Trump’s Gift to Drug Cartels, Money Launderers, and Terrorists
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/06/donald-trump-gao-report-shell-companies-money-laundering-drug-cartels/
Trump’s Gift to Drug Cartels, Money Launderers, and Terrorists
Making America a safe space for fraudsters, crooks, and national security threats.
President Donald Trump speaks at an event about coal on Thursday in the Oval Office.
A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
There has justifiably been much attention paid to Donald Trump’s personal corruption: cutting sleazy crypto deals, trading stocks in companies affected by his administration’s decisions, doling out pardons to fraudsters who make hefty donations to his political organizations, and so much more. But what’s even more significant is how Trump is perverting the federal government to allow wealthy individuals and corporations engaged in crooked conduct to escape scrutiny, prosecution, and punishment. Corporate scumbags and felonious plutocrats have never had it so good.
The Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues.
At the Securities and Exchange Commission, enforcement actions have fallen precipitously, and the commission ended several high-profile cryptocurrency inquires that involved Binance, Coinbase, and other firms. The workforce for the SEC’s enforcement division was cut by a fifth last year, with many experienced attorneys and accountants given the boot. The IRS, too, has been hammered by layoffs, and the number of audits of people with $10 million or more in income dropped by two-thirds from 6,786 in 2025 to 2,264 in 2026. With new priorities established at the Justice Department—such as essentially shutting down the pursuit of cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—the number of white-collar prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, according to the Financial Times.
But beyond this, the Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues. Who says so? The US Government Accountability Office. It recently released a report assessing Trump’s decision to loosen reporting requirements for shell companies. These are corporations that can have legitimate uses but are also set up so people or entitites can evade taxes, launder money, hide assets, and obscure the true beneficiaries of financial transactions. For instance, a sanctioned Russian oligarch might be able to use a shell company—or a string of them—to buy real estate in the United States and keep secret his ownership of the property.
The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2021, required most US firms to disclose to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) their “beneficial owners”—that is, the real people who control or own them. (In many instances, shell companies do not have to reveal their true owners and are registered in the name of others.) The aim of the legislation was to create a registry of owners and impede illegal financial activities, such as money laundering. An estimated 32 million businesses would have to register and note their real owners. (Several categories of business were exempted because disclosure requirements already applied to them—such as banks, credit unions, and securities dealers.)
But one month into Trump’s second term, his administration essentially eviscerated this reporting requirement, when FinCEN issued rules exempting domestic companies and Americans from this disclosure. As the GAO put it, this new exemption applied “to over 99 percent of entities that were previously targeted.”
The GAO report—in exceedingly dry language—notes this exemption is a boon for assorted malfeasants:
U.S.-based shell companies, often structured as LLCs or corporations, can pose significant risks of illicit finance activity. Treasury’s 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment identified several cases in which shell companies were used to facilitate financial crimes, including laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, cybercrime, and fraud, among others, indicating the continued risk posed by shell companies. The 2025 domestic reporting company exemption may perpetuate these risks.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, quickly jumped on the GAO report and cited it as evidence Trump is on the side of the bad guys:
The Trump Administration continues to put cartels and criminals ahead of law enforcement, opening the door for them to move millions of dollars through our financial system. Today’s GAO report confirms that Treasury gutted a bipartisan law designed to crack down on the abuse of shell companies, exempted 99 percent of the entities previously required to report, and has failed to address the “significant risks” this rollback created. Law enforcement groups have warned that it will be harder to go after drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and major criminal enterprises.
Warren noted that one of the main forces behind passage of the Corporate Transparency Act was a former senator named Marco Rubio. In 2020, he tweeted, “My ‘Corporate Transparency Act’ [is] the most significant anti-corruption and money-laundering legislation in decades [and] forces anonymous shell companies to disclose their true owners.”
“There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”
Republican and Democratic senators have opposed the Trump administration’s wipeout of the Corporate Transparency Act, as have law enforcement organizations, business groups, and national security–minded think tanks of the right and left. The hawkish and neocon-ish Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a statement last year that said, “Anonymous U.S. shell companies are not a theoretical vulnerability—they are a proven vehicle for illicit finance, sanctions evasion, corruption, terrorism, and transnational crime…FinCEN’s decision to exempt domestic entities would allow these practices to continue unchecked.”
Last year, Warren, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and other Democratic senators wrote the Treasury to complain about the weakening of this requirement, noting, “There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”
The Trump administration claims this disclosure obligation was too onerous for businesses, but it entailed minimal effort for the corporations compelled to register. So why kill this requirement? Warren and other legislators suspect Elon Musk had something to do with this. In a separate letter sent to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in April 2025, she and 18 other congressional Democrats asserted the Trump administration’s decision to neuter the Corporate Transparency Act was “seemingly triggered by a single Elon Musk social media comment.”
They pointed out that Musk, who at that time was a key adviser to Trump and engaged in a reckless dismantling of various government agencies, might have been “benefiting from foreign investments made through legal entities designed to hide the identities of the foreign investors.” They cited the Financial Times: “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk” through “opaque structures” and “an arrangement that shields their identities from public view.”
During the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”
Responding to the recent GAO report, Warren asserted that this disclosure requirement would be beneficial for efforts to combat transnational crime, drug trafficking (including fentanyl smuggling), sex trafficking, the evasion of sanctions imposed on Iran, the theft of US technology by China and others, and fraud that targets US government programs. (The criminals that stole federal funds in Minnesota relied on shell companies.)
This may well be a personal issue for Trump. His Trump Organization is a collection of hundreds of shell companies. (Such entities are commonly used for real estate transactions.) And during the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”
Corporate reporting rules may seem like a wonkish topic. It certainly is not as visceral as Trump selling pardons or pocketing billions in crypto grift. But it may be more important, for Trump’s decision to protect the secrecy of shell companies—perhaps at the urging of Musk—has more far-ranging consequences than his own sticky-fingers corruption. It’s another way Trump is making America great for plutocrats, oligarchs, fraudsters, and scoundrels.
Cybele Mayes-Osterman
