The feds are scrutinizing wire transfers the Kremlin sent to Russian embassies around the world with a memo line that said “to finance election campaign of 2016,” a new report said Tuesday.
The FBI is looking at more than 60 wire transfers totaling more than $380,000, BuzzFeed News reported.
The website said the money, which moved through Citibank accounts, arrived between Aug. 3 and Sept. 20 last year at Russian embassies in nearly 60 countries, including Washington, DC, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
BuzzFeed said $30,000 was sent by the Russian foreign ministry to its embassy in the US capital.
The FBI learned about the transfers at the end of September, and is now looking into how the money was spent.
“We had an election and the intelligence community concluded Russia interfered in it,” an FBI agent told BuzzFeed.
“How could we not investigate a suspicious financial transaction that contained a memo that said, ‘finance election campaign 2016’? Given the climate and what was in that memo line, it would be very irresponsible for us not to investigate. It’s a good lead.”
President Trump has repeatedly denied collusion between his campaign and Russia, alternately calling the special counsel’s probe “a hoax” cooked up by Democrats, “a witch hunt” and “fake news.”