The "D" day pool, best guess as to when Trump is out

DIY-HP-LED said:

Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes
as He Reaped Riches From His Father
The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but 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.
By DAVID BARSTOW, SUSANNE CRAIG and RUSS BUETTNER
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html
Oct. 2, 2018
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.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

The president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for this article. But a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings. “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

Mr. Harder sought to distance Mr. Trump from the tax strategies used by his family, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he said. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”

[Read the full statement]

The president’s brother, Robert Trump, issued a statement on behalf of the Trump family:

“Our dear father, Fred C. Trump, passed away in June 1999. Our beloved mother, Mary Anne Trump, passed away in August 2000. All appropriate gift and estate tax returns were filed, and the required taxes were paid. Our father’s estate was closed in 2001 by both the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State tax authorities, and our mother’s estate was closed in 2004. Our family has no other comment on these matters that happened some 20 years ago, and would appreciate your respecting the privacy of our deceased parents, may God rest their souls.”

The Times’s findings raise new questions about Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his income tax returns, breaking with decades of practice by past presidents. According to tax experts, it is unlikely that Mr. Trump would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution for helping his parents evade taxes, because the acts happened too long ago and are past the statute of limitations. There is no time limit, however, on civil fines for tax fraud.

The findings are based on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the inner workings and immense profitability of his empire. They include documents culled from public sources — mortgages and deeds, probate records, financial disclosure reports, regulatory records and civil court files.

The investigation also draws on tens of thousands of pages of confidential records — bank statements, financial audits, accounting ledgers, cash disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks. Most notably, the documents include more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts. While the records do not include the president’s personal tax returns and reveal little about his recent business dealings at home and abroad, dozens of corporate, partnership and trust tax returns offer the first public accounting of the income he received for decades from various family enterprises.

[11 takeaways from The Times’s investigation]

What emerges from this body of evidence is a financial biography of the 45th president fundamentally at odds with the story Mr. Trump has sold in his books, his TV shows and his political life. In Mr. Trump’s version of how he got rich, he was the master dealmaker who broke free of his father’s “tiny” outer-borough operation and parlayed a single $1 million loan from his father (“I had to pay him back with interest!”) into a $10 billion empire that would slap the Trump name on hotels, high-rises, casinos, airlines and golf courses the world over. In Mr. Trump’s version, it was always his guts and gumption that overcame setbacks. Fred Trump was simply a cheerleader.

“I built what I built myself,” Mr. Trump has said, a narrative that was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times.

Certainly a handful of journalists and biographers, notably Wayne Barrett, Gwenda Blair, David Cay Johnston and Timothy L. O’Brien, have challenged this story, especially the claim of being worth $10 billion. They described how Mr. Trump piggybacked off his father’s banking connections to gain a foothold in Manhattan real estate. They poked holes in his go-to talking point about the $1 million loan, citing evidence that he actually got $14 million. They told how Fred Trump once helped his son make a bond payment on an Atlantic City casino by buying $3.5 million in casino chips.

But The Times’s investigation of the Trump family’s finances is unprecedented in scope and precision, offering the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald J. Trump a gilded life. The reporting makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth.
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gonnagro said:

Oh c'mon, is this really news.

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gonnagro said:

Oh c'mon, is this really news.

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Roger A. Shrubber said:

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/01/trump-reporter-insult-854870

i find it interesting that while some presidents have had less than perfect relationships with the press, none of them have been openly antagonistic, combative, and insulting to them, either.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had a great mudslinging fight in ally owned newspapers....
"During Jefferson’s campaign against John Adams, both men used the press to levy insults at each other. Jefferson-allied papers accused President Adams of being a hermaphrodite and a hypocrite, while Adams’ camp attacked Jefferson’s racial heritage, accusing him of being “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father” as well as an atheist and libertine. But though Jefferson’s relationship with the press was complicated, he was still a staunch advocate for press freedom, stating “the only security of all is in a free press.”"

Nixon was raked over the coals mercilessly in the media (deservedly so), and so was Bill Clinton.
they were all treated much more harshly than trump has been treated, and still managed to maintain a cordial relationship with the press in public.
but that's because they were politicians, their careers were built on being able to compromise, on being able to reach a consensus....whereas trumps career seems to have been built on lying, stealing from contractors, and a big fat loan from his father.
Teddy Roosevelt would give reporters information on Sunday night, and watch the common people on Monday for their reactions, and would base many of his decisions on those reactions. He was so popular with the people that his opponents were afraid to attack him openly.
But trump has decided that instead of making friends with the press, and using them as a very handy tool, it's a better idea to not only alienate them, it's a good idea to actively attack them. to call them liars. to act the injured party....
while i don't imagine that there is any news outlet that has no bias, their basic function is to inform people of facts. those facts have to be verifiable, or the news agency leaves itself open to legal action. carefully count the number of legal actions brought against news outlets by trump.....

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Ripped Farmer said:

Isn't this common practice?

Or do people throw them away at the end of each season in your neighborhood?

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gonnagro said:

Oh c'mon, is this really news.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

New Rule: Power Begets Power | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

In his editorial New Rule, Bill calls on liberals to stop chasing conservatives out of restaurants and focus on chasing them out of office.

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Fogdog said:

I've seen this complaint before. It's false. As if we can only do one or the other.

Hispanic food service workers can refuse to serve fascists who endorse inhumane racist policies against Hispanic people. The restaurant owner has the right to object but then again, he'd be short handed if the staff stood together on this.

AND we can run campaigns to defeat fascists holding public offices.

There is no need to make it one or the other. In fact they are two distinct actions. This time, Maher is confused but others have said the same thing so he's not alone in this mistake.

Also the crazy notion that liberals should be careful not to upset fascists or else they will wake up sleeping racists who will then vote Republican. That's pretty ignorant.

YES, get out and vote.

YES, refuse to serve those in the Trump administration who have harmed people for no good reason other than politics.

YES, we can do both.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

I think Bill's point was that many of these people don't bother to vote (he's working it for laughs too), I figure they will this time around. In fact this whole sordid episode has been a real political education for a generation or two of Americans. The fact is many young people don't vote and many especially don't show up for the midterms, older more conservative and socially radical voters do show up to vote.

I don't think Bill said people shouldn't give these assholes a hard time in public, just that it's better to vote than to protest, many who are on the streets never showed up at the ballot box.

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WordzyBoii said:

maybe if democrats weren't so concerned with the mass killing (abortion) of their voter base for the last 60 years they would do better in elections.

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INF Flux said:

What's that saying about a broken clock?
Trump uses the press as a punching bag because it scores him points. Everytime this subject comes up I remember the day when Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard joined 4000 other veterans in solidarity with the Standing Rock protests against a pipeline through their water supply and the brutality they'd faced. I tuned to CNN waiting for the breaking news. The ran Wolf Blitzer's Turkey tips as the lead story all day long and never mentioned it. They lie about the wars and most egregiously, just don't bother to cover things that might be against their advertisers agendas. From Fox to msnbc, the people in flint know their story isn't being told, the people in baltimore know their story isn't being told, the people in virginia, etc. We're being told the economy is great. I'm driving past Hoovervilles, left and right.
The forces that are arrayed against Trump lacking credibility is a problem. Truth and better policy would beat him easy. Everyone knows he's full of shit. A better option needs to be better. Just like his attacks on media wouldn't land if they weren't tangentially grounded in average peoples reality.

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schuylaar said:

+rep

we need to let democracy happen..while being force fed your candidate..in other words, i wouldn't want to be in the next person shoes who pulls what hillary pulled on the country.

hillary clinton is single handedly responsible for trumps presidency.

if we make them accountable; they won't do it again..like cops.

there should be prosecution for DNC shenanigans.

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WordzyBoii said:

maybe if democrats weren't so concerned with the mass killing (abortion) of their voter base for the last 60 years they would do better in elections.

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WordzyBoii said:

maybe if democrats weren't so concerned with the mass killing (abortion) of their voter base for the last 60 years they would do better in elections.

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