He explained that we could trace these dollars by using something called a 1782 subpoena. I’d never heard of it, but it sounded promising. His idea was to take advantage of a little-known feature of the international banking system: whenever money is transferred in dollars—even between two banks in Russia—it touches a US clearing bank for a fraction of a second, leaving a permanent record. Those clearing banks are headquartered in Manhattan and under the jurisdiction of US courts. If we subpoenaed those banks and got their records, we could use that information to begin to reconstruct the
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