Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html
“The legal ring surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT
Trump leaves office facing mounting debt, devalued assets and scarcity of willing lenders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTNQUOOznG
Noam Chomsky: Where the Left Goes After Trump (2021 Interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huy82PVaCzs
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
Karen McQuillan
Tony Schwartz: The Truth About Trump | Oxford Union Q&A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxF_CDDJ0YI
Andrea Bernstein: The Trumps, The Kushners and American Greed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFd7-AbwwBA
Kushner, Inc: Vicky Ward on How Jared and Ivanka’s Greed & Ambition Compromise U.S. Foreign Policy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHzp3MPPGEE
No, It Wasn’t a Coup Attempt. It Was Another Trump Money Scam.
The president knew he couldn’t prevail in the courts but he understands how to make money by failing. He did it with casinos and he’s doing it again.
President Trump’s post-election machinations are not a bungled coup attempt; they add up to a scam to enrich himself. A coup would require broad collaboration from the courts and, failing that, from the military. The evidence suggests that Trump may not even be serious about election fraud. If he were, he would have recruited serious election law experts in the states he has contested. Instead, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell blanketed the country with a blizzard of lawsuits, offering fever dreams from the dark web as their legal justification and evidence.
The president’s post-election campaign demonstrates his singular talent for taking care of himself even when he loses. It is a momentous historic attack on the democratic process, on the order of Reconstruction. But for Trump, as Michael Corleone put it, “it’s just business.” Ultimately, Trump’s goals are to remain a star, make money, and solidify his clout. The corrosive effects on democracy are collateral damage.
Donald Trump has always craved fame, a drive common to national politicians. But he alone honed his approach to politics through his stint as a reality TV star. That’s where he learned how he could weave a narrative around his personality that tapped into the fantasies of a national audience. His quixotic claim to have won an election that he knows he lost rests entirely on his curated public persona. And as long as he pursues his claims, he is the center of attention instead of an ignored, sad, lame duck.
Trump’s intrigues embody his drive to come out ahead whether he succeeds or fails. His campaign hardly touched on the pandemic, the economy, or even his signature complaints about immigrants. Instead, he offered a narrative about systemic voter fraud and a stolen election. The strategy was smarter than Trump’s consultants and most media understood. It strengthened his connection to Americans who feel vulnerable to powerful shadowy forces beyond their reach, sufficient to drive nearly enough of them to reelect him.
This approach also laid a foundation for Trump to come out on top again, albeit not as president, and monetize the loss. Soon after the polls closed, his campaign announced an “Official Election Defense Fund” to help pay for his election challenges – with much of the proceeds diverted to his personal PAC, Save America. And by mobilizing his millions of true believers around a false narrative that his enemies have cost them their leader, Trump secured an enormous fan base for whatever he does as an ex-president. Millions will pay to attend more rallies or perhaps subscribe to a new Trump streaming service or cable network.
The strategy will give Trump a global stage to spotlight his inevitable grievances with President Joe Biden. It could become a means to mobilize public pressure against ongoing criminal investigations and possible indictments. Even from Mar-a-Lago, he could keep officeholders aligned with his interests, even as an ex-president.
Ensuring that Trump benefits even when he loses—and so never appears to fail – is an approach he has honed over his career. It nearly always involves making himself richer. He forged the strategy in Atlantic City. When he issued $100 million in junk bonds to bail out the failing Trump Plaza casino in 1993 temporarily, he used half of those proceeds to cover his personal debts. When his three casino hotels went bankrupt, he collected $160 million in management fees from the time the hotels declared Chapter 11 to the inevitable moment, years later, when he had to surrender them to his creditors.
Trump had figured out how to win while losing other people’s money. The final collapse of his Atlantic City properties also became personal paydays: He walked away with $916 million in tax losses based on $3.4 billion in defaulted debts owed to the banks and junk bondholders that actually put up the capital. To make it legal, Trump had assumed personal liability for the loans. But that was at the heart of the scam: Since he had not put up his own money, he couldn’t claim the losses without putting himself technically “at-risk” for the loans.
As president, Trump continues to profit from losing other people’s money. He owns 16 golf courses, all financed by accommodating lenders who put up the money to buy and operate them. As any real estate operator knows, golf courses are notorious money losers. Here too, Trump is personally “at-risk” for those loans – because otherwise, he couldn’t write off their annual losses. Based on the tax returns described in the New York Times, he claimed $15.3 million in those tax losses in 2017, his first year in the White House. For that year, he also reported personal income of nearly $14.8 million from branding deals, income tied to his old reality TV show, and revenues from favor seekers joining Mar-A-Lago and taking suites at his hotels. The losses Trump claimed for ventures paid for with other people’s money enabled him, even as president, to avoid paying personal income tax on all of his $14.8 million income.
Winning by failing has been Donald Trump’s signature business strategy, and now it is his political strategy. Since he couldn’t force the Justice Department to arrest Biden or coerce the courts to overturn the election results, he is left to enrich himself and maintain his influence with his fans and GOP elected officials. Thankfully for democracy, Americans now face not a coup d’état but yet another scam from Donald Trump – and probably not his last.
As impeachment begins, New York accelerates probes of Trump's property dealings
By Jason Szep, Joseph Tanfani and Peter Eisler
(Reuters) - As former U.S. President Donald Trump goes to trial this week in the Senate on charges of inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, criminal and civil investigations into his businesses are accelerating in New York.
Manhattan prosecutors probing Trump’s real-estate business for possible insurance and tax fraud have stepped up witness interviews in recent months and hired forensic accountants, four people familiar with the criminal probe told Reuters. A separate state attorney general’s civil probe into whether the business falsely reported property values got a boost on Jan. 29, when a New York Supreme Court judge ordered the Trump Organization to turn over documents.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision is expected soon on whether Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr can obtain eight years of Trump’s tax records and other financial information from accounting firm Mazars. Two people familiar with the district attorney’s criminal probe expect the court to act this month.
Both the district attorney and the attorney general are focused in part on whether Trump’s businesses improperly falsified values on real-estate assets to secure tax breaks, loans or other benefits.
Trump’s tax returns could provide compelling evidence in the criminal probe if they differ significantly from other financial statements reported by the Trump business, said Daniel Horwitz, a white-collar defense lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor. But in addition to records, he said, prosecutors will likely need witnesses who could “testify about false documents and why they were falsified.”
Lawyers for the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. The Trump Organization has denied in court filings that the company falsified property values, and has rejected other allegations being investigated by Manhattan District Attorney Vance and New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump’s lawyers have tried to block the disclosure of his tax records by appealing the Manhattan district attorney’s request to the U.S. Supreme Court. Lower courts rejected an argument by Trump’s attorney that the request amounted to political “harassment.” Trump’s team has requested a stay of the Supreme Court proceedings. The high court normally acts quickly on such “emergency applications,” but Trump’s request has been pending since October. Another ruling in favor of the district attorney would clear the way for prosecutors to access the tax and financial records.
The Manhattan district attorney said in an August filing that the office is investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct” at the Trump Organization. In a September filing, he said “mountainous” misconduct allegations could justify a grand jury probe into possible tax fraud, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. James’ office has filed a civil lawsuit to compel the Trump Organization to produce documents but has not alleged any crimes.
A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment. A spokesman for James’ office said the Trump Organization has turned over all the documents that prosecutors sought but declined to comment further on the inquiry.
The investigations face challenges. The Manhattan district attorney may struggle to prove that inaccurate property estimates amount to fraud because the standards for valuing properties vary, legal experts say. Such appraisals are also typically performed by outside parties, potentially putting distance between any controversial valuations and Trump’s businesses.
“There’s a lot of expertise to hide behind,” said Joshua Levine, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who now specializes in white-collar criminal and regulatory law in private practice.
PROBE OF NEW YORK MANSION
Court records show that the two investigations, while separate, do overlap. Both the district attorney and the attorney general, for instance, are examining how the Trump Organization and its agents assessed the value of Seven Springs, a 212-acre estate north of Manhattan that Trump purchased in 1995. Trump’s company has said the century-old, 50,000-square-foot mansion was used as a Trump family retreat.
Trump’s ambitions to build a championship golf course there were derailed by local opposition, and he shelved another plan to build luxury homes. But the property did become a vehicle for a tax break, according to property records and court filings. In 2015, he signed a conservation easement - an agreement not to develop the property - covering 158 acres.
The attorney general’s office said in a court filing that an appraiser hired by Trump before the conservation agreement set the property’s value at $56.5 million and the easement’s value at $21.1 million - an amount Trump claimed as an income tax deduction.
The attorney general’s office, in an August court filing, said it was investigating whether the assessment was “improperly inflated” to increase the tax benefit. In filings, prosecutors cited emails from Trump Organization representatives to the appraisers arguing for a higher valuation.
The Manhattan district attorney is investigating Trump’s handling of the same property. Vance’s office in December subpoenaed the three towns that cover parts of the Seven Springs property, seeking tax assessments, financial statements, conservation easements and Trump’s development proposals.
Trump has claimed a vastly higher value on Seven Springs in other documents. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, while testifying in a February 2019 congressional hearing, provided a 2012 financial statement from the Trump Organization that valued Seven Springs at $291 million. Cohen testified that the statement intended to portray Trump as richer than he really was to insurance companies - in an effort to secure lower premiums - as well as to journalists.
Cohen also said the Trump Organization provided the statement to Deutsche Bank AG - the company’s biggest creditor - during Trump’s failed attempt in 2014 to buy the Buffalo Bills, a professional football team. Federal law makes it a crime to provide false statements to banks.
Both the Manhattan district attorney and the state attorney general subpoenaed Deutsche Bank in 2019, according to three bank sources. One attorney general’s subpoena sought information on the financing of four Trump Organization property projects and his Buffalo Bills bid. Another, from the district attorney, requested financial statements in support of various loan applications, the sources said. In recent months, Manhattan investigators have spoken to a number of staff at Deutsche Bank, the three sources said.
Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
Both the district attorney and the attorney general are also looking at 40 Wall Street, a Trump Organization skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, according to the state attorney general’s court filings and people familiar with Vance’s investigation. The attorney general’s office is examining financial statements submitted by the Trump Organization to banks in connection with loans for the building, according to court filings.
TAX BREAKS ON L.A. GOLF COURSE
The attorney general is looking into additional deals, court documents show, including whether Trump failed to pay taxes on debt that was forgiven in connection to a loan restructuring for the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Prosecutors have said in court records that the Trump Organization had refused to produce documents to determine whether it declared that money as income in its tax filings, as usually required by law.
Attorney General James also is also examining another Trump conservation tax break, this one for his Trump National Golf Club near Los Angeles. Trump bought the cliff-top course in 2002, after its 18th hole collapsed into the ocean, and invested heavily to rebuild it.
In December 2014, Trump signed an agreement that granted a conservation easement over 11.5 acres of the course. An appraisal ordered by Trump valued the property at $107 million, setting the easement’s value at $25 million, James’ office said in court filings. That valuation is high compared to the metrics usually used to value golf properties, real-estate experts said.
BURDEN OF PROOF
For the Manhattan district attorney, proving in court that Trump or other company officials intended to commit a crime will be “particularly hard,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who teaches legal ethics and criminal law at New York Law School.
Prosecutors in corporate fraud cases, she said, often rely on a combination of direct evidence - such as incriminating witnesses, video, emails or text messages - and circumstantial evidence, such as tax records or other financial documents. They use such records, she said, often to point out where a company veered from common industry practice.
To look for anomalies among property deals, Vance’s office has retained forensic accounting specialists from Washington-based FTI Consulting Inc, a person familiar with the investigation said. An FTI spokesman declined to comment.
A key challenge for the investigators, Roiphe said, is that industry standards for real estate valuations can be flexible.
“It's kind of common practice that you need to be a little bit loose with valuations,” she said. “So, to say this was done with a purpose - with the intent to defraud - will be challenging.”
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