Category Archives: FBI

Abuse of the Civil Asset Forfeiture Law

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Related reading: The Myth of Judicial Activism

The Supreme Court struck down less than 1% of the federal laws passed over a 50-year period.

*** Questions must be asked why is the Justice Department re-applying this program and to what end?

Criminal forfeiture is an action brought as a part of the criminal prosecution of a defendant. It is an in personam (against the person) action and requires that the government indict (charge) the property used or derived from the crime along with the defendant. If the jury finds the property forfeitable, the court issues an order of forfeiture.

For forfeitures pursuant to the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO), as well as money laundering and obscenity statutes, there is an ancillary hearing for third parties to assert their interest in the property. Once the interests of third parties are addressed, the court issues a final forfeiture order.

Civil judicial forfeiture is an in rem (against the property) action brought in court against the property. The property is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is necessary.

Administrative forfeiture is an in rem action that permits the federal seizing agency to forfeit the property without judicial involvement. The authority for a seizing agency to start an administrative forfeiture action is found in the Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. § 1607. Property that can be administratively forfeited is: merchandise the importation of which is prohibited; a conveyance used to import, transport, or store a controlled substance; a monetary instrument; or other property that does not exceed $500,000 in value.

Source: A Guide to Equitable Sharing of Federally Forfeited Property for State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, U.S. Department of Justice, March 1994.

Participants And Roles

The Justice Asset Forfeiture Program includes activity by DOJ components and several components outside the Department. Each component plays an important role in the Program.

Department of Justice Components

Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS) of the Criminal Division holds the responsibility of coordination, direction, and general oversight of the Program. AFMLS handles civil and criminal litigation, provides legal support to the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices, establishes policy and procedure, coordinates multi-district asset seizures, administers equitable sharing of assets, acts on petitions for remission, coordinates international forfeiture and sharing and develops training seminars for all levels of government.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) enforces the federal laws and regulations relating to alcohol, tobacco, firearms, explosives and arson by working directly and in cooperation with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. ATF has the authority to seize and forfeit firearms, ammunition, explosives, alcohol, tobacco, currency, conveyances and certain real property involved in violation of law.

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) implements major investigative strategies against drug networks and cartels. Enforcement operations have resulted in significant seizure and forfeiture activity. A significant portion of DEA cases are adopted from state and local law enforcement agencies.

Federal Bureau of Investigation The FBI investigates a broad range of criminal violations, integrating the use of asset forfeiture into its overall strategy to eliminate targeted criminal enterprises. The FBI has successfully used asset forfeiture in White Collar Crime, Organized Crime, Drug, Violent Crime and Terrorism investigations. See the FBI Investigative Programs Asset Forfeiture Home Page for more information.

United States Marshals Service as the primary custodian of seized property for the Program. USMS manages and disposes of the majority of the property seized for forfeiture. See their Seized Asset Information page and their National Sellers List for more information.

United States Attorneys’ Offices (USAOs) are responsible for the prosecution of both criminal and civil actions against property used or acquired during illegal activity.

Asset Forfeiture Management Staff (AFMS): Has responsibility for management of the Assets Forfeiture Fund, the Consolidated Asset Tracking System (CATS), program-wide contracts, oversight of program internal controls and property management, interpretation of the Assets Forfeiture Fund statute, approval of unusual Fund uses, and legislative liaison on matters affecting the financial integrity of the Program.

Components Outside the Department of Justice

There are several organizations outside the Department of Justice who participate in the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Program. This list may change as additional agencies and offices become part of the DOJ program. These agencies participate in Judicial forfeitures only.

United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) makes seizures under their authority to discourage profit-motivated crimes such as mail fraud, money laundering and drug trafficking using the mail.

Food and Drug Administration FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations has made seizures involving health care fraud schemes, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, illegal distribution of adulterated foods, and product tampering.

United States Department of Agriculture, Office of the Inspector General USDA’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) mission is to promote effectiveness and integrity in the delivery of USDA agricultural programs. Forfeiture is integrated as an important law enforcement tool in combating criminal activity affecting USDA programs.

Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security The Bureau of Diplomatic Security investigates passport and visa fraud and integrates asset forfeiture into our strategy to target the profits made by vendors who provide fraudulent documentation or others who utilize fraudulent visas and/or passports to further their criminal enterprises.

Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) is the criminal investigative arm of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense. The mission of DCIS is to protect America’s War fighters by conducting investigations and forfeitures in support of crucial National Defense priorities that include homeland security/terrorism, product substitution, contract fraud, public corruption, computer crimes, and illegal technology transfers. ”

The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 established the Department of Justice Assets Forfeiture Fund to receive the proceeds of forfeiture and to pay the costs associated with such forfeitures, including the costs of managing and disposing of property, satisfying valid liens, mortgages, and other innocent owner claims, and costs associated with accomplishing the legal forfeiture of the property.

The Attorney General is authorized to use the Assets Forfeiture Fund to pay any necessary expenses associated with forfeiture operations such as property seizure, detention, management, forfeiture, and disposal. The Fund may also be used to finance certain general investigative expenses. These authorized uses are enumerated in 28 U.S.C. §524(c). Read more here.

Secret Service has Large Quiet Office in Hoover, Alabama

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Primer: The U.S. Secret Service maintains Electronic Crimes Task Forces, which focus on identifying and locating international cyber criminals connected to cyber intrusions, bank fraud, data breaches, and other computer-related crimes. The Secret Service’s Cyber Intelligence Section has directly contributed to the arrest of transnational cyber criminals responsible for the theft of hundreds of millions of credit card numbers and the loss of approximately $600 million to financial and retail institutions. The Secret Service also runs the National Computer Forensic Institute, which provides law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges with cyber training and information to combat cyber crime.

HOOVER, Ala. — The classrooms, tucked above a municipal court here in the Birmingham suburbs, are a long way from the White House. But walk through a set of secured doors and into the futuristic-looking work space, and you will find an important wager by the agency best known for protecting presidents, the Secret Service.

Only it has almost nothing to do with earpiece-wearing agents or armored cars.

Though the Secret Service may be better known for keeping government executives safe, it also has a mandate to investigate and fight financial and other cybercrimes. And in an era of overworked protection details and nonstop cybercrime, it could use some help.

So here at the National Computer Forensics Institute, the pupils are hardened police officers, prosecutors and, occasionally, a judge. Instruction mimics what the agency teaches its own special agents. And tuition is not only free, but the Secret Service throws in travel, room, board and, for police officers, tens of thousands of dollars of technology to set up their own forensics labs back home.

Data is extracted from mobile phones for use in a class on prosecution in Hoover. Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

In exchange, the Secret Service has quietly empowered a network of thousands of law enforcement officers across the country capable of processing digital evidence and indebted to the agency that taught them.

“The threat nature has increased in the world, and the threats are all more and more integrated with the digital world,” said Ben Bass, the special agent in charge of the institute. “So assimilating that into what we do is really important.”

The institute opened in 2008 as a partnership between the Secret Service and the state of Alabama, which contributed space and money for its construction. At the time, few state and local law enforcement agencies had the capability to process digital evidence found on computers and cellphones, even as it was exploding in volume and importance. That left agencies heavily reliant on the Secret Service and the F.B.I. for processing and created a years long backlog in many cases.

The Secret Service reasoned that it would be critical to the future of its mission — not to mention the effectiveness of local and state law enforcement — to try to change that. The program remains the only one of its kind and scale in the country.

Though its protective mission occupies the public’s attention, the Secret Service has been investigating crimes since 1865, when President Lincoln saw the need to create a small force of investigators within the Treasury Department to combat counterfeit currency that was undermining American markets. That mandate has changed and widened in the decades since, along with threats to the country’s financial systems, and the agency now investigates bank fraud, credit card fraud, identity theft, child exploitation as well as counterfeiting.

It does so with a reasonably small force. The majority of the Secret Service’s 3,300 agents work out of field offices. The F.B.I., by comparison, has more than 13,000. To amplify its effect, the agency relies on dozens of electronic and financial crimes task forces across the country, where local and state law officers and people in academia and businesses work alongside its own agents.

The help has arrived at the right time for the agency, where in recent years low morale, high attrition and more people to protect in more places have conspired to pinch resources. Because protection is a nonnegotiable task, investigations often take the hit.

The effect can be significant. In the 2016 fiscal year, the agency spent 65 percent of its time on protection and 35 percent on investigative work, according to calculations it shared with members of the House Oversight Committee. That was an election year, when protection demands are highest. But it appears the ratio for this fiscal year — which only included the last month or so of the campaign — has not changed much, with 60 percent of time going to protection through the end of May. Typically it would be about 40 percent for a post-campaign fiscal year.

Robert Novy, the deputy assistant director for investigations, said the task forces help ensure that cases continue to move forward regardless of protection demands. He also said that they have begun to free the Secret Service’s own staff to focus on larger-scale cyberthreats and high-dollar financial crimes.

“By elevating their capacities and capabilities, it allows us to focus on finding ways to counter more significant financial threats,” Mr. Novy said.

Still, building the program has proved challenging. A decade after it first opened its doors, the institute trains about 1,100 people a year. But it is running at between 30 percent and 40 percent of capacity because of a shortage of federal funds. For some programs, would-be enrollees can wait as long as three years.

Its financial outlook remains uncertain. President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal zeroed out the program, though Randolph D. Alles, the agency’s new director, told lawmakers last month that he considered it “critical” to the agency and would move money from elsewhere in his budget to pay for it if need be. At the same time, lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced legislation that could stabilize its funding.

A break room at the institute.
Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

The institute’s finances appeared to be on few minds on a recent early summer day in Hoover, where a class of two dozen prosecutors sat in neat classroom rows, computers humming beside their feet, as data from the cellphone of a fictitious drug smuggler flashed onto their computer screens. The evidence was all there in ordered folders: call logs, texts, even compromising photographs of a would-be drug dealer, made visible by powerful software and a few patient instructors.

One room away and a few hours later, two dozen police officers packed into a wood-trimmed mock courtroom listened to another instructor hold forth from the witness stand on the ins and outs of being a good forensics witness. The key, he said, is balancing the use of technical details like “master boot records” and “disk partitions” with the bigger picture a less tech-savvy jury can more easily grasp.

“I need to be able to understand it so I can translate it when I go before a panel of 12 people,” said Jennifer Eugene, a prosecutor from New Jersey, describing her experience in front of a jury. “The law has not caught up with where the technology is.”

A five-week course for police on the basics of computer evidence recovery is the most popular, and graduates of the course leave here with $28,000 worth of technology and the ability to search seized computers for evidence of a crime. A similar course on mobile devices is growing in popularity. And more advanced courses cover network intrusion.

A classroom where a course on network intrusion is taught.
Kevin D. Liles for The New York Times

Prosecutors and judges can take shorter courses meant to familiarize them with digital evidence, which is still relatively new to many courtrooms.

But the mutual benefits of the program were on display, too. Frank Garibay, a detective with the San Antonio Police Department who had returned to the institute as a proctor after taking coursework himself, said his training here had transformed what his department could do.

It had also meant that when officials from the Texas Rangers and Homeland Security Investigations zeroed in on an illegal gambling ring in Texas, they could turn to the Secret Service’s San Antonio-based electronic crimes task force, including Mr. Garibay, for help.

The Secret Service paid for members of its task force to travel to the small South Texas town of Falfurrias for a weekend to set up a war room to process digital evidence.

The operation ended up taking down about a dozen illegal casinos, recovered almost $6 million, exposed drug and human trafficing rings, and ultimately public corruption.

 

Kushner’s Testimony to Senate Senate Intel Committee Staffers

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Jared Kushner tells Congress: “I did not collude”

Axios: Giving his version of his Russia contacts for the first time, Jared Kushner says in an 11-page statement to congressional committees that he had “hardly any” contacts with Russians during the campaign, and regarded the meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower as “a waste of our time.”

  • Key quote: “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector. I have tried to be fully transparent with regard to the filing of my SF-86 [security clearance] form, above and beyond what is required.”
  • Why it matters: The stakes for the congressional interviews are high for Kushner because the Trump son-in-law is of acute interest to special counsel Bob Mueller, and prosecutors can be expected to pick apart today’s statement.
  • Kushner has a 10 a.m.appointment with staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and his meeting tomorrow with the House Intelligence Committee. Both sessions are behind closed doors.
Highlights 1018 words

The most colorful passage: “[I]n looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work,” he says in the statement, “I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.’ I had not met the attorney before the meeting nor spoken with her since. I thought nothing more of this short meeting until it came to my attention recently.”

Another highlight: “With respect to my contacts with Russia or Russian representatives during the campaign, there were hardly any. … [T]he day after the election, I could not even remember the name of the Russian Ambassador. … I sent an email asking [Dmitri Simes of the Center for the National Interest, which hosted a Trump foreign policy speech], ‘What is the name of the Russian ambassador?'”

Other key points:

  • “When it became apparent that my father-in-law was going to be the Republican nominee for President, as normally happens, a number of officials from foreign countries attempted to reach out to the campaign. My father-in-law asked me to be a point of contact with these foreign countries. … [O]ver the course of the campaign, I had incoming contacts with people from approximately 15 countries.”
  • “I called on a variety of people with deep experience, such as Dr. Henry Kissinger, for advice on policy for the candidate, which countries/representatives with which the campaign should engage, and what messaging would resonate.”
  • “The first [campaign contact] that I can recall was at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. in April 2016. … [T]he host of the event, Dimitri Simes, … introduced me to several guests, among them four ambassadors, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. With all the ambassadors, including Mr. Kislyak, we shook hands, exchanged brief pleasantries.”
  • “Reuters news service has reported that I had two calls with Ambassador Kislyak at some time between April and November of 2016. While I participated in thousands of calls during this period, I do not recall any such calls with the Russian Ambassador. We have reviewed the phone records available to us and have not been able to identify any calls to any number we know to be associated with Ambassador Kislyak and I am highly skeptical these calls took place.”
  • “I had no ongoing relationship with the Ambassador before the election, and had limited knowledge about him.”
  • “The only other Russian contact during the campaign is one I did not recall at all until I was reviewing documents and emails in response to congressional requests for information.”
  • That was the Trump Tower meeting, and he said the invitation from Donald Trump Jr. “was on top of a long [email] back and forth that I did not read at the time. … Documents confirm my memory that this was calendared as ‘Meeting: Don Jr.| Jared Kushner.’ No one else was mentioned.”
  • “There was one more possible contact that I will note. On October 30, 2016, I received a random email from the screenname ‘Guccifer400.’ This email, which I interpreted as a hoax, was an extortion attempt and threatened to reveal candidate Trump’s tax returns and demanded that we send him 52 bitcoins in exchange for not publishing that information. I brought the email to the attention of a U.S. Secret Service agent on the plane we were all travelling on and asked what he thought. He advised me to ignore it and not to reply — which is what I did. The sender never contacted me again.”
  • “On November 16, 2016, my assistant received a request for a meeting from the Russian Ambassador. … The [Dec. 1] meeting occurred in Trump Tower, where we had our transition office, and lasted twenty [to] thirty minutes. Lt. General Michael Flynn (Ret.), who became the President’s National Security Advisor, also attended.
  • “I believed developing a thoughtful approach on Syria was a very high priority given the ongoing humanitarian crisis, and I asked if they had an existing communications channel at his embassy we could use where they would be comfortable transmitting the information they wanted to relay to General Flynn. The Ambassador said that would not be possible and so we all agreed that we would receive this information after the Inauguration. Nothing else occurred. I did not suggest a ‘secret back channel.'”
  • “My assistant reported that the Ambassador had requested that I meet with a person named Sergey Gorkov who he said was a banker and someone with a direct line to the Russian President who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new administration and best ways to work together. I agreed to meet Mr. Gorkov because the Ambassador has been so insistent, said he had a direct relationship with the President, and because Mr. Gorkov was only in New York for a couple days.”
  • “The [Dec. 13] meeting with Mr. Gorkov lasted twenty to twenty-five minutes. … At no time was there any discussion about my companies, business transactions, real estate projects, loans, banking arrangements or any private business of any kind.”
  • “There has been a good deal of misinformation reported about my SF-86 [security clearance] form. As my attorneys and I have previously explained, my SF-86 application was prematurely submitted due to a miscommunication and initially did not list any contacts (not just with Russians) with foreign government officials.”
  • “[P]eople at my New York office were helping me find the information, organize it, review it and put it into the electronic form. They sent an email to my assistant in Washington, communicating that the changes to one particular section were complete; my assistant interpreted that message as meaning that the entire form was completed.
  • “At that point, the form was a rough draft and still had many omissions including not listing any foreign government contacts and even omitted the address of my father-in-law (which was obviously well known). Because of this miscommunication, my assistant submitted the draft on January 18, 2017.”
  • “The very next day, January 19, 2017, we submitted supplemental information to the transition, which confirmed receipt and said they would immediately transmit it to the FBI.”

Now 10 Dead in Smuggled Truck

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Statement from ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan on Human Smuggling

“By any standard, the horrific crime uncovered last night ranks as a stark reminder of why human smuggling networks must be pursued, caught and punished.  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations works year-round to identify, dismantle, and disrupt the transnational criminal networks that smuggle people into and throughout the United States. These networks have repeatedly shown a reckless disregard for those they smuggle, as today’s case demonstrates. I personally worked on a tragic tractor trailer case in Victoria, Texas in 2003 in which 19 people were killed as a result of the smugglers’ total indifference to the safety of those smuggled and to the law.

“The men and women of ICE are proud to stand alongside our law enforcement partners, including locally and at the U.S. Department of Justice, to combat these smuggling networks and protect the public and those who would fall victim to their dangerous practices that focus solely on their illicit profits.  So long as I lead ICE, there will be an unwavering commitment to use law enforcement assets to put an end to these practices.”

The Federal complaint is found here.

*** Texas Public Radio

FNC: A suspect arrested in connection with the deaths of at least 10 people packed into a sweltering tractor-trailer is due in court Monday over his alleged role in the immigrant-smuggling attempt gone wrong.

Federal prosecutors said they planned to bring charges against James Mathew Bradley Jr., 60, of Clearwater, Florida, who is due to appear in federal court at 11 a.m. local time.

U.S. Attorney Richard Durbin Jr. did not say whether Bradley was the driver of the truck, although investigators said earlier that the driver was in custody.

Authorities initially discovered eight bodies Sunday inside the crowded 18-wheeler parked outside a Walmart in the summer heat. Two additional victims later died at the hospital.

Officials feared the death toll could still rise, because nearly 20 others rescued from the truck were in dire condition, many suffering from extreme dehydration and heatstroke, officials told the Associated Press.

Based on initial interviews with survivors of the San Antonio tragedy, more than 100 people may have been packed into the back of the 18-wheeler at one point in its journey, ICE acting Director Thomas Homan said. Officials said 39 people were inside when rescuers arrived, and the rest were believed to have escaped or hitched rides to their next destination.

Four of the survivors appeared to be between 10 and 17 years old, Homan said. Investigators gave no details on where the rig began its journey or where it was headed.

Mexican nationals were among both the survivors and the dead, Mexican Consul General in San Antonio Reyna Torres said, without giving a specific number. Torres said the consulate has been in contact with relatives both in Mexico and in the U.S.

Guatemala’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, said at least two Guatemalans were on the abandoned rig. The two male survivors told Guatemalan consulate officials that they crossed the border by foot at Laredo and boarded the tractor-trailer, according to Tekandi Paniagua, communications director for the foreign ministry. The pair told officials their final destination was Houston, Paniagua added. More here.

Kushner Overlooked 77 Assets, But it Gets Worse

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In part from Examiner: White House senior adviser Jared Kushner on Friday released a revised version of his personal financial disclosure that reveals his initial filing did not include 77 assets, according to a report Friday.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the new disclosure says 77 assets were “inadvertently omitted” from Kushner’s original form, released in March, and were added during the “ordinary review” process with the government ethics office.

In addition to information on Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, the new disclosure includes details of Ivanka Trump’s finances.

Ivanka Trump is the president’s daughter, a senior White House aide and Kushner’s wife.

The new financial forms show Kushner and Ivanka Trump collectively have between $206 million and $760 million in assets, the Journal said. Kushner’s initial disclosure valued their assets at between $240 million and $740 million. More here.

***

OCCRP

IN 2014, Prevezon Holdings Limited, was controlled by the son of a Russian political figure. The company had many interests in real estate, including an investment in a venture with a Soviet-born diamond and property magnate named Lev Leviev—who also happened to be one of the developers of 20 Pine.

Starting in late 2009, Prevezon began purchasing units in 20 Pine, acquiring five in total. The company later added three Manhattan commercial spaces to create a $24 million portfolio, which prosecutors sued to seize last year. “While New York is a world financial capital,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a press release announcing the action, “it is not a safe haven for criminals seeking to hide their loot.” The lawsuit is here.

Jared Kushner sealed Manhattan real estate deal with oligarch’s firm cited in money-laundering case

Guardian: Donald Trump’s son-in-law bought part of old New York Times building from Soviet-born tycoon, Guardian investigation into Russian money in NYC property market finds

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, who acts as his senior White House adviser, secured a multimillion-dollar Manhattan real estate deal with a Soviet-born oligarch whose company was cited in a major New York money laundering case now being probed by members of Congress.

A Guardian investigation has established a series of overlapping ties and relationships involving alleged Russian money laundering, New York real estate deals and members of Trump’s inner circle. They include a 2015 sale of part of the old New York Times building in Manhattan involving Kushner and a billionaire real estate tycoon and diamond mogul, Lev Leviev.

The ties between Trump family real estate deals and Russian money interests are attracting growing interest from the justice department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, as he seeks to determine whether the Trump campaign collaborated with Russia to distort the outcome of the 2016 race. Mueller has reportedly expanded his inquiry to look at real estate deals involving the Trump Organization, as well as Kushner’s financing.

Kushner will go before the US Senate intelligence committee on Monday in a closed session of the panel’s inquiry into Russian interference in the election in what could be a pivotal hearing into the affair.

Leviev, a global tycoon known as the “king of diamonds”, was a business partner of the Russian-owned company Prevezon Holdings that was at the center of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit launched in New York. Under the leadership of US attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by Trump in March, prosecutors pursued Prevezon for allegedly attempting to use Manhattan real estate deals to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury.

The scam had been uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who died in 2009 in a Moscow jail in suspicious circumstances. US sanctions against Russia imposed after Magnitsky’s death were a central topic of conversation at the notorious Trump Tower meeting last June between Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

Don Jr and Manafort have been called to testify before the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, at which they are certain to face questions about the Trump Tower encounter.

Two days before it was due to open in court in May, the Prevezon case was settled for $6m with no admission of guilt on the part of the defendants. But since details of the Trump Tower meeting emerged, the abrupt settlement of the Prevezon case has come under renewed scrutiny from congressional investigators.

Four Russians attended the meeting, led by Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with known Kremlin connections who acted as legal counsel for Prevezon in the money laundering case and who called the $6m settlement so slight that “it seemed almost an apology from the government”. Sixteen Democratic members of the House judiciary committee have now written to the justice department in light of the Trump Tower meeting demanding to know whether there was any interference behind the decision to avoid trial.

Constitutional experts are also demanding an official inquiry. “We need a full accounting by Trump’s justice department of the unexplained and frankly outrageous settlement that is likely to be just the tip of a vast financial iceberg,” said Laurence Tribe, Harvard University professor of constitutional law.

Separately, the focus of investigators on Trump family finances stem from the vast flow of Russian wealth that has been poured into New York real estate in recent years. As Donald Trump Jr put it in 2008, referring to the Trump Organization: “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Among the overlapping connections is the 2015 deal in which Kushner paid $295m to acquire several floors of the old New York Times building at 43rd street in Manhattan from the US branch of Leviev’s company, Africa Israel Investments (AFI), and its partner Five Mile Capital. The sale has been identified as of possible interest to the Mueller investigation as Kushner later went on to borrow $285m in refinancing from Deutsche Bank, the German financial house that itself has been embroiled in Russian money laundering scandals and whose loans to Trump are coming under intensifying scrutiny.

Court documents and company records show that AFI was cited in the Prevezon case as a business partner of the defendants. In 2008, Prevezon entered a partnership with AFI in which Prevezon bought for €3m, a 30% stake in four AFI subsidiaries in the Netherlands. Five years later, AFI tried to return the money to the Russian-owned company, but it was intercepted and frozen by Dutch authorities at the request of the US government as part of the Prevezon money-laundering probe.

In Manhattan, Leviev’s firm also sold condominiums to Prevezon Holdings from one of its landmark developments at 20 Pine Street, just a few blocks from Wall Street.

Real estate brochures describe the lavish interior decor of the condominiums, replete with bathrooms bedecked in stone and exotic woods, and boasting “the ultimate in pampering; a sybaritic recessed rain shower”. The 20 Pine Street apartments that Leviev sold to Prevezon were later frozen by US prosecutors seeking to block the flow of what they alleged to be money stolen from the Russian treasury and laundered through New York real estate.

Prevezon’s 20 Pine Street apartments and €3m in assets were all released as part of the settlement in May.

The Guardian contacted both Kushner and Leviev for comment, but they did not immediately respond.

The pursuit of Prevezon Holdings for alleged money laundering took on enormous political significance as it unfolded. For the prosecutors, it was a test case over suspicious Russian money flows designed to show the US was serious about going after money launderers. For the Russians, it was an opportunity to push back against stringent US sanctions that had long infuriated the Kremlin.

In court documents, US prosecutors accused Prevezon and its sole shareholder, Denis Katsyv, of participating in the laundering of proceeds of the vast tax fraud that stole $230m from the Russian treasury and moved it out of the country in chunks. Prevezon was alleged to have received some of the fraudulent spoils through a network of shell companies, hiding the money by investing in Manhattan real estate including the Leviev condominiums in 20 Pine Street.

Prevezon and Katsyv have consistently denied any involvement in money laundering and have dismissed the lawsuit as “ill-conceived”. In a statement released at the time of the settlement, they said they had “no involvement in or knowledge of any fraudulent activities”.

Magnitsky discovered the massive tax fraud, said to be one of the largest in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, in 2007. After he blew the whistle on the scam, he was arrested by the same officials whom he had accused of covering up the racket and imprisoned, dying in jail having been denied medical treatment.

Magnitsky’s death led to a political backlash in the US that in turn spawned tough sanctions on Russia, known as the Magnitsky Act. Russian individuals associated with the lawyer’s demise and other human rights abuses were banned entry to the US.

Veselnitskaya not only acted as Prevezon’s Russian counsel in the money-laundering case, she also was a leading lobbyist against the Magnitsky sanctions. She raised the subject prominently at the meeting in Trump Tower with Don Jr and Kushner, though according to Veselnitskaya the president’s son-in-law left after 10 minutes.

By the time of the Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya was already personally acquainted with Russia’s powerful prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, and her lobbying against the Magnitsky sanctions had drawn significant attention in government circles.

“Natalia’s main role was coordinating, including regular coordination with Chaika, whom she knew personally,” said a source acquainted with the Prevezon case.

Veselnitskaya told the Guardian: “My meeting with Trump’s son was a private meeting; nobody in the government had anything to do with it.” She declined to answer a follow-up question about whether and how she knew Chaika.

Jamison Firestone, the founder of the Russian law firm that employed Magnitsky at the time that he exposed the fraud, said that Veselnitskaya clearly intended to use the Trump Tower meeting to lobby against the Magnitsky sanctions. “They really made it a state priority to get rid of these sanctions,” he said.