Bloomberg News corrected a major story that alleged the Justice Department had subpoenaed President Donald Trump’s past financial records.
Bloomberg’s Politics division reported early Tuesday that Robert Mueller, the special counsel for the Justice Department, had issued a subpoena to Deutsche Bank that had “zeroed in” on the financial records of the Trump family.
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The news caused major buzz, as Mueller’s examination of Trump’s financial records, or those of Trump’s family, was considered a “red line” to the president, and one not related to Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, insisted the Bloomberg report was wrong at her Tuesday press briefing.
“We confirmed that the news reports that the special counsel had subpoenaed financial records related to the president are completely false,” Sanders said. “No subpoena has been issued or received. We have confirmed this with the bank and other sources. I think this is another example of the media going too far and too fast, and we don’t see it going in that direction.”
At that point, Playboy correspondent Brian Karem tried to interrupt Sanders, to insist the media were just doing their job.
Reaction to the news that Trump’s financial records had been subpoenaed was met with celebration from left-wing media outlets.
“The development seemed likely to send the already unraveling Trump into a tailspin,” wrote reporter Bess Levin of Vanity Fair.
But by Wednesday afternoon, Bloomberg Politics corrected its story to note that the subpoena related to people “affiliated” with Trump.
Deutsche Bank has long been reported to have loaned The Trump Organization money. Bloomberg reports that before becoming president, the debt to Deutsche Bank ran as high as $300 million.
The 16th largest bank in the world, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, the German bank has assets of $1.7 trillion. The reason Deutsche Bank attracts so much attention from Trump critics is that the Justice Department looked into an alleged $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme.
The bank reportedly settled with U.S. regulators sometime this year, CNN reported in November.
(photo credit, homepage images: Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)
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