Don the Con: Today, the NY Times destroyed Trump’s biz reputation once and for all. Here’s how…
The New York Times has just published one of the biggest bombshell articles of the year — and certainly the biggest (perhaps of all times) exposé concerning Donald J. Trump’s pre-political career as a “real estate mogul”:
{a} Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.
President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
“Real estate genius”? Try this: “criminal tax evasion mastermind”.
A few major takeaways from the article:
- Donald Trump’s father Fred created “295 streams of revenue that… over five decades… enrich[ed] his son. In most cases his four other children benefited equally. But over time, as Donald Trump careened from one financial disaster to the next, his father found ways to give him substantially more money, records show.”
- Trump and his attorneys used manipulation of properrty values to evade tax payments.
- All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company formed by the Trump family in 1992, became a conduit for overt fraud.
- Starting in the 1970s, Fred Trump extended a series of “loans” to his son that look more like gifts.
- Fred Trump used the purchase of millions of dollars in casino chips from one of his son’s casinos as a de facto (amd illegal) loan.
- Donald Trump used the press to manipulate stocks through announcements that he was “taking a position” on one or another company.
- Trump Palace was used as a vehicle for his father to avoid taxes of about $5 million dollars.
And there’s more. Much, much more. Expect major tantrums from The Donald. Expect the deplorables to dismiss The Times’ thorough research — facts that completely demolish Trump’s reputation as a business genius — as “fake news.”
Expect also that there will be more than a few prosecutors and staffers in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office scrutinizing the article and the over 100,000 documents backing the research, along with Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. It just might be time for investigators to have a gander at Trump’s personal tax returns — that is, if Team Mueller does not have them already.
Trump’s tax scams of two decades ago look to have finally caught up with him. Buckle up, full-contact-sport politics fans.
