Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pressed for proof on Sunday that Donald Trump Jr. paid back a Russian oligarch who funded his wedding festivities.
Page A2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 21 September 2026
Senator from Trump's own party asks him to prove the wedding repayment he claims already happened.
As it ran on the front
I need somebody who does this for a living to explain a word to me, because I don't do wire transfers and I figured a bank would be the outfit that knows the answer, not me. So I asked the woman at the counter at my branch — Tuesday, not busy — what it means when somebody says a debt got "reimbursed." She said it means money moved, on a date, in an amount, and the bank has a record of both, because that's the job. That's their whole business, keeping track of when money that went one way came back the other. I believe her. I just don't have the two things she said I should have.
I wrote some of this down. Not all of it — I lost the thread once and had to start the notebook over on the same page — but here's what I've got. In May, Donald Trump Jr. got married in the Bahamas. A Russian named Umar Kremlev, who runs the International Boxing Association and who Vladimir Putin had handed the Order of Friendship to a few weeks before the wedding, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward it — the rental of a private island was part of that. Trump Jr. and his wife confirmed it themselves, on social media, once ProPublica had already reported it.…
…(cont) I don't want to be a bother, but I have to go back to the word for a second. The date. The bank teller told me a reimbursement has a date. Nobody in anything I've read has said what that date is.
On September 14th, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee asked for answers about Kremlev's role in the wedding. By September 16th, congressional Democrats had an investigation going. I don't know exactly which hour that turned from a question into an investigation, and I'm not going to guess, but by the 16th it was one.
I hate to come back to this again, but there's a second thing the teller mentioned — the amount. She said a reimbursement has a number attached to it too, same as the date. Hundreds of thousands of dollars is the number I've got for what went out. I don't have a number for what, if anything, came back.
On September 18th, a Friday, the President said his son had reimbursed Kremlev for the wedding. Past tense. Already done, he said.
Here's the part I keep chewing on, and I know this is the third time I'm asking you to sit through it with me — when I paid my brother-in-law back for the loan he floated me on the fan belt for my car, I handed him cash off the porch and he counted it in front of me. Small thing. But there was a moment where the money had to actually move from one hand to the other, in front of a witness, and I could tell you when it happened because I was standing there.
I'm sorry, I keep going back to this, but there are two days between when the President said it happened and when somebody from his own party asked for proof — the 18th to the 20th, and I checked that against the calendar twice, because that's the kind of thing I get wrong. On Sunday, a United States senator, Bill Cassidy, went on television and asked to see proof that the money the President said moved had actually moved.
Excuse me, before you go — one more thing, because the teller said it and I don't want to lose it. She told me she doesn't ask who paid who back. She just asks for the date and the number, and then she can tell you whether the word applies. Nobody has given Senator Cassidy either one. Reimbursed.
“They hand you the word "reimbursed" like it's a receipt they don't have to show, and it isn't one — it's just a word. A senator from his own party is up there on television asking where the paperwork is, and if his own guy doesn't buy it, why would you? Somewhere there's a wire transfer with a date and a number on it, or there isn't, and that's the whole ballgame.”
“Look — the President said his son paid the man back, and when the President of the United States says something happened, that's supposed to be — did I just say that? That's not what I meant. Senator Cassidy's just doing his due diligence, that's all this is, nothing to see here, and if there's a receipt somewhere it's a family matter between them and their accountant.”
The receipts
Congressional Democrats have opened an investigation after ProPublica revealed on Monday that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin bankrolled part of Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding in May. ProPublica reports that Umar Kremlev paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on wedding expenses, including the rental of a private island.…
President Donald Trump said Friday that his son Donald Trump Jr. had reimbursed the Russian oligarch who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund his wedding celebration. An investigation published this week by ProPublica reported that Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association and a close ally of Russian…
· Top Oversight Democrat wants answers on Russian oligarch's role in Trump Jr.'s wedding from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.