The FBI is now probing “suspicious money transfers” made after the now infamous Trump Tower meeting.
The two transfers were made from a billionaire Russian real estate executive after the June 9, 2016 meeting between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who promised she had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump and Aras Agalarov
Aras Agalarov’s offshore company wired more than $19.5 million to his account in a New York bank just 11 days after that meeting, Buzzfeed reports.
Agalarov, who has close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin and was Donald Trump’s host when he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, made a second transfer on November 21, 2016, 13 days after the election.
Ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is accused of fraud, Trump’s son Don Jr. and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, also attended the meeting at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
The suspicions money transfers came to light after law enforcement ordered banks and financial institutions to look through records of people connected to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
The banks then reported the suspicious activity to the Treasury Department.
Investigators found that the Agalarov family made 19 separate wire transfers from their Russian accounts to a New Jersey personal checking account belonging to Emin Agalarov, the pop singer and billionaire’s son.
The account received more than $1.2 million between November 2016 and July 2017.
The personal account, which was only opened in 2012, then transferred the money to a company owned by a business associate of the Agalarovs who represented the family at the Trump Tower meeting; Irakly ‘Ike’ Kaveladze.
