by Michelle Malkin
Editorial Reviews
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.
From the Inside Flap
The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.
Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:
* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily
* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide
* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration
* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons
* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power
* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.
• ISBN-10: 1596981091
• ISBN-13: 978-1596981096
Michelle Malkin
No Shady Banking Buddy Left Behind
First Lady Michelle Obama's latest overseas jaunt is getting all the headlines. But President Obama's money-grubbing junket to Chicago may cost taxpayers far more in the long run. With his Gaultier-clad wife sashaying around the Spanish seaside, the lonely fundraiser-in-chief returned to Illinois to take care of some birthday-week business. Job One: Filling the Senate campaign coffers of his corruption-tainted political protege Alexi Giannoulias.
Mission accomplished. Obama's Thursday afternoon campaign event for Giannoulias, the beleaguered state treasurer of Illinois, reportedly raked in $1 million. Lagging behind his GOP opponent, liberal Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, Giannoulias has coveted one-on-one, grip-and-grin time with Obama for months. In addition to the cash, photo-ops and video of the Obama fundraising event that Giannoulias will milk from now until Election Day, the White House has dispatched Vice President Joe Biden, White House senior adviser David Axelrod and White House campaign management guru David Plouffe to boost Giannoulias' bid. Plouffe proclaimed Democrats "all in" for Giannoulias, whom he described as "a great progressive champion."
Obama gave his own personal seal of ethical approval, telling deep-pocketed donors this week: "I appreciate his strong sense of advocacy for ordinary Americans. You
can trust him -- you can count on him." Uh-huh. And I've got a bridge to Hope and Change to sell you.
What would Giannoulias know about "ordinary Americans"? Giannoulias, 34, befriended Obama during pickup basketball games with an elite group that also included Michelle Obama's brother, Craig; Chicago edu-crat Arne Duncan (now Education Secretary); and hedge fund manager John Rogers (the ex-husband of the Obamas' ex-White House social secretary, Desiree Rogers). He spread his wealth and influence around early and often to support Obama's fledgling political career. He pitched in $7,000 in 2003-2004 to Obama's Illinois State Senate bids. He hosted fundraisers for Obama's U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 and for his presidential campaign in 2007.
Where'd the cash come from? Giannoulias' Greek immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to convicted mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky, high-flying behavior. It's the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign funds. And it's the same place where a mutual friend of Obama and Giannoulias -- convicted Obama fundraiser/slum lord Tony Rezko -- used to bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos. This week, the Chicago Sun-Times revealed an additional $22.75 million Broadway Bank loan to a Rezko-owned business in 2006. Giannoulias held an ownership stake in the bank at the time.
Giannoulias served as Broadway Bank vice president and senior loan officer for four years. According to the Chicago Tribune, during Giannoulias' tenure, some $27 million of Broadway Bank's funny money went to mob crooks Michael "Jaws" Giorango and Demitri Stavropoulos. Giorango is a hustler who fronted a nationwide prostitution ring and was sentenced to six months in prison; Stavropoulos is behind bars for operating a multistate bookmaking ring. Giorango ran the $400-an-hour call girl operation out of high-rise luxury apartments in Chicago with the infamous "Gold Coast Madam," Rose Laws. Giorango and Stavropoulos used their Broadway Bank loans to start their own risky lending business for nontraditional borrowers unable to secure traditional bank financing.
Despite Giorango's criminal record exposed by the Tribune in 2004, Broadway Bank approved massive mortgages for him. Giannoulias' brother, Demetris, explained that as a "relationship bank," Broadway wouldn't just throw someone under the bus because of a "bad article." Instead, the bank went ahead and rubber-stamped a September 2005 loan for $3.4 million to buy a 32-unit Los Angeles apartment complex. The application falsely stated that the borrower, Giorango, had "not been convicted of a felony." Giannoulias oversaw the servicing of such shady loans totaling $11 million. Remember: He was no low-level staffer. He was, as he reminded supporters when he needed to deflect attention away from his youth, top management at Broadway Bank.
In January 2010, the bank entered a consent decree with federal and Illinois state regulators. It required Broadway Bank "to raise tens of millions in capital, stop paying dividends to the family without regulatory approval, and hire an outside party to evaluate the bank's senior management." The city's former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real estate crash loomed. Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. In late April, federal regulators shut it down. Cost to taxpayers: an estimated $390 million. Giannoulias refused to drop out of the race -- and instead used the company failure to argue that it made him (SET ITAL) more (END ITAL) qualified to serve in office: "I have a renewed vigor and a new perspective on just how horrible it is out there for so many people."
President Obama agrees: Abysmal failure should be rewarded with promotion. He's leaving no shady banking buddy behind.
BARACK OBAMA: Was he America’s first closet Communist president?
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/05/karin-mcquilan-barack-obama-and-his.html
Obama choose Communists and Marxists for the highest, most powerful positions in our land, including his closest political advisors, and his head of the CIA. These facts are not in dispute. Most are openly admitted by the people in question, as necessary damage control. Our press chooses not to report them.
Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod , Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.
THE OBAMA MARXIST-MUSLIM BANKSTER-FUNDED THIRD TERM for life:
"Cold War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communist background in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview . Another Kengor article describes the Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers , and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power." Karin McQuillan
*
"We know that Obama and his inner circle have set up a war room in his D.C. home to plan and execute resistance to the Trump administration and his legislative agenda. None of these people care about the American people, or the fact that Trump won the election because millions of people voted for him."
Patricia McCarthy / AMERICAN THINKER.com
A liberal Swiss billionaire known for meddling in U.S. elections has funneled millions of dollars to former attorney general Eric Holder's effort to redraw electoral maps in favor of Democrats, newly obtained documents reveal.
Swiss Billionaire Gave Millions to Eric Holder’s Partisan Gerrymandering Group Hansjörg Wyss (left) with Roz Zander and Michael Bloomberg / Getty Images Hayden Ludwig • May 6, 2021 5:00 am
A liberal Swiss billionaire known for meddling in U.S. elections has funneled millions of dollars to former attorney general Eric Holder's effort to redraw electoral maps in favor of Democrats, newly obtained documents reveal.
The Berger Action Fund , the advocacy arm of Swiss megadonor Hansjörg Wyss's Wyss Foundation , passed $3 million to the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF) between 2018 and 2020. The NRAF is the 501(c)(4) lobbying arm of Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a self-described "centralized hub for executing a comprehensive redistricting strategy" to give Democrats an edge in congressional races.
Holder, who chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, launched the group in 2017 with the goal of electing Democratic majorities in state legislatures in order to control the 2021-2022 redistricting process. While Holder has claimed his group wants to create " fair maps ," the committee's stated goal in its IRS forms is "to build a comprehensive plan to favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process through 2022."
Holder has repeatedly decried the influence of foreign money in U.S. politics, even comparing Russian interference in the 2016 election to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed about starting the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Holder wrote , "There is nothing more fundamental to the well-being of our nation than the right to cast a ballot in fair elections, free from foreign interference." And in October 2020 he told Bloomberg that "we need to be prepared" for foreign "attempts to interfere with our electoral system."
Wyss's contributions reveal that the foreign billionaire supplied as much as 40 percent of the NRAF's total funding in 2017-2018 and 24 percent in 2018-2019, making him one of the largest donors to the organization in those years. Wyss is a Swiss citizen who stated that he does not hold permanent U.S. residency in 2014 and recently declined to tell the New York Times if he is an American citizen.
In 2016, the Daily Caller reported that Wyss had made $41,000 in illegal contributions to Democratic political action committees in violation of the federal government's strict ban on foreign support for U.S. political campaigns. Wyss's substantial spending through his nonprofits, while legal, raises serious ethical concerns about the far-reaching impact of foreign "dark money" in American elections and redistricting processes.
But Wyss has donated over $650 million since 2002 to environmentalist and left-wing groups through the Wyss Foundation. The New Venture Fund, a dark money nonprofit managed by the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, has received roughly $56.5 million from the Wyss Foundation since 2007.
Wyss's Berger Action Fund has passed at least $12.4 million to Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund since 2010. The donations help fund the group's Hub Project, a campaign run by veteran Democratic Party operatives to help liberal groups with messaging strategy. The Hub Project is credited with doing "remarkable damage" to former president Donald Trump's reputation among Wisconsin voters in the 2020 election and helping Democrats defeat Republicans on "health care, taxes and the economy" in the 2018 midterms.
Wyss's groups have also supported Democratic-aligned nonprofits such as Priorities USA, the League of Conservation Voters, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund. The Wyss Foundation boasted it gave $1 million to leftist groups for "civic participation" just prior to the 2016 election.
Wyss and the Wyss Foundation declined to comment to the Washington Free Beacon on his funding of partisan groups involved in U.S. elections, particularly as it concerns his opaque immigration status. The Berger Action Fund, which does not maintain a website, could not be reached for comment.
Poll: Nearly 6-in-10 Americans Worry Mail-In Voting Will Spike Voter Fraud 1,821 JASON REDMOND
Nearly 6-in-10 American likely voters say they are worried that nationwide mail-in voting will increase voter fraud, a new poll reveals.
The latest Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 likely voters finds that about 58 percent of Americans, or almost 6-in-10, are concerned over a spike in voter fraud should there be nationwide mail-in voting for upcoming elections.
A plurality of 36 percent of Americans said they are “very concerned” about more voter fraud because of mail-in voting, and another 22 percent said they are “somewhat concerned.” A minority of 39 percent said they are not concerned that mail-in voting will lead to more voter fraud.
Close to 80 percent of Republican voters said they are concerned about more voter fraud spurred by mail-in voting, along with more than half of swing voters. A majority of Democrats, 53 percent, said they are not concerned with voter fraud.
Federal Data: 28.4M Mail-In Ballots Have Gone Missing Since 2012 Election https://www. breitbart.com/politics/2020/ 04/20/federal-data-28-4m-mail-in-ballots-have-gone-missing-since-2012-election/ …
Feds: 28.4M Mail-In Ballots Have Gone Missing Since 2012 Election About 28.4 million mail-in ballots went missing in the last four election cycles dating back to 2012, federal data reveals.
breitbart.com
83
4:41 PM - Apr 20, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
87 people are talking about this
Working and middle-class Americans are much more likely to be concerned with voter fraud from mail-in voting than wealthy Americans.
For example, more than 6-in-10 likely voters earning less than $30,000 a year said they are concerned about voter fraud, as well as 58 percent of voters earning $30,000 to $50,000 a year and 63 percent of voters earning $50,000 to $100,000 a year.
Among those earning more than $200,000 a year, though, only 35 percent said they are concerned about voter fraud, while 65 percent said they are not concerned.
The survey comes as elected Democrats are lobbying for nationwide mail-in voting for the November presidential election — a move that would potentially deliver ballots to an estimated 24 million ineligible voters. The plan is being bankrolled by organizations funded by billionaire George Soros.
Voters were surveyed from April 14 to 15 with a margin of error +/- 3 percentage points.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder
Obama: DACA Illegal Aliens Deserve Amnesty During Coronavirus Crisis
JOHN BINDER
Former President Barack Obama says the time is now, during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, to provide amnesty to about 3.5 million illegal aliens who are enrolled and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
While about ten million Americans have filed for unemployment in just three weeks, Obama took to Twitter to call for an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.
“Dreamers have contributed so much to our country, and they are risking their lives fighting on the frontlines of this pandemic,” Obama said. “They deserve permanent immigration status and a pathway to citizenship—as they are Americans in every way but on paper.”
Barack Obama
✔ @BarackObama
Center for Immigration Studies Research Director Steven Camarotta has noted that DACA illegal aliens make up about 0.2 percent of the nation’s nearly 15 million healthcare workers. In New York, where a staggering number of DACA illegal aliens reside, they still only account for about 0.2 percent of the state’s healthcare workers, according to Camarotta.
Obama’s lobbying for a DACA amnesty in the middle of the coronavirus crisis comes as House Democrats — including Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Joaquin Castro (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — have sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding DACA illegal aliens have their work authorizations extended.
“Support of DACA recipients during the current pandemic is particularly critical as over 200,000 DACA recipients are in occupations and industry groups that render them ‘essential critical infrastructure workers,’ according to DHS guidance,” the House Democrats wrote in their letter.
A DACA amnesty would put more citizen children of illegal aliens — known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported , while American taxpayers would be left potentially with a $26 billion bill.
Additionally, about one-in-five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one-in-seven would go on Medicaid.
Any plan to give amnesty to DACA illegal aliens that does not also include provisions to halve legal immigration levels — the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants a year at the expense of America’s working and middle class — would give amnestied illegal aliens the opportunity to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
At the southern border, a DACA amnesty has the potential to trigger a border surge that could triple the number of illegal aliens pouring through the border. Since DACA’s inception, more than 2,100 recipients of the program have been kicked off because they were found to either be criminals or gang members.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)
Article Link: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES THE OBAMA CONSPIRACY TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA “The Race”… now calling itself UNIDOSus.
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/11/23/omalley-obama-devastated-democratic-party-like-bad-forest-fire/
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica , by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY
DO A SEARCH FOR ERIC HOLDER AND "Operation Fast and Furious,"
GLOBALIST BARACK OBAMA AND NANCY PELOSI’S CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY AND KEEP AMERICA FLOODED WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2018/12/nancy-pelosi-and-obama-soros-globalist.html
“One of the most disgusting things to come out of the Obama administration was "Operation Fast and Furious," where members of the Department of Alcohol, To bacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed illegal gun sales to go through – commonly referred to as "gun walking" – in order to track buyers and sellers they believed were connected to the Mexican drug cartels. Nearly 2,000 firearms were sold and were eventually found throughout the United States and Mexico. Two of them were used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.” BETH BAUMANN
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
Jose Angel Gutierrez, professor, University of Texas, Arlington and founder of La Raza Unida political party screams at rallies: "We have an aging white America. They are d ying. They are s hitting in their pants with fear! I love it! We have got to eliminate the g ringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to k ill him!"
Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica , by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY/ FRONTPAGE mag
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators. Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.
In today's election, yours is a choice between
freedom and globalism
By Mark Christian
I know something about both freedom and globalism. What I know is that you cannot have both, which is why I immigrated to America, the world's last stronghold of freedom.
In the way of background, I grew up in a prominent Muslim family in Egypt and became an imam at an early age. Like Christianity, Islam is a global religion. Unlike Christianity, Islam imposes an imperial global vision on true believers and denies them freedom of thought and movement.
Progressive globalism does much the same. Although Islam and progressivism would seem to have nothing in common, they do share one overriding goal: the need to crush traditional American Christianity, the one obstacle to world dominance in either case. At some point, Islam and progressivism will part ways, but for now, they are content to "coexist."
Progressive leaders turn a blind eye to the slaughter of Christians at a church in France or the shooting of a priest in another church or the beheading of a French teacher for daring to show a picture of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. In countries like France, leftists have been responsible for as much church vandalism as Muslims, maybe more. For now, the left and Islam are allies. The result of the failed immigration policies and the rabid push of atheism by most European governments has made their combined mayhem possible.
The mayhem has been papered over with lies, which is why Joe Biden makes such a perfect front man for the global elites. Biden has lied about almost everything in his life. Where to begin?
Biden lied about his undergraduate degree and his
majors, lied about his rank in law school, lied
about scholarships and educational aid he had
received, lied about his stance toward the Vietnam
war while in college, lied about his plagiarism of
other politician's writings and speeches, lied about
the circumstances around his first wife's fatal
accident, lied about how he met his second and
current wife, and lied about the affair they were
having when they were both married.
Joe Biden is the embodiment of the dark side of
American politics.
When the Vietnam war ended, and our troops needed funding to evacuate gracefully, Joe Biden stood in the way. His obstruction led to Saigon's fall and the disgraceful flight of American troops and personnel off the American embassy's rooftop in Vietnam.
When President Ford pleaded with Congress to help the Vietnamese refugees, the ones who were aiding Americans during the war, Joe Biden stood in the way. Even though many of these refugees were orphan children, Joe Biden called them criminals and prostitutes on the Senate floor.
Most recently and dramatically, Biden lied
about his knowledge of his son's shady dealings,
lied about his own involvement in corruption
and bribery, and lied about his current
presidential agenda and what he wants to
implement in regards to energy, fracking, court-
packing, health care, education, and COVID
among other issues.
Biden has lied about so much that I am not sure if he ever told the truth or is now even capable of doing so. Thanks to Big Tech's and Big Media's suppression of his record, he can present himself as a man of character and high morals. We must feel sorry for the multitude of gullible Americans who believe him.
Do not be a fool and believe for a second that the elites hate Trump because of his tweets or because he is allegedly a sexist, a rapist, a racist, or a foreign agent. Nor do they hate him because of the pandemic death toll.
In reality, the elites hate Trump because of "YOU," because you elected a man they did not nominate and could not control. I have never seen global anticipation for an American election like this one. The world is watching. The progressive and Islamic elites are pulling for Biden, but lovers of freedom all over the world are quietly cheering for Trump. If you have yet to vote, be sure to vote today and give them something to cheer about.
Image: Biden the globalist by Andrea Widburg.
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national
immigration policy — which seeks to drive up
legal and illegal immigration levels to their
highest levels in decades — offers a flooded
labor market with low wages for U.S. workers
and increased bargaining power for big
business that has long been supported by Wall
Street.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Why do Trump's foreign golf
resorts lose millions of dollars
every year? Experts say it
could be incompetence,
vanity, or something more
sinister
Donald Trump's golf courses lose millions of dollars every year, according to financial documents. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Donald Trump's flagship foreign golf resorts posts massive losses every year.
He has said they are "not really golf investments" but "development deals."
Experts and critics think Trump may have other reasons for keeping them.
Sign up for the 10 Things in Politics daily newsletter.
Donald Trump's golf resorts lose a lot of money. According to a bombshell New York Times report published last year, the 15 courses he owns around the world have lost over $315 million over the past 20 years. The interesting question is why does Trump hang on to so many money-losing enterprises?
Much about Trump's financial arrangements remains a mystery - partly because privately listed companies in the US can largely avoid public scrutiny - though investigations into whether Trump committed bank and tax fraud may reveal more.
No one's quite sure how much he's worth. No one's sure why the self-styled "king of debt" decided to plow up to $400 million into his two Scottish golf resorts. And no one's sure what his tax returns might turn up.
But because the United Kingdom has a registry of companies that requires them to publicly file accounts every year, we can look in detail at how much his two courses in Scotland lose every year and how much debt they've racked up. (Hint: It's a lot.)
So why do Trump and his sons, who ran his businesses while he was president, continue to run courses that lose so much money?
Read more: EXCLUSIVE: Documents reveal how Trump is spending taxpayer money on his postpresidential offices - from printer toner to Stephen Miller's salary
We spoke to leading experts, examined the financial data, and looked back at Trump's own words on the matter to find out why.
Insider contacted the Trump Organization for comment but did not receive a reply.
Trump's losses aren't 'normal' Companies House (UK)
Trump has two golf resorts in Scotland. He opened the first, Trump International Golf Links, in Aberdeenshire in 2012 on a piece of land he had purchased six years before. The course has lost money every year since.
Company accounts for 2019 - which covered the period before COVID-19 wreaked havoc on many businesses - showed that Trump International Golf Club Scotland Limited , which owns the course, posted an annual loss of $1.5 million. The total debt on the resort is more than $60 million, the balance sheet showed.
The second course is Turnberry, the crown jewel of his global golf empire. He paid $60 million in 2014 for the storied resort, where Tom Watson famously scraped out a win over Jack Nicklaus at the 1977 Open Championship.
Trump claimed to have spent a further $150 million on its lavish refurbishment. Turnberry's parent company, Golf Recreation Scotland, posted a $3.25 million loss on revenue of $26 million in 2019 and owes nearly $160 million to its creditors, the balance sheet showed .
Such losses are not unprecedented in the industry. Running a golf resort profitably is hard to do, said Larry Hirsh, the president of Golf Property Analysts, which values and markets golf properties.
"Over the last 10 to 20 years, golf courses have had their challenges," Hirsh told Insider.
"It costs a lot to go play, and Trump has never been shy about pricing his properties. Certainly, golf has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years a decline in participation," he said.
However, he added that "it's certainly not the idea" for major golf courses to lose money. "I don't think it's normal," he said.
Trump said his golf courses were 'not really golf investments' Trump said in a 2016 interview with Reuters that people looking at the massive losses at his golf resorts were missing the point.
He said his resorts were "not really golf investments" but real-estate "development deals."
"It's pretty simple," he said. "My golf holdings are really investments in thousands, many thousands of housing units and hotels. At some point the company will do them. Hopefully, I won't because I will be president, but we're in no rush to do them."
Companies House (UK)
There's just one problem with those claims: Trump hasn't built a single residential property on any golf resort he owns in the past decade, in Europe or the United States, Reuters reported last year .
He secured provisional permission in 2008 to build about 1,500 luxury homes and a hotel on farmland surrounding the Aberdeenshire estate, in what the Trump Organization had billed as the "world's greatest golf course ." The economic gains would outweigh the environmental impact of the building work, officials said. But neither the houses nor the hotel materialized.
In 2019, he secured approval for a reworked plan to build 500 homes, but construction hasn't started.
At Turnberry, Trump failed to secure permission to develop hundreds of houses on the adjoining land. He had boasted to Reuters that he "would have the right to build at least a thousand houses on Turnberry, if I wanted to." But Scottish planners had different ideas. In 2019, the local authority rejected plans to develop the land, The Scotsman reported .
The ruling said the development could "negatively affect" Turnberry's status as an iconic resort. It suggests that Trump's plan to build houses on his golf resorts may be unsound from a business perspective.
That brings us to the second theory: incompetence.
Is it simply incompetence? Getty
"Stupidity and grandiosity should never be overlooked as possible grounds for all of this," said Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School, who wrote about Trump's tax returns last year.
Trump's patchy business record is well documented . He demonstrated a genius for self-marketing and licensed his name to resorts and luxury developments all over the world, propelling him to the White House. But his businesses have also filed for bankruptcy six times, and he counts dozens of hugely expensive failures among his successful business ventures.
There were his Atlantic City casinos , which closed after racking up billions of dollars in debt. There was Trump University, which paid a $25 million settlement to former students in 2017 after New York's attorney general called it "fraudulent." And there was a short-lived airline called Trump Shuttle .
The accounts for Turnberry and Trump Links suggest they may be two further examples of poorly run businesses. A detailed analysis of Trump's two courses by Behind the Balance Sheet, a financial research consultancy, illustrated that profits had been consistently lower than at other established rivals in Scotland, including Loch Lomond Golf Club and Gleneagles, and that capital expenditure had consistently outstripped revenue growth at both resorts.
All in all, it's difficult to see how either business would ever generate a positive return on Trump's huge initial investment.
Are they being kept for 'fishy' tax purposes? Getty
Companies House accounts showed that Golf Recreation Scotland, Turnberry's parent company, depends on an eye-watering amount of debt - around $160 million - owed to its parent company, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is registered in New York.
Trump International Golf Club Scotland, which controls Trump's Aberdeenshire resort, owed Trump more than $55 million, and nearly $5 million to its parent company, DJT Holdings.
Their loans are unusual, however, because they are interest-free , negating the tax benefit of loaning money between companies owned by Trump, Mother Jones reported in November .
It's "a bit fishy," Shaviro said.
"Under US tax law, you can't really have an interest-free loan between related parties," he said.
"There would be a tendency to impute the market interest rate, or else they say it's really equity.
"So when separate tax entities are engaged in transactions, the idea is that it's got to be arm's length, it's got to reflect reality."
Shaviro said it wasn't clear there was any tax benefit to the way Trump had set up the loans.
"I don't see the obvious tax benefits here," he said. "Whether it's money-laundering or playing games with lenders, there is a pretty good guess something is going on, but I'm not sure exactly what it would be."
That brings us to the last theory.
Trump's 'unexplained' funding for his golf courses Getty
A group of Scottish lawmakers led by the Green Party's Patrick Harvie this year called for an "unexplained wealth order" over Trump's finances . Their central question: Where did Trump get the money to pay for his resorts in the first place?
Harvie, a member of Scottish Parliament, said in February : "The purchases in Scotland were part of a very long spending spree, with his spokespeople claiming that he had vast sums of money sitting around and available for investment even though, at the same time, he was apparently being turned down for credit."
Trump, who once called himself the "king of debt ," had spent his career building businesses on other people's borrowed money, even bragging about it on the campaign trail in 2016.
He began that spending spree in 2006, buying up more than $400 million worth of properties in cash over the next decade, The Washington Post reported in 2018 . The first purchase was his Balmedie estate. The most expensive was Turnberry in 2014, even though it was losing money then, too. He purchased a course in Doonbeg, Ireland, in the same year, also using cash.
Harvie alluded to the closed-door congressional testimony in 2017 of Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the political-research agency that produced the so-called Steele dossier on links between Trump and Russia (one part of which a UK judge called "misleading ").
Simpson told lawmakers that the firm's investigations had identified in the Trump Organization "patterns of buying and selling" real estate that "were suggestive of money laundering."
Later, he said that "because the Irish courses and the Scottish courses are under the UK," Fusion GPS was "able to get the financial statements."
"And they don't, on their face, show Russian involvement, but what they do show is enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources and - or at least on paper it says it's from the Trump Organization, but it's hundreds of millions of dollars," Simpson said. "And these golf courses are just, you know, they're sinks. They don't actually make any money."
Trump's son Eric said last year that Harvie's claims had "no basis in fact " and called them "disgusting."
Scotland's government rejected the calls for an unexplained wealth order on the grounds that it was for the country's law officers, not politicians, to instigate such investigations. Nonetheless, these questions about how Trump paid for his golf resorts and why they keep losing so much money will only grow.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The New York attorney general's office said Tuesday night it has informed the Trump Organization that its investigation into the company "is no longer purely civil in nature" and is now also a criminal one.
Why it matters: The attorney general's office is now working with the Manhattan district attorney's office, which has been investigating the Trump Organization for potential bank, tax and insurance fraud.
Driving the news: New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) announced in 2019 that her office was investigating Trump Organization finances.
Her office filed a lawsuit last August to compel the organization to comply with subpoenas for an investigation into whether former President Trump and his company improperly inflated the value of its assets on financial statements.
Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for James, said in an emailed statement Tuesday: "We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA." Levy declined to comment further.
What they're saying: Representatives for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment on the news, first reported by CNN .