Via America’s Lawyer: The latest FinCEN document leak exposes how U.S. banks have laundered huge sums of money for terrorist organizations and other sanctioned entities. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins to discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A new report has revealed that US banks have been laundering billions of dollars for hostile foreign governments, terrorist groups across the country. As you know, I’m handling one of the biggest cases in the country. We’ve brought Iran into the case. We brought international banks into the case where we had people like HSBC, some of the biggest banks on the globe that were laundering money for terrorists. And I was asked to get involved and build out that case. This, this, this is a whole new feature though, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: This, this is, this is bigger than anything I’ve, I’ve seen.
Farron Cousins: Right. This should, should certainly hopefully help the case as well.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, it will.
Farron Cousins: Because these, they’re called the FinCEN files and what this is, you have a lot of these banks here in the US HSBC, JP Morgan, Barclays from England, Deutsche bank and banks from all over the world, really, that basically knowingly help terrorist organizations, drug cartels, hostile foreign governments that aren’t allowed to move money. Allowed them all to move money and the other part of it is it’s not just the banks knowingly doing this because there’s plenty of evidence in these papers, 2,500, I think there are.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they know.
Farron Cousins: They know they’re doing it. But the governments have been sitting on this information because the banks do have to turn in their paper and say, hey, look, we think there’s some fraud here.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. But let me tell you what happens from what we, what we’ve already seen from the litigation that we’ve brought. They turn in the papers and what that does is give some plausible protection.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: In other words, hey, we told you government, but what you see is they continued exactly the same course after they turned in the papers. The problem is that the department of justice does not have enough courage to do what they need to do. They don’t need to go after all of them. HSBC, remember the story we did on HSBC, they signed a six or seven page document. They said, yes, we’re laundering money. Yes, we know it’s going to terrorists. Yes, we know that the money is being used to kill American, American contractors and contractors actually from all over the world. Yes, we know all that. Yes, we have the records that show all that. And you know what, you know what the, the justice department Eric Holder did, Eric Holder made them pay $1.6 billion, $1.6 billion. Slapped them on the hand, nobody was even indicted.
Farron Cousins: And they made far more than that. So they technically profited off of this. Tens of billions.
Mike Papantonio: Oh they made, projection was. No that the projection was, they made an excess of $30 billion and the justice department fines them $1.6 billion. This, where does this go, Farron?
Farron Cousins: Hopefully. Well, unfortunately let me tell you where it goes. It goes nowhere right now because the public doesn’t seem to care. They don’t seem to understand that their bank, because a lot of people have regular accounts at these banks, your bank, you have your mortgage through them. You have a checking account with them. They are helping these criminals, you know, deadly criminals.
Mike Papantonio: Traffickers, human traffickers, drug cartels, terrorists, oligarchs from Russia that are trying to hide money and trying to move it into the Western economy. Because right now they’re, they’re, they’re, you know, they’re being, they’re suspended and being able to do that.
Farron Cousins: Well, and the reason the public isn’t known about this story is because you tune to MSNBC or Fox or CNN right now, you’re going to see commercials for big banks. You open up any newspaper in this country, there’s going to be advertisements for banks. These banks are huge spenders in corporate media. They’re going to do what they can to downplay this. The, the blame will be shifted probably to the government, rather than the banks. The banks will say, as you said, look, we pointed it out. We don’t know why the government didn’t do it.
Mike Papantonio: It’s all we, all we had to do. Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But this spanned the papers that, that they got a hold of, not all the papers, but just the ones that got ahold of four administrations, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump.
Mike Papantonio: It was going on.
Farron Cousins: Happened under all of them.
Mike Papantonio: During all of them. Yeah, yeah.
Farron Cousins: Every one of them.
