A Win for Dark Money

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration.

When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar.

Exactly who and how may be secret.

Exactly why is no mystery.

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information.

This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection.

But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners.

But the relief to honest business owners is tiny.

The added burden on the financial sector is huge.

The real winners here are shady business owners.

In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules.

The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump. [ Read: A green light for crooks ] After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected.

Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.