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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And the reason that it is a national security bill is because--to paraphrase a famous author--the United States is engaged in a clash of civilizations. And I describe that clash of civilizations as between rule of law countries like the United States and countries that are run by kleptocrats and oligarchs and criminals or subject to control by traffickers and international criminal organizations.

Now, if you are an oligarch or a kleptocrat or international criminal, the thing you want more than anything else is to be able to hide what you stole. And you don't want to hide what you stole in your own corrupt and crooked country. You want to hide what you stole behind rule of law.

And the result is that the United States and other countries on the rule of law side of this clash of civilizations are giving aid and comfort to our enemies by helping them hide their crooked assets.

The concern for the United States was made pretty clear by Treasury Secretary Yellen, who admitted ``there's a good argument that . . . the best place to hide and launder ill-gotten gains is actually the United States.''

So we are trying to clean that mess up. And it is not just this administration. Under President Trump, Secretary Mnuchin said:

Treasury's ability to combat tax evasion and to detect, deter, and disrupt money laundering and terrorist financing would be greatly enhanced through reporting of beneficial ownership information.

The suggestion that this magically appeared in some bill? No. It was worked through two committees in the Senate. It has been bipartisan from its earliest days, both in the Judiciary Committee and in the Banking Committee. It has been through enormous effort. And, in fact, the last Trump administration, working with us on this bill in 2019, released a statement of administration policy condemning this bipartisan ``measure that will help prevent malign actors from leveraging anonymity to exploit these entities for criminal gain.''

Are there examples of what has been going on? Well, terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Putin's oligarch cronies, North Korean foreign operatives, and fentanyl traffickers all need shell companies to hide what they have stolen.

Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the ``Merchant of Death,'' used a global network of anonymous shell companies, including at least 12 incorporated in Delaware, Florida, and Texas. Anonymous LLCs impeded New York City's ability to trace the terror finance scheme that funded the 9/11 attacks--again, shell corporations that we didn't know who was really behind.

An anonymous New York company served as a front for the Iranian government in violation of U.S. sanctions, with millions of dollars in rent illegally funneled to Iran.

A DOJ indictment last year said that cartel operatives designed a network of shell companies in Wyoming to launder illegal millions for the Sinaloa cartel. Narco traffickers in New Jersey were charged with using an American shell company to buy fentanyl-related supplies from China.

So this is a real problem, which is why the Trump administration's Statement of Administration Policy was supportive.

Now, we went through a lot of effort to get here. The first group that stood up against it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and when it was exposed what they were arguing for, they actually ended up backing off and going to neutral on the bill, because they are bank members and they are anti-money laundering members.

And other Members of the Chamber said: What are we doing here?

And as soon as when that entity disappeared, up came the American Bar Association, doing the same thing. And their banking session and their anti-money laundering session and their former prosecutors and their national security folks all said: What are you doing?

And so the American Bar Association backed off.

The third in this game of political special interests whack-a-mole was NFIB, which came in to present the same stale argument to Senator Graham, Senator Grassley, and myself that were so stale and so flagrant that--well, I am not going to name names. Let's just say the NFIB had a very bad day facing down this bipartisan group.

So a lot of work has gone into this. The stakes are very high. This actually is a national security bill. And against that risk of being the loser in the clash of civilizations, because we are giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to use American shell corporations to hide what they get selling fentanyl to our citizens, here is what we ask: When you set up a corporation, you tell us your name. That is not very complicated. You can do that pretty quickly. You tell us your address. That doesn't take more than a couple of seconds to remember. What is my address? Yeah, write that down. Your date of birth? That is pretty simple too. And then either a passport or driver's license number. It is, literally, that simple. Where it gets complicated is where you have complex networks of joined shell companies in a complex corporate structure. But if that is what you have got, the very same lawyers who put that complex structure together can easily add this information.

So, in my view, delaying the Corporate Transparency Act would empower criminals who are operating through American shell companies, who outcompete and defraud honest small business owners, while emboldening and facilitating terrorist groups, foreign adversaries like Russia and China and Iran, North Korean weapons of mass destruction financing, fentanyl trafficking, and a whole array of grotesquely bad actors.

With great regard for my friend Senator Lankford, I object.

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