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- The whistleblower Valentin Broeksmit was found dead in LA on Tuesday, per multiple reports.
- A 2019 NYT profile connected Broeksmit’s trove of Deutsche Bank documents to an FBI Trump probe.
- Broeksmit had been missing for over a year when he died. Police do not suspect foul play.
A whistleblower who was linked to an FBI investigation into former President Donald Trump’s ties to Deutsche Bank was found dead on Monday, according to multiple reports.
The body of Valentin Broeksmit, 46, was found on the grounds of Woodrow Wilson High School in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The Los Angeles Police Department reported him missing more than a year ago, and he appeared to be homeless at the time of his death, the paper reported Sgt. Rudy Perez of the Los Angeles School Police Department as saying.
Perez said there is no evidence of foul play, the paper reported. A cause of death is not listed in the coroner’s report, which said his case file is “deferred pending additional investigation.”
Broeksmit, the son of a senior Deutsche Bank employee, had offered to supply sensitive company documents to the FBI, according to a 2019 New York Times profile by the journalist David Enrich.
The younger Broeksmit met with FBI investigators at a time as they were probing Trump’s relationship with the bank, the paper reported.
On top of sharing documents with several reporters, he sold a trove of documents to Fusion GPS, the company that had earlier produced the infamous “Steele dossier,” The Times reported.
Neither Fusion GPS nor the FBI immediately responded to Insider’s requests for comment. Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
According to the Times report, the House Intelligence Committee also subpoenaed Broeksmit for documents relating to its probe of Trump and Deutsche Bank.
Broeksmit’s father, William, died by suicide in 2014, leaving several notes, Reuters reported at the time. The Times later reported that the elder Broeksmit had been wracked with guilt over what he saw as mistakenly giving the conduct of some Deutsche Bank traders a clean bill of health.
After William’s death, Valentin gained access to his emails, which “only people within the inner circle of Deutsche would ever see,” an unnamed FBI agent is quoted as saying in the Times profile.
The investigative reporter Scott Stedman tweeted about Valentin’s death on Tuesday, calling him a friend who “supplied me and other journalists with Deutsche Bank documents that highlighted the bank’s deep Russia connections.”
He said that Broeksmit had “struggled with drugs on and off,” a characterization underscored by multiple descriptions of drug use in the Times profile.
Emphasizing that he didn’t suspect foul play, Stedman went on to write in a further tweet: “Everyone needs to fucking stop with the conspiracy theories about Val.”
Enrich, the journalist who wrote the Times profile, also tweeted of Broeksmit’s death: “This is terrible news. Val was a longtime source of mine and the main character in my book. We had a complicated relationship, but this is just devastating to hear.”
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