Things that make you go hmmm
Robert Mueller's team is looking at fishy transactions involving Russian diplomatic personnel
The team working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russia's influence over the 2016 election is reportedly inspecting "suspicious" transactions involving Russian diplomatic personnel, BuzzFeed News writes. Among the transactions flagged by the Russian embassy's bank and reported, as is legally required, to the U.S. Treasury's financial crimes unit is a payment of $120,000 to then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak just days after the presidential election and an attempt to withdraw $150,000 from the embassy's account less than a week after President Trump's inauguration.
In particular, Kislyak's payout raised eyebrows because it was marked as "payroll," although it didn't fit into his normal pay routine. Likewise, in the spring of 2014 some 30 checks to embassy employees totaling about $370,000 raised suspicions because "bank officials noted that the employees had not received similar payments in the past, and that the transactions surrounded the date of a critical referendum on whether parts of Crimea should secede from Ukraine and join Russia," BuzzFeed News writes.
Just because payments are flagged as suspicious, though, doesn't mean they are necessarily illegal. As people in the intelligence and diplomatic communities told BuzzFeed News, "there could be justifiable uses for the money, such as travel, bonuses, or pension payouts." That is now up to the Treasury Department, Senate Intelligence Committee, and Mueller to review and decide. Read more about the suspicious financial activity, including a small Washington, D.C., contractor who received some $320,000 from the Russian embassy, at BuzzFeed News.