“The potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern,” Waters said in a statement Monday. “The Financial Services Committee is exploring these matters, including as they may involve the president and his associates, as thoroughly as possible pursuant to its oversight authority, and will follow the facts wherever they may lead us.”
The Intelligence Committee is more focused on aspects of financial connections or dealings that could suggest potential leverage by foreign entities over Trump, his family or his business. Trump has some $340 million in loans from Deutsche Bank, according to his most recent financial disclosures.
Possible financial leverage wasn’t mentioned in Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings from his 22-month probe of Russian election interference.
Schiff has frequently noted that Trump was pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow during the presidential campaign.
“That’s a different form of collusion, but it is equally compromising to the country because it means the president of the United States is looking out for his bank account and not for the United States of America," Schiff said in an interview on NBC in February.
Schiff and other committee Democrats had sought to pursue Trump’s financial connections ever since he became president. But it was only after Democrats won control of the House in 2018 that they gained subpoena power.
Deutsche Bank had been Trump’s go-to lender for decades, even as other commercial banks stopped doing business with him because of multiple bankruptcies.
House Republicans have said that Schiff and other Democrats are hounding the president with their flurry of investigations and subpoena threats.
“These allegations are coming from the same Democrats who have claimed for more than two years that Trump is a Russian agent, so their conspiracy theories don’t have great track records," Jack Langer, a spokesman for Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Monday evening.
This article provided by Bloomberg News.