Does Trump owe Russia money? A rejected 2016 Deutsche Bank loan and emoluments lawsuit may hold clues.

President Trump turned to his longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, in early 2016 for a loan of at least $10 million to work on the Trump Organization's Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, and Deutsche Bank said no, judging the risk too high, The New York Times reported over the weekend. On Monday, The Times of London reported that Maryland prosecutors have subpoenaed financial documents relating to DJT Holdings LLC, the company that owns the Turnberry club and Washington's Trump International Hotel, among other properties, to find out who exactly owns it. There is speculation Russia is financially involved.

"In the decade before he was elected president, Mr. Trump's company spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying or renovating about a dozen clubs and resorts around the world," The New York Times reports. "The funding of Mr. Trump's golf empire has been something of a mystery." Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh says his team is looking for evidence "President Trump is violating the Constitution's emoluments clauses." Those cases "are rare and challenging to prove," says Vanity Fair's Eric Lutz. "Potentially more worrisome for the president is the possibility that the Maryland subpoena could reveal the unknown source of DJT Holdings's funding."

Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, told the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017 that Trump's "Irish courses and the Scottish courses ... don't, on their face, show Russian involvement," but do show "enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources ... hundreds of millions of dollars. And these golf course are just, you know, they're sinks. They don't actually make any money." In 2013, Eric Trump told golf writer James Dodson that "we have all the funding we need out of Russia" for Trump golf properties; Eric Trump denied saying that in 2017, Dodson stood by his report.

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House Democrats are planning to investigate Trump's involvement with Deutsche Bank, which was fined as recently as 2017 for laundering Russian money. Trump Organization spokeswoman Amanda Miller told the Times that "at no time was any money needed to finance the purchase or the refurbishment of Trump Turnberry"; she did not address the 2016 Deutsche Bank loan.