This story kinda naturally leaps to conspiracies and coverups, but I’ll humbly submit that there must be a mechanism where law enforcement (likely Mueller, but could “just” be FBI financial crimes unit) can remove/hide extraordinarily sensitive data. Things that could reveal details of an ongoing investigation, expose informants, damage international relations, or all three.

Because no matter how much blatantly illegal activity has already happened with impunity at this point, I really strongly doubt all traces of these financial records have been wiped from all backups and transaction logs. Banks have a thing about data integrity. So if someone did try to cover this up, that was the most boneheaded move to date, and that’s really saying something after what we’ve seen this last year.

Nevertheless, regardless of how you choose to interpret the story, there doesn’t appear to be a way to interpret it in a way that doesn’t indicate something very unusual and illegal happened that someone (either the criminals or law enforcement) felt justified the unprecedented removal of data from the FinCEN database.