million State Department enterprise fund that will invest in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, which is a strategic geographic region at the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Armenia is expected to benefit. That means Sokolov has two overlapping roles: first, he owns or manages private businesses in Armenia, including the copper mine. Second, Sokolov helps oversee a U.S. government-backed investment fund that may invest in Armenia.
Armenian lawmakers and critics are concerned that the relationship creates a potential conflict of interest by essentially granting Sokolov public or government-supported investment and decision-making in a country where he also has large private financial interests.
Armenia’s National Assemblymember Mesrop Manukyan said when speaking to the ICIJ that Sokolov’s position “create[s] legitimate questions about … the separation between private commercial interest and decisions involving public or government-backed funds.”
Sokolov's spokesperson also claimed there was “no evidential basis” to link Sokolov's donations to Trump and approval by Trump's government. Suggesting otherwise “would be incorrect and wholly misplaced," they added.
While the administration and Sokolov deny any corruption, the report raises legitimate questions about transparency, favoritism and whether private business interests could overlap with Trump's government power.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-treasury-department-is-now-helping-a-hunter-biden-probe-while-furiously-protecting-the-president/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/trumps-treasury-dept-pushes-plot-to-fan-the-flames-of-corporate-tax-dodging/
no lnx
Trump’s Treasury Dept. pushes plot to fan the flames of corporate tax dodging
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams November 1, 2019
President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department on Thursday took the first step toward eliminating remaining regulations designed to prevent corporations from avoiding U.S. taxes by storing profits overseas, a move critics decried as yet another harmful giveaway to big business.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, said in a statement that the 2017 GOP tax law—which disproportionately benefited the rich—rendered Obama-era rules against offshore tax avoidance “obsolete” by significantly reducing the corporate tax rate.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, disagreed with Mnuchin’s assessment, warning in a statement that the Treasury Department’s plan “only provides an opening for corporations to again dodge their taxes.”
“The corporations that got a massive taxpayer handout are getting another gift from Donald Trump,” said Wyden. “The Obama administration had essentially shut down inversion—transactions whose only purpose is to help big multinational corporations move overseas to avoid paying taxes.”
According to Bloomberg, the Treasury Department’s proposal, detailed in a policy guidance (pdf) released Thursday, “could make it easier for firms to use accounting tactics to minimize their U.S. earnings and inflate their foreign profits, which are frequently taxed at rates lower than the current 21 percent domestic corporate levy.”
“The existing regulations were aimed at stopping American companies from moving their headquarters to a lower-tax country, a process known as a corporate inversion,” noted Bloomberg.
Contrary to Mnuchin’s claim that the GOP’s 2017 tax law eliminated incentives for corporations to shift profits overseas, advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers have argued the law made it easier for businesses to avoid U.S. taxes.
“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) will allow companies to avoid taxes on $235 billion in profits each year going forward,” a coalition of more than 50 progressive organizations led by Americans for Tax Fairness wrote in a letter (pdf) to Congress last May.
“Moreover, the law created new incentives for multinational corporations to move their real operations offshore,” the groups said. “The law guarantees that U.S. multinational corporations will pay at most one-half the domestic tax rate on their offshore earnings, with many companies paying little or nothing in taxes on these earnings.”
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OMG
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/saudis-and-the-us-team-up-to-kill-european-union-effort-to-create-a-dirty-money-blacklist/
United States and key ally Saudi Arabia saw their lobbying efforts pay off on Friday after the European Commission’s proposed dirty money blacklist—which included the oil-rich kingdom and several American territories—fizzled.
“The Americans fell on us like a tonne of bricks,” an anonymous Brussels official told the *Financial Times*.
The effort “to protect the integrity of the E.U. financial system,” the commission said last month, included blacklisting 23 territories that had “strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks.” They included American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico as well as Saudi Arabia.
However, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, “European governments, under pressure from Washington and Riyadh, have refused to endorse” the list.
“The rejection of the governments is a farce at the expense of security,” declared Sven Giegold, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Germany, in a statement quoted by *Bloomberg*. “France and the U.K. want to remove Saudi Arabia and other countries from the list. Spain is protecting Panama. The United States is exerting massive pressure because four U.S. jurisdictions,” he said.
“Governments must ask themselves whether they are on the side of autocrats or their citizens!” he added in a tweet.
As Politico reported, the list, which would need the backing of the European Parliament and Council of the E.U. to go into effect, “is politically sensitive because it has teeth. E.U. banks that handle payments connected to the blacklisted countries and territories would have to conduct ‘enhanced due diligence’ on any cash that moves to and from the E.U. and the blacklisted jurisdictions.”
Politico also noted the “intense backlash and behind-the-scenes lobbying from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.”
The proposal drew ire from the U.S. Treasury Department, which denounced the commission’s methodology, and its head, Secretary Steven Mnuchin, wrote to the commission to denounce the effort, as FT reported.
U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, even acknowledged that “we had to spend our energy killing this bad idea.”Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, for his part, also wrote to E.U. leaders about the “surprising and unexpected” list, and warned of its damage to “trade and investment flows between the kingdom and the European Union.”
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https://www.alternet.org/trump-treasury-department-obstructing-russia-investigation
Insofar as Congress had made a serious effort to investigate Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, Trump administration has hardly been cooperative.
Indeed, according to a new report from BuzzFeed News, civil servants in the Treasury Department voiced concern last year that their department was deliberately seeking to prevent the Senate Intelligence Committee from tracking down financial records of key actors in the Russia affair:
Last year, Treasury rejected the committee’s request for help from one of its experts, even as Treasury officials have speculated — behind closed doors — that the Senate committee would not be able to follow the twisting financial trail laid out in the documents they had turned over, a path that often passes through offshore shell companies or untraceable cash transactions. In emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News, personnel within Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, discussed in 2017 whether Treasury was trying to thwart the committee’s investigation. Additionally, some FinCEN personnel questioned whether they had the proper legal authority to share confidential information about US persons with committee staffers.
Senators on the Intelligence Committee first asked the Treasury Department to disclose financial information on Trump and his associates last year. Democratic members of the committee have openly expressed frustration with how slowly the department has cooperated with them.
A spokesman for FinCEN refused to give BuzzFeed a detailed response to the story, saying "We don’t discuss the specifics of requests related to committee investigations."
But the Treasury Department's purported desire to undermine the Russia investigation squares with a pattern of apparent politically motivated refusals to embrace transparency.
Last month, the department announced that the IRS would no longer force tax-exempt dark-money political groups to report the names of certain donors in their filings. This information was not even public to begin with — it was simply used to help the IRS record where political money was coming from — but apparently, even this slightest gesture at disclosure was too much for the Trump administration.
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vox
United States government is making it easier for “dark money” donors to keep their contributions, well, in the dark. The Treasury Department on Monday said it planned to end requirements that certain tax-exempt organizations identify their financial contributors on their tax returns.
The decision means groups such as the National Rifle Association, Planned Parenthood, and the AARP will no longer have to tell the IRS who’s giving them money.
The decision landed the same day as the Justice Department announced the arrest of Maria Butina, a Russian national with NRA ties who is accused of trying to influence US politics. Ethics experts say Treasury’s maneuver will make identifying activities like those Butina has been accused of even harder to track.
Labor unions, volunteer fire departments, issue advocacy groups, local chambers of commerce, veterans groups, community service clubs, and other so-called social welfare 501(c)(4) groups or those that don’t generally get tax-deductible contributions will be freed of requirements that they list the names or addresses of their donors on their annual returns with the IRS.
Since the *Citizens United* Supreme Court decision in 2010 that held political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, the IRS has been flooded with applications from groups seeking 501(c)(4) status. A number of well-known organizations have it, including the Democratic Socialists of America, Americans for Prosperity, and the NRA.
Before this change, such groups had to report to the government the names of donors who gave them more than $5,000 a year. The names of donors weren’t revealed to the public, but the amounts were, and government officials were able to see where money was coming from. After the new reporting requirements kick in, even the IRS won’t know.
“It is quite clear that what they want is to not enable enforcement that is actually part of the law by the IRS on issues of whether or not some of these groups are actually political committees,” Ann Ravel, a former Democratic commissioner on the Federal Election Commission (FEC), told me. “That’s the whole purpose of this.”
Dark money is about to get a little darker
Dark money is political spending meant to influence voter decisions and politics where the source of funds is undisclosed. Donors can give thousands or millions of dollars to push issues and wield influence through groups like 501(c)(4)swithout ever having their identities revealed — although 501(c)(4) groups can only take in “dark money” as long as political activities aren’t their primary purpose.TheCenter for Responsive Politicsnotes that political organizations spent more than $15 million in 2015 to influence the 2016 elections outside of party or official campaign structures; only $5 million of that was reported to the FEC.
The revised requirements will go into effect for taxable years ending on or after December 31, 2018, meaning the reporting requirements will kick in for returns due after May 15, 2019. Tax-exempt charitable organizations, those listed under section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code, will still have to say who’s giving them money.
Paul S. Ryan, vice president at the watchdog group Common Cause, said Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers, has been fighting for the IRS change for years and has actively opposed state efforts to expand donor disclosure requirements for political spending. “AFP has been the most active, open, and visible advocate for reducing and preventing disclosure of donors to 501(c)(4) organizations,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell applauded the IRS’s decision and said it was “a move in the right direction to end activist regulators’ culture of intimidation to silence political speech.”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement announcing the decision that Americans “shouldn’t be required to send the IRS information that it doesn’t need to effectively enforce our tax laws,” adding that the IRS “simply does not need tax returns with donor names and addresses” to do its job.
Mnuchin also said that the decision will not limit transparency. That’s true in the case of tax-exempt charitable organizations, which will still have to disclose donors. But other groups will be able to keep even more information from the public and from the government. They can still engage in politics, and as long as they don’t spend more than half of their money on campaign ads or election-influencing activities, the organizations don’t have to say who’s funding them, even just to the IRS.
“They say if they need it, they can request it. But there’s no way that they would have any reason to request it if they don’t have the information to begin with,” Ravel, the former FEC commissioner, said.
The timing of the rule change and the Maria Butina charges is ... not ideal
The Justice Department on Monday charged Maria Butina, a Russian national, with conspiring against the US as a foreign agent. One of the elements under scrutiny is Butina’s ties to the NRA, which she courted in her attempt to establish a “back channel” of communications between the US and Russia. There have also been reports that the FBI is investigating whether Russian money went to the NRA during the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.
Ethics experts say the Treasury Department’s announcement on Monday regarding donor disclosures will make deciphering the murkiness surrounding the NRA more difficult because it undermines the federal government’s ability to detect illegal activities by nonprofit groups.
It’s still illegal for groups such as the NRA to spend contributions from foreign nationals to influence US elections, said Ryan, but because donations don’t have to be listed, it will be harder for the authorities to identify malicious activity.
“Large amounts of foreign national donations to a politically active nonprofit could be a red flag to IRS staff that could trigger greater scrutiny,” Ryan said. “But such red flags will no longer be visible to IRS staff. President Trump’s Treasury Department has struck a blow to US democracy with this rule change.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sounded the alarm bells in a statement on Monday. “Trump’s Treasury Department made it easier for anonymous foreign donors to funnel dark money into nonprofits the same day a Russian national linked to the NRA was arrested for attempting to influence our elections,” he said.
The Campaign Legal Center, an election spending watchdog, estimates the NRA’s 501(c)(4) arm spent $35 million in dark money in the 2016 election.
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Goldstone, a spokesperson for CLC, called the Treasury Department’s Monday decision “shocking” in an email.
“The requirement that 501(c)(4)s report their top donors to the IRS was one of the few ways that the government could identify illegal foreign money in elections,” he said. “Now that this requirement has been tossed aside, dark money will be much harder to trace.”
The Treasury Department’s announcement also came the same day of President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, during which both leaders refused to acknowledge Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The timing is “perfectly fitting,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and ethics expert at Washington University.
“This change will make it easier for 501(c)(4) groups to hide their use of money from foreign donors in order to influence US elections,” she said. “Putin would approve of this change.”
The government is making it easier for “dark money” donors to go ...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/.../irs-dark-money-nra-maria-butina-donors
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Treasury Department loosens nonprofit donor disclosure requirements
https://www.opensecrets.org/.../treasury-department-loosens-nonprofit-donor-disclosu...
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The NRA can be so secretive about its Russian donors because it ...
https://www.nbcnews.com/.../nra-can-be-so-secretive-about-its-russian-donors-because...
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U.S. Treasury Restricts Donor Disclosure Requirement for Some ...
https://www.wsj.com/.../u-s-treasury-restricts-donor-disclosure-requirement-for-some-no...
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