Why I hope Trump's future trial is televised.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has named a special counsel to oversee the criminal investigation into former president Donald Trump’s possible mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and residence, as well as key aspects of the Jan. 6 investigation, according to a senior Justice Department official.

The decision is expected to be announced Friday afternoon, and comes just days after Trump formally declared himself a 2024 candidate for president.

Well before Trump’s announcement, according to people familiar with the matter, Justice Department officials discussed the possibility of appointing a special counsel to take over investigations involving Trump — such as the Mar-a-Lago case or the attempts to prevent Joe Biden from ascending to the presidency after the 2020 election — if Trump formally declared himself a candidate, people familiar with the matter have said.

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hanimmal said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/18/justice-trump-garland-special-counsel/View attachment 5227813

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including nearly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010, his longtime accountant testified Tuesday, confirming long-held suspicions about the former president’s tax practices.

Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP who spent years preparing Trump’s personal tax returns, said Trump’s reported losses from 2009 to 2018 included net operating losses from some of the many businesses he owns through his Trump Organization.

“There are losses for all these years,” said Bender, who was granted immunity to testify at the company’s criminal tax fraud trial in Manhattan.

The short exchange amounted to a rare public discussion of Trump’s taxes — which the Republican has fought to keep secret — even if there was no obvious connection to the case at hand.

A prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, questioned Bender briefly about Trump’s taxes on cross examination, at one point showing him copies of Trump tax paperwork that the Manhattan district attorney’s office fought for three years to obtain, before moving on to other topics.

The Trump Organization, the holding company for Trump’s buildings, golf courses and other assets, is charged with helping some top executives avoid income taxes on compensation they got in addition to their salaries, including rent-free apartments and luxury cars. If convicted, the company could be fined more than $1 million.

Trump is not charged in the case and is not expected to testify or attend the trial. The company’s former finance chief testified that he came up with the scheme on his own, without Trump or the Trump family knowing. Allen Weisselberg, testifying as part of a plea deal, said the company also benefited because it didn’t have to pay him as much in salary.

Bender’s testimony came on a day full of Trump-related legal drama, including the U.S. Supreme Court clearing the way for Congress to get six years worth of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses.

Also Tuesday, the judge in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit against Trump and his company set an October 2023 trial date; a federal appeals court heard arguments in the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago documents investigation; and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, testified before a Georgia grand jury probing alleged 2020 election interference.

Bender’s tax loss testimony echoed what The New York Times reported in 2020, when it obtained a trove of Trump’s tax returns. Many of the records reflected massive losses and little or no taxes paid, the newspaper reported at the time.

The Times reported Trump paid no income tax in 11 of the 18 years whose records it reviewed, and that he paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2017, the year he became president. Citing other Trump tax records, The Times previously reported that in 1995 he claimed $915.7 million in losses, which he could have used to avoid future taxes under the law at the time.

Manhattan prosecutors subpoenaed Bender’s firm in 2019, seeking access to eight years of Trump’s tax returns and related documents, finally getting them after a protracted legal fight that included two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bender handled tax returns and other financial matters for Trump, the Trump Organization and hundreds of Trump entities starting in the 1980s. He also prepared taxes for members of Trump’s family and other company executives, including Weisselberg and Weisselberg’s son, who managed a company-run ice rink in Central Park.

Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty in August to dodging taxes on $1.7 million in extras in exchange for a five-month jail sentence, testified that he hid company-paid extras such as Manhattan apartments and Mercedes-Benz cars from his taxable income by having the company’s comptroller, Jeffrey McConney, reduce his salary by the cost of those perks.

Bender testified that Weisselberg kept him the dark on that arrangement — and that he only found out about it from prosecutors last year.

But emails shown in court Tuesday suggested that McConney tried to loop him in as early as 2013, with attached spreadsheets listing Weisselberg’s pay and reductions for extras, including Trump-paid tuition for his grandchildren’s private schooling.

Bender, who testified that he got numerous emails from Trump executives daily, said he didn’t recall seeing those messages. If he had, he said: “We would have had a serious conversation about continuing with the client.”

Mazars USA LLP has since dropped Trump as a client. In February, the firm said annual financial statements it prepared for him “should no longer be relied upon” after James’ office said the statements regularly misstated the value of assets — an allegation at the heart of her lawsuit.

Trump blamed Bender and Mazars for the company’s troubles, writing on his Truth Social platform last week: “The highly paid accounting firm should have routinely picked these things up - we relied on them. VERY UNFAIR!”

Bender testified that he put the onus on Weisselberg to fix any problems as scrutiny of the Trump Organization intensified after Trump’s election in 2016 and advised him to stop one dubious practice: the company’s longstanding, tax-saving habit of paying executive bonuses as freelance income.

The accountant said he told Weisselberg: “If there is anything bothering you, even if there’s the slightest chance, we have to set the highest standards so the company should be, effectively, squeaky clean.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s company impeded a grand jury investigation last year by repeatedly failing to turn over evidence in a timely fashion, leading to a secret contempt finding and a $4,000 fine, according to court records made public Tuesday.

The Trump Organization was found to have been “willfully disobeying” four grand jury subpoenas and three court orders, to the detriment of Manhattan prosecutors who were left ill-prepared to question witnesses, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan ruled.

The subpoenas, issued in March, April, May and June 2021, preceded the Trump Organization’s July 2021 indictment on criminal tax fraud charges for helping executives avoid taxes on company-paid perks. The company was convicted this month and faces a fine of up to $1.6 million.

The $4,000 contempt fine was the maximum allowable by law.

It’s yet another kerfuffle involving Trump and allegations of mishandling or withholding records. In April, a judge held Trump in contempt and fined him $110,000 for being slow to respond to a civil subpoena issued by New York’s attorney general. The former president has also been under investigation for storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Merchan vaguely referenced the Trump Organization’s contempt proceeding while presiding over the company’s criminal trial, saying he would wait until after it was over to unseal records related to an unspecified proceeding held last year.

That proceeding turned out to be the Trump Organization’s closed-door contempt trial on Oct. 7, 2021 and Merchan’s partially redacted 28-page ruling finding the company in contempt, which he issued on Dec. 8, 2021.

While the company’s name was blacked out in the court record released Tuesday, the details in the decision and the manner in which it was unsealed by the judge made it clear who was involved.

Manhattan prosecutors, frustrated with the company’s lack of compliance, had sought “coercive sanctions” of $60,000 per day, Merchan said.

Trump Organization lawyers argued that the company had been providing a steady stream of records, at one point totaling more than 3.5 million pages of records, but Merchan said that was “just enough to fend off” the prosecution’s request for penalties “while never fully meeting any of the deadlines.”

“When challenged (the company) provided one excuse after another,” Merchan wrote. “At times it claimed it was impossible to meet deadlines because the demands were too voluminous, overbroad or vague. On other occasions, it blamed delays and omissions on human error” or technical issues.

In the recently concluded criminal tax fraud trial, two corporate entities at the Trump Organization were convicted Dec. 6 of charges including charges of conspiracy and falsifying business records. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 13. The defense said it will appeal. Trump himself was not on trial.

The company’s former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, previously pleaded guilty to charges that he manipulated the company’s books to illegally reduce his taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits such as a Manhattan apartment and luxury cars. He testified in exchange for a promised five-month jail sentence.

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canndo said:

I figure this. If a mob of drug addled pot heads were not influenced by the antics of Mr smiley faced balloon head trump then who THE HELL ARE those who have actually followed this baboon through years of insanity. What are their intellectual qualifications?

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cannabineer said:

They did their own research!

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canndo said:

It has become my dying wish that the denials denizens be swept into the deep but only as they expend their final gasps in.."you were right all along".

Too much to expect?

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cannabineer said:

yes; too much to expect. Human cognition is bistable. The energy barrier to righting a big enough delusion-investment is large.

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canndo said:

Sad. I would have no problem acknowledging truth in my final moments.

In final truth is final salvation.

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canndo said:

"See? I told you so" is less than satisfying. I want heads rolling. I want trumpian tears. I want gnashing of tears, renting of loin cloths, pulling of hair, wailing and weeping. Most of all I want simple agreement. "Gee, I guess he WAS a con man".

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Sometime soon — possibly within the next few days — a congressional committee led by Democrats will begin doling out former President Donald Trump’s income tax returns to the public. The disclosure marks the end of a bitter, multi-year battle to keep the returns under wraps. It all would have been unnecessary if Trump had done what every president since Gerald Ford had done: release them voluntarily.

Trump’s predecessors released theirs to help promote bi-partisan transparency and good government in the post-Watergate era. He had no interest in any of that when he landed in the White House, and relied on a litany of howlers, including claiming his was being audited, to explain his recalcitrance.

What a fine mess he has gotten himself into. There are certainly more surprises to come, but a pair of summaries of the House Ways and Means Committee’s analysis of Trump’s personal and business tax records from 2015 through 2020 contained interesting revelations that will trouble the former president and certainly draw the attention of prosecutors. One of the reports also details what appears to be a glaring institutional failure by the Internal Revenue Service to undertake mandated audits of his returns. The documents also show that during one year of his presidency, Trump — a self-proclaimed billionaire — paid no personal income taxes at all.

The records question the validity of about $300 million in tax deductions claimed by a skein of Trump holding companies for such write-offs as charitable giving, operating losses and business expenses. Both reports speculate that about $51,000 was given to his three eldest children as gifts, but may have been disguised as loans to avoid tax payments. And one of the reports shows that a mandatory audit of Trump’s returns only occurred in one of the six tax years that should have been scrutinized.

The IRS instituted mandated audits of presidential tax returns in 1977 in response to a tax scandal that ensnared former President Richard Nixon.
The mandate was seen as a way of insulating the IRS from political pressure and criticism by simply making the audits automatic and annual. Yet only one was triggered during Trump’s presidency, begging the question of whether the White House corrupted the IRS.

That Trump has avoided paying taxes and engaged in questionable practices is hardly new. The New York Times detailed his machinations in a series of landmark articles in 2020 that congressional investigators relied on in their own probes. I saw Trump’s federal tax returns about 15 years ago as part of a legal action in which he unsuccessfully sued me for libel for a biography I wrote (the suit was later dismissed).

What is new is the extent to which Trump and his cohorts may have run roughshod over institutional checks and balances designed to prevent presidents from grifting while in office — and to also help ensure that financial conflicts of interest don’t collide with sound public-policymaking.
There is also fresh detail in the reports that is likely to deepen the public’s understanding of just how fast and loose Trump was with tax rules that average Americans are expected to adhere to and which he disdained.

The tax disclosures will inevitably be painted as the partisan handiwork of Democratic hacks only interested in embarrassing or defanging a potent political opponent. The same argument has been trotted out repeatedly to taint the work of the January 6 committee. Had Republicans been more willing to compel Trump to comply with the traditions and requirements of tax disclosures, it would have been harder to label the House Ways and Means effort as partisan. But his party chose to acquiesce.

The reality is that every president should be transparent about their finances and Trump chose not to be. Consequences came with that decision, as they should have.

The framers of the Constitution and subsequent political leaders in the US left the presidency free of strict conflict of interest rules so as to not curtail the powers of the office. None of them, however, envisioned someone with Trump’s finances, moral ambiguity and appetites landing in the White House. An update of financial disclosure rules is long overdue, and if a collision over Trump’s taxes helped clarify the matter, so be it. (Clarity may be the best we get for the time being; the House is about to change hands, so any recommendations the current leadership makes will be short-lived.)

Besides, Trump has provided ample fodder for making tax disclosure rules stricter and more universal. He never authentically distanced himself from his businesses while he was president and he surrounded himself with like-minded advisers. Shortly after Trump left office, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his former Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, successfully rang up the Saudis and other overseas investors for billions of dollars in investment funds. There are still unanswered questions about the extent to which Trump himself was financially beholden to foreign powers before and during his presidency.

As more information about his finances surfaces in coming days, it will be a reminder of the extent to which the former president played a shell game with his wealth and business interests while in power — and what he might try to get away with again if he occupies the Oval Office in the future.
Finding ways to curtail that kind of grifting isn’t partisan; it’s just good government.

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cannabineer said:

Georgia’s report is supposed to come out today.

(add) where’s hannimal?

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Roger A. Shrubber said:

Looks like you may be getting your wish
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/georgia-da-investigating-trump-over-2020-election-says-decisions-imminent.html

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis cited that plan during a hearing in Atlanta, where she urged the judge to keep sealed — for now — a final special grand jury report that was assembled to gather evidence and hear testimony from 75 witnesses for that investigation.
A consortium of media outlets has asked Judge Robert McBurney to make the report public, as the grand jury has recommended.
Willis, in arguing to keep it sealed, said, “For future defendants to be treated fairly, it’s not appropriate at this time to have this report released.”
″“We need to be mindful of protecting future defendants’ rights,” she told McBurney
“Decisions are imminent,” Willis said.

Now let's see if her definition of 'Imminent" and mine are close to each other....My definition of Imminent has me noticing that 4 hours has passed since she made the statement....

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