Whoever Owns Trump's Enormous Debts Could Be Running the Country

[aubiefifty 16,801]

washingtonmonthly.com

 

Whoever Owns Trump's Enormous Debts Could Be Running the Country

by David Atkins

7-9 minutes

---

 

At long last, the New York Times has the president’s tax records.

September 28, 2020

| 4:52 AM

 

The White House/Flickr

At long last, the New York Times has Donald Trump’s tax returns. The picture they paint, put shortly, is one of epic financial malfeasance, likely criminal tax avoidance on a massive scale, probable bank fraud, opulent living at taxpayer expense, unethical self-dealing and wild recklessness more becoming a buffoonish French aristocrat or drunken sailor than a prudent businessman. Donald Trump’s approach to business and tax compliance appears to have been the same as his approach to politics: tell outrageous lies, play the government and creditors for fools, steal everything not nailed down today, figure out how to solve tomorrow’s consequences tomorrow, and already be onto the next con before anyone can catch him on the last one.

But despite its potential to land the entire Trump family in penury and jail, what is far more terrifying for the country isn’t what lies in his past of tax avoidance. It’s the time bomb of debt that lies in Trump’s very near future. It’s about the mystery of who owns Trump’s outlandish debts, and the degree of secret power they may be wielding over the country.

The particulars of the Trump grift are sickening in both the details and grand scope. It’s not just an issue of his class: the scale of his tax avoidance far dwarfs that of most others in his income bracket. Despite posturing as a billionaire, Trump paid only $750 in taxes for the years 2016 and 2017. He tried to use the same trick to offload tens of millions in tax burdens by claiming business losses twice in as many decades, except that the second time he actually still retained partial ownership of the underlying business, and has been in a $72 million battle with the IRS for a decade ever since–a battle he should lose by all rights. His daughter Ivanka was hired as a consultant for the same work she was doing in her main job–an obvious and incredibly stupid  tax-avoidance grift that could easily land her jail. He (likely illegally) deducted $70,000 in hair care for his TV show. And so on.

Keep in mind, though, that this is just what we know of from his own personal reporting to the IRS. It’s not a forensic accounting document. These financial statements are Trump’s best foot forward to the government, with no knowing what criminal rot lies in the details.

Many rich tax cheats will tell the IRS they are broke while hiding their true wealth elsewhere.  But Donald Trump isn’t just a tax cheat pretending to be broke for the feds. He appears to actually be broke. He inherited money from his father, squandered it on failed casino investments, offloaded the losses onto creditors, and then remade himself as a personal brand machine selling the rights to his name. He played a fake billionaire on TV and made significant money from doing that. Remarkably, adopting a fake reality TV show persona for public entertainment value may be the closest thing to honest work Trump has ever done.  But rather than being content to invest those proceeds wisely, he went on another foolish real estate spending spree. His properties old and new are losing ridiculous amounts of money–he has lost a shocking $315 million dollars in the last 20 years at his golf courses alone.

One fact stands out far above all the others in its staggering implications: Donald Trump is personally responsible for $421 million worth of loans coming due in the next few years. Not his business. Him. Personally. He has no means of repaying them. He already refinanced his few profitable properties, and sold off most of his stocks to stay afloat. He appears short on liquidity. And we still don’t know to whom he owes the money.

This fact has frightening implications for public policy and national security. Even minor debts are a frequent reason for the government to deny a security clearance, for the obvious reason that indebted and financially desperate public servants make easy marks for bribery, blackmail and potential treason. The potentially destructive power of that sort of hold on a President of the United States is beyond comprehension. It is the stuff of nightmares, bad spy movie plots and otherwise outlandish conspiracy theory. Imagine if a president owed millions to the mob or to those with close ties to a foreign government, and those individuals both controlled the president’s financial future and knew of corrupt criminal activity. The president might act with otherwise strange deference to said mobsters and those connected to them, and bend public policy on their behalf. If they were tied to fossil fuel interests, the president might set the globe on fire rather than cross them. If his creditors were simply a wealthy set of Wall Street tycoons, he might rig all financial policy on their direct behalf.

What we do know is that beginning in the late 2000s, no one would lend to Donald Trump. His history of bankruptcies, combined with whatever horrors were on his personal and organizational financial statements, clearly made every bank run the other direction. Every bank but one, that is: Deutsche Bank. Donald Trump’s history with Deutsche Bank has always merited special scrutiny, but never more than now. The head honchos at Deutsche would have known just how desperate Trump’s financial position was. But they lent to him anyway. Why? It certainly looks even more ominous that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son was managing the real estate division at Deutsche that lent to Trump, and that Justice Kennedy unexpectedly retired to ensure Trump could seat his replacement. And it looks triply suspicious that Deutsche Bank has been fined and sanctioned over multiple money laundering scandals, including $20 billion from Russian kleptocrats.

It could all be a coincidence. But it probably isn’t.

Still, even if the darkest fears turn out to be unfounded, some group of individuals still owns Trump’s nearly half-billion dollar debts. They likely also know where many of his financial and legal skeletons are buried. Whoever they are, they have the capacity to be directly dictating to Donald Trump and he would be in no position to say no. That is an untenable place for the country to be in.

The New York Attorney General has even more dirt on the finances of the Trump Organization, and the New York Times will be releasing even more information on Trump’s taxes in the coming days. But even with just what we know now, the country faces an unprecedented policy and national security crisis. The situation is untenable. A man in Trump’s position simply cannot be allowed to continue as president.

Trump has already proven himself temperamentally and morally unfit for the job. But now, whether he wins or loses re-election, no responsible member of Congress should allow him to be re-inaugurated. The Republican Party could easily put Vice President Pence in his place and achieve the same policy goals. Trump must be impeached and removed, because the country faces grave risks every day he remains in power.

David Atkins

[homersapien 11,381]

LOCK HIM UP!  LOCK HIM UP!  LOCK HIM UP! 

[DKW 86 7,425]

Being able to spot people like Trump and watch as the rest of the world figures them out...Well, it just makes cold beer taste sssooo much better...

[Grumps 3,704]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

LOCK HIM UP!  LOCK HIM UP!  LOCK HIM UP! 

IMPEACH HIM AGAIN! IMPEACH HIM AGAIN! IMPEACH HIM AGAIN!

[wdefromtx 3,159]

21 minutes ago, Grumps said:

IMPEACH HIM AGAIN! IMPEACH HIM AGAIN! IMPEACH HIM AGAIN!

Then throw him in jail with Hillary.

[homersapien 11,381]

Trump’s taxes show why he is desperate to stay in office

Opinion by

Max Boot

Columnist

September 28, 2020

 

During the first presidential debate in 2016, Hillary Clinton speculated that Donald Trump was keeping his taxes secret because he didn’t want Americans to know that “maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is,” “maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be,” and maybe “he’s paid nothing in federal taxes.”

The New York Times just confirmed that Clinton was right — and reveals why President Trump has tried so hard to keep his taxes secret. It somehow managed to obtain Trump’s tax returns, which show that he is either a terrible businessman or a massive tax cheat — or possibly both. He managed to pay no federal income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — and only $750 in 2016 and 2017 — by claiming vast losses from his business empire. That $750 figure is a killer because it’s a number that middle-class Americans can understand. As a just-released Biden campaign ad points out, that’s far less than the taxes paid by the average teacher, nurse or firefighter.

The latest Times story neatly complements a previous Times scoop in 2018 which showed that, far from being a self-made man, young Trump received $413 million from his father — and squandered it in a series of failed deals. The new article picks up the story, showing that Trump received another windfall from “The Apprentice” and related deals — and then promptly squandered that, too. By July, the newspaper reports, the supposed billionaire had no more than $873,000 in securities left to sell.

The Times article supports the assumption that Trump ran for president in 2015 — a race he never expected to win — to revive his flagging fortunes. That is, in fact, what Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, told Congress last year: “Mr. Trump would often say this campaign was going to be the greatest infomercial in political history. . . . The campaign for him was always a marketing opportunity.”

Once Trump unexpectedly won, the marketing opportunities only increased for the most unethical president in our history. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) just released a report showing that Trump has 3,400 conflicts of interest. He has profited from his presidency by making repeated visits to his own properties with his vast entourage in tow, while lobbyists, political groups and foreign governments have also paid to stay at his properties.

Trump tried to secure even more lucrative paydays by announcing that the Group of Seven summit would be held at his Miami-area golf resort and reportedly instructing the U.S. ambassador in London to pressure the British government to move the British Open golf tournament to his Scottish resort. Both schemes blew up in Trump’s face, raising the issue of why someone as rich as he claims to be would engage in such blatant profiteering. Now, we know the answer. Trump is not just less wealthy than he claims; he is up to his eyeballs in debt.

The Times reports that Trump is on the hook for $421 million in debt, much of which is coming due soon. As former FBI agent Josh Campbell points out, that much debt “disqualifies most people from obtaining a government security clearance,” because the U.S. government “views this as a vulnerability and a point of leverage for foreign adversaries seeking access to classified information.”

The Times account did not specify who Trump’s creditors are and sheds little light on his business connections with Russia. It did note that he made more money from holding the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 — $2.3 million — than from any other pageant. That money came from the Agalarov family, which is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and which lost $10 million on the transaction.

This should serve as a reminder that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III refused to look into Trump’s financial dealings with Russia, which Trump said was a red line for him. That investigation still needs to be conducted. But even the bare facts revealed by the Times show why both former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats suspect that (as Coats told Bob Woodward) “Putin had something on Trump.”

And Putin isn’t alone. The Times shows that Trump made millions of dollars during his presidency from licensing deals in places such as the Philippines, Turkey and India, rendering him vulnerable to pressure from the strongmen in power in all of those countries. Indeed, former national security adviser John Bolton said that Trump’s decision-making on Turkey was motivated by Trump’s business interests. That is a shocking corruption of U.S. foreign policy.

Will any of it matter? It’s true that the Times’s revelations are unlikely to move Trump’s devoted supporters to vote for Joe Biden. But they do disrupt Trump’s ability to get his message across with only 36 days left in an election that he is losing.

The Times has done an impressive job of getting the truth out, and now it is up to the voters to decide whether they want to reelect a flimflam man. The Times account makes clear that Trump is desperate to stay in office in no small part because he needs to profit from the presidency — and to avoid the risk of prosecution for tax fraud and other possible crimes.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/28/trumps-taxes-show-why-he-is-desperate-stay-office/

[SuperAUsome09 738]

Trump went with the whole "I'm not required by law to disclose my tax records" but I'm pretty sure it's a somewhat longstanding "tradition" for presidents to do so. As egotistical as Trump is, he'd be gloating to the world about this("Look how much I pay in taxes compared to the rest")....unless there was something to hide.

[yngwie1995 2,229]

Yet, silence from the left and the media on Hunter Biden sitting on the Burisma board (Ukrainian oil company), getting paid $50K per month, just because he was the VP's son. Yeah, nothing fishy going on there. Where's the national security concern over that one?

[homersapien 11,381]

3 hours ago, yngwie1995 said:

Yet, silence from the left and the media on Hunter Biden sitting on the Burisma board (Ukrainian oil company), getting paid $50K per month, just because he was the VP's son. Yeah, nothing fishy going on there. Where's the national security concern over that one?

It certainly looked bad, but there was/is no national security concern. 

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Ukraine Report_FINAL.pdf

Now let's have an similar investigation into Trump's finances.  After all, he's the POTUS.

[homersapien 11,381]

Running for president was the worst business decision Trump ever made

 

Megan McArdle

Columnist

September 28, 2020

 

We do not live in a just world. Keep that in mind if Sunday’s New York Times revelations about President Trump’s tax returns have kindled hope in your breast that he’s finally — finally! — about to get his comeuppance.

Yes, Trump appears to have reduced his tax bill through a series of skeevy deductions for personal expenses and “consulting” payments to his family, and, yes, Trump paid a mere $1,500 in income taxes, total, in 2016 and 2017, according to the Times. Moreover, that may itself have been sleight of hand, a token amount so that Trump could truthfully say he was paying taxes.

Yes, you almost certainly pay more than $750 a year in income taxes. I pay more than that in income taxes. A friend’s son paid more during the summer he worked as a camp counselor.

No, none of us has $10 billion, like Trump (dubiously) has claimed. And yes, we all, in our small way, have subsidized this alleged billionaire’s pricey hairstyling and extended stays in luxury accommodation.

Yes, too, foreign interests and miscellaneous characters appear to have become big spenders at Trump properties since he started running for president.

But we knew he was a tax chiseler and a scoundrel before the Times story broke. We knew it before he became president, because he bragged about it on the campaign trail. If voters didn’t care then, why would they start to now?

If the numbers weren’t so complicated to parse, voters might be more interested in learning that his businesses aren’t so profitable — something Trump would surely never admit. Indeed, he sold himself as a top-notch manager with a Midas touch: not some useless politician, but an actual businessman, someone who knew how to make things happen in the real world.

The Times report paints a different picture — one of a bad businessman who successfully played a good one on television. Some of his early real estate investments are still making him money, and there’s considerable income from his minority interest in property managed by someone else. But over the past 20 years, most of his profits, more than $400 million, came from “The Apprentice” or licensing deals. That income, however, was almost completely absorbed by gargantuan losses at the actual businesses where he had to make things happen in the real world.

How could the numbers grow so large? The most charitable and, to my mind, likely explanation is that Trump spent too long playing a businessman and could no longer distinguish his reality show from reality.

So instead of tucking those hundreds of millions into safe, boring investments where they’d keep throwing off income forever, Trump bought a string of golf courses, then lost buckets of money running them. Dubious tax strategies and aggressive borrowing helped keep the leaky boat afloat. But now, he has hundreds of millions of debt coming due in the next few years, and, if he loses his audit dispute with the Internal Revenue Service, potentially a nearly $100 million tax bill to boot.

All this helps explain his decision to run for president, with all the scrutiny that comes with it. After all, scrutiny is great news for a showman looking to revive a flagging brand as his income from “The Apprentice” declined.

Quite possibly this was the worst business decision Trump ever made. (And that’s saying a lot.) Being president has temporarily paused many of his problems, such as the audit. But in four months, or four years, Trump will leave office, and all his old problems will resume, along with some new ones.

NBC cut ties with him as a result of his campaign, and he has thoroughly alienated the left-leaning media bosses to whom he might pitch a new reality show. His presidential celebrity has invited potential lawsuits that could prove expensive and poisoned his brand for half the population. Income from his fans (or sycophants) may have temporarily allayed those losses, but the foreign money, at least, will probably end when his presidency does. On top of all that, the pandemic that Trump bungled has hit real estate, travel and leisure — the primary sectors in which he’s invested — particularly hard.

Of course, there will be new opportunities in conservative media, and surely Trump will try to capitalize on them. Yet there’s reason to wonder just how lucrative such opportunities will prove.

Trump’s greatest appeal to conservatives has never been the man himself, but rather the vehement reaction he evokes from the left. Once Trump is no longer president, the left will move on to other things, and with half his audience gone, the other half may lose interest, too. So there’s still some reason for Trump’s critics to hope that they may, eventually, see a little bit of justice after all.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/running-for-president-was-the-worst-business-decision-trump-ever-made/2020/09/28/d0bad886-01c7-11eb-b7ed-141dd88560ea_story.html

[alexava 6,973]

My concern was that he was beholden to foreign loan sharks. I think the fbi has had such a hard on for his skull, it would have been uncovered by now. They been going at him pretty hard for 4 years. 

[homersapien 11,381]

4 hours ago, homersapien said:

It certainly looked bad, but there was/is no national security concern. 

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Ukraine Report_FINAL.pdf

Now let's have an similar investigation into Trump's finances.  After all, he's the POTUS.

More on the Hunter Biden investigation:

The GOP’s own star witness just blew up Trump’s ‘Hunterghazi’ smear

Opinion by

Greg Sargent and 

Paul Waldman

September 23, 2020

 

President Trump has spent over two years trying to “prove” that Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine were corrupt. He and lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani schemed over this for many months, with Trump ultimately trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into announcing an investigation into those activities, which got Trump impeached even as the smears they manufactured crashed and burned.

Now Trump has been counting on Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to validate these narratives, via an inquiry conducted by the Homeland Security committee, which Johnson chairs. The goal was to use the official sheen of a Senate probe — one also conducted with the Finance Committee — to manufacture the impression of wrongdoing on Biden’s part.

But as befits this cast of bumblers and incompetents, the star witness in the GOP’s own investigation has actually further undermined those smears.

Johnson has now released his long-awaited (by Trump, anyway) report on his investigation. One of its big revelations is supposed to be that George Kent, a top State Department official, testified that he “raised concerns” inside the Obama administration about appearances of conflicts of interest surrounding the business activities of the then-vice president’s son Hunter.

But, while that itself is true, there’s a big problem here: Kent also gave the committee testimony that completely undermines the larger narrative that Trump and Republicans have tried to spin into political gold for over a year.

The story they try to tell

The basic story they have long tried to tell goes like this. As vice president, Biden sought the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma, an energy company that was paying Hunter Biden a lucrative salary to sit on its board, from investigation. Joe Biden also conditioned foreign aid on that prosecutor’s ouster.

All this is supposed to show that Biden corrupted Obama administration foreign policy on his son’s behalf.

But this “Hunterghazi” tale has been widely debunked. In reality, Burisma was not even being investigated at the time, and the vice president was working to oust that Ukrainian prosecutor because the prosecutor himself was corrupt.

That was the actual Obama administration policy, and this goal was backed by international institutions precisely because they had a stake in a corruption-free Ukraine. GOP senators were briefed by Obama officials about this policy at the time, including about the conditioning of foreign aid, and had no objections to it.

Kent himself — that would be the Republicans’ own star witness — has now confirmed much of this, in testimony to the committee as part of the GOP’s own investigation.

In that testimony, as the Democratic response to the GOP report details, Kent knocked down every key pillar of the GOP story line:

• Kent debunked the idea that Burisma was protected from investigation, stating that “I did not witness any effort by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny.”
• Kent debunked the idea that the U.S. effort to oust the Ukrainian prosecutor was about stopping an investigation into Burisma, flatly stating that it was not.
• Kent confirmed that the quest for that ouster was about purging Ukraine of corruption, noting that “Ukrainian society” wanted the prosecutor gone because he was “protecting corrupt friends.”
• Kent confirmed that the conditioning of aid as leverage had nothing to do with Hunter Biden and that it originated with those involved in formulating “Ukraine policy.”

Kent already testified to some of these points during impeachment. But now he offered it directly to the GOP investigation itself.

Appearances versus realities

The Johnson report purports to use Kent’s concerns about appearances of conflict of interest to create the impression of corruption on Joe Biden’s part. It notes that in the last years of the Obama administration, Kent raised concerns to officials in Biden’s office about the “perception” of a conflict of interest, which he called “awkward.”

The GOP report notes that Kent testified about this before the committee. But as the GOP report itself shows, in that testimony Kent worried that critics would use Hunter Biden’s involvement to question the true motives behind administration policy, not that the motives themselves were problematic.

To be fair, the part of the story concerning appearances is problematic. Hunter Biden should not have taken the Burisma money. It did create perceptions of a conflict. State Department officials were in fact preoccupied with these appearances.

And such perceptions themselves are bad. They undermine public faith in the integrity of government, even if there are no genuine underlying conflicts — that is, no actual cases of public officials using the government for private gain — as in this case there aren’t.

It’s also fair to question the judgment of the vice president in allowing this to happen, though it’s unclear what control he might have exercised over his son, who had other personal problems that reportedly anguished his father.

But the bottom line here is that the central holy grail that Trump and Republicans have been pursuing just isn’t there.

Comically, the GOP report deals with this by slipping in the following line:

The extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.

Not clear? Actually it is clear: Hunter Biden’s role didn’t affect U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

Indeed, the line itself constitutes a striking admission: After pouring extraordinary amounts of effort into making this seem like a scandal, they could not produce evidence of their central claim.

The ultimate irony here is that this effort to prove that Joe Biden abused official resources for personal gain is itself an example of exactly this — but on the part of Trump and his co-conspirators.

Just as Trump subverted U.S. foreign policy to his personal gain by attempting to bulldoze a foreign ally under duress into helping validate his campaign messaging, the GOP report is yet another attempt to manipulate a government product for Trump’s benefit. It may be dressed up with vague insinuations and the imprimatur of an oversight committee, but it’s just one more crass, shameless misuse of official resources.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/23/gops-own-star-witness-just-blew-up-trumps-huntergazi-smear/