House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters said she has advised her staff to seek whatever information it needs in investigating Deutsche Bank's ties to President Trump's businesses.
"I do not know everything that we are requesting at this point, but whatever is necessary," Waters, a California Democrat, told reporters Wednesday. She said the committee is interested in examining whether Trump has any connections to recent scandals Deutsche Bank has been ensnared in, such as so-called mirror trades in which regulators accused the bank of allowing Russian clients to move billions of dollars out of the country.
Waters is among congressional Democrats who have long pledged to dig into why Deutsche Bank continued to lend Trump money, while other banks declined to. She said earlier this month that Deutsche Bank's lawyers are cooperating with the financial services panel regarding the bank's relationship with Trump, as well as concerns that the Frankfurt-based lender might have been a conduit for "money laundering."
Waters has said her committee plans to send a letter asking Deutsche Bank for documents that she had previously requested when Democrats were in the minority. She said the bank is cooperating now that she leads the financial services panel. In an interview with MSNBC last week, Waters said that her staff has plans to meet in New York with lawyers from Deutsche Bank to go over her requests.
Deutsche Bank has said that it's engaged in a productive dialogue with congressional committees and will provide any "appropriate information" requested through "authorized investigations."
The financial services panel is coordinating its Deutsche Bank probe with the House Intelligence Committee. A focus are the loans that Trump received from the lender before he became president, which total some $340 million, according to his most recent financial disclosures.
