Trump and his tax returns..

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The owners of a Panama hotel formerly managed by the Trump Organization alleged in a court filing that the firm created a “false light” around the hotel’s finances and dodged Panama taxes, according to The New York Times. The owners of the former Trump International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, now a JW Marriott, claimed in Manhattan federal court Monday that the Trump Organization “also made fraudulent and false claims to the Panamanian tax authorities” to “cover up its unlawful activities.”

Trump Organization accused of evading taxes in Panama | TheHill

“The editor that wrote… the first story to question whether [Trump] was failing before his bankruptcy was the subject of an investigation and of threats by Trump and bullying,” Greenberg explained. “And the magazine backed down and changed its story and told them to say — instead of ‘Trump was worth below zero’ — that he had a net worth of $500 million. The reason they did it is because Trump was threatening to sue, and he was also threatening to expose [Forbes publisher] Malcolm Forbes with some sort of outrageous lie that Trump had concocted.” He then explained that Trump has a particular loathing for investigative reporters because they have the power to expose him as a fraud. “Truth is like kryptonite to Donald Trump and truth tellers are mortal enemies because they destroy his myth of success,” he said.

Watch this financial reporter blows the lid off Trump’s decades-long scam to lie about his wealth – Alternet.org

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Lawyers for President Trump argue that the president is immune from all criminal investigations in a new federal lawsuit seeking to block New York prosecutors from obtaining his tax returns. This article first appeared in Salon. Trump sued his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance on Thursday, after Vance’s office subpoenaed the firm to demand eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax returns. Department of Justice guidelines say a president cannot be prosecuted while in office, as former special counsel Robert Mueller made clear. But Trump’s personal attorneys are now going well beyond that by arguing that he also cannot be “investigated … or otherwise subjected to the criminal process.” The suit also quoted a decision by then-appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote in 2009 that investigations are “distracting” to the president, even though Kavanaugh himself was part of a years-long criminal investigation of former President Bill Clinton.

Trump’s new argument: He’s immune from all criminal investigation in new tax return lawsuit – Alternet.org

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A new ProPublica investigation lends credence to a remarkable claim made by Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer and fixer, during his congressional testimony earlier this year. Cohen alleged that Trump “inflated his total assets when it served his purposes and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.” And ProPublica’s Heather Vogell has receipts indicating Cohen knew what he was talking about. Property tax documents obtained by Vogell via New York’s Freedom of Information Law “show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.”

New ProPublica investigation sheds light on Trump’s shady business practices - Vox

• One reason he doesn't want to release his tax returns..
  
• There are likely to be more, given the length he goes about it shielding them from public view.
  

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Chris Hayes talks to the reporter for ProPublica who acquired documents that detail what some experts are calling ‘fraud’

Trump kept two sets of books for Trump Tower

On Wednesday, ProPublica reported that an analysis of Trump Organization tax and loan documents revealed a gap between the financial information Trump’s company reported to lenders when seeking massive loans on Trump’s signature Manhattan property and the numbers they handed over to the government when tax-time came around. “The findings,” wrote Heather Vogell, “add a third major Trump property to two for which ProPublica revealed similar discrepancies last month.”

New evidence of Trump’s financial crimes emerge during an otherwise quiet holiday weekend – Alternet.org

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Three different committees of Congress, as well as New York State prosecutors, have issued subpoenas to President Donald Trump’s accountants and bankers for his tax and business records. Trump has sued to stop the accountants and bankers from complying. He has lost twice at the district-court level and twice at the appeals-court level. Now he is looking to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to rescue him.

On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments in the cases of Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank. The decision will be rendered sometime between then and the court’s summer break. Although Trump is suing his accountants and his bankers as a private citizen, his case has been joined by the Department of Justice. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has signed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States. It is an astonishing document. It invites the Supreme Court to junk two centuries of precedent—and to substitute an entirely new system of judicial review of congressional subpoenas that involve a president.

A legislative subpoena must therefore satisfy heightened requirements when it seeks information from the President. At the threshold, the full chamber should unequivocally authorize a subpoena against the President. Moreover, the legislative purpose should be set forth with specificity. Courts should not presume that the purpose is legitimate, but instead should scrutinize it with care. And as with information protected by executive privilege, information sought from the President should be demonstrably critical to the legislative purpose. A congressional committee cannot evade these heightened requirements merely by directing the subpoena to third-party custodians, for such agents generally assume the rights and privileges of their principal, as
this Court has recognized in analogous cases.

All the requirements in that above paragraph were devised for purposes of this litigation. None of them has ever been enforced—none of them has ever been imagined—in the previous 230 years of skirmishing between Congresses and presidents. Every must and should and cannot was invented in this very brief, for the immediate legal purposes of this president in this dilemma. 

As the House of Representatives noted in the brief it filed, previous Congresses have obtained the bank records of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Jimmy Carter, and the tax records of President Richard Nixon. They have read the diaries of President Ronald Reagan and the law-firm billing records of first lady Hillary Clinton. It’s never before been the law that a subpoena of the president must be authorized by “the full chamber,” much less that this authorization be “unequivocal”—whatever that means.

The Mazars Lawsuit - The Atlantic

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A new report from The New York Times’ David Enrich highlights dubious dealmaking and questionable partnerships between President Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank. While numerous banks viewed Trump’s past bankruptcies as a sign to steer clear of the real estate mogul, Deutsche Bank used him and his businesses to rapidly ascend the financial sector. The Times report details how Deutsche Bank gave Trump special treatment over several years, and how the millionaire leveraged the partnership to secure unorthodox credit lines. Here are the five biggest bombshells from the report, from Trump flying bankers in his private jet to the bank holding years of hidden tax returns.

These are the 5 biggest bombshells from The New York Times' report on Trump's money and Deutsche Bank

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President Trump on Thursday complained that he was being treated unfairly and subject to “political prosecution” after the Supreme Court ruled that New York state prosecutors could subpoena his financial records while blocking Democrats from accessing his tax returns for the time being.

Trump complains of 'political prosecution' after SCOTUS rulings on financial records | TheHill

• Political prosecution by the Supreme Court in which he personally nominated two judges
  
• And they didn't allow Congress the same access to his tax returns
  

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The more pertinent mystery about Trump’s money isn’t about these loans mentioned by the Times that are coming due. It’s about the properties he bought and developed without getting any financial assistance at all. The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has reported that, between 2006 and 2014, Trump made a major change in the way he did business: He started dropping large amounts of cash to buy and develop certain properties, rather than relying on loans. Most notably, Trump bought and renovated a golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, for over $200 million — for which he paid entirely in cash.

The Trumps have claimed they simply had the cash on hand for this. But the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson doesn’t buy it.
“The portfolio of assets that Trump owns does not suggest that he would have so much money that he can casually spend a few hundred million on a whim,” Davidson wrote in 2018. “There simply isn’t enough money coming into Trump’s known business to cover the massive outlay he spent on Turnberry.” Davidson has gone on to suggest that Trump’s expensive purchases like this may truly have been “on behalf of others” — that he was laundering money for some shady wealthy foreigners. We don’t know where the hundreds of millions in cash Trump used for Turnberry and these other properties came from, and there’s no hard evidence that it was connected to money laundering. But Trump hasn’t given a convincing explanation for this, so it remains an unresolved mystery..

Who does Trump owe hundreds of millions of dollars to? - Vox

• The loans, which are coming due in the coming years are bad enough as it makes him corruptable (he wouldn't be hired for a security function with that much debt hanging over him).
  
• But the real mystery is where the cash comes from, since what the NYT exposé revealed is that most of the times his business makes large losses.
  

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Back in 2011, when Obama released his tax return for that year it revealed that he had paid $162,074 in federal taxes after earning $789,674. At the time, Trump was happy about the amount that Obama had paid and complained that he had only paid 20.5 per cent of his salary.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/stat...68672?s=20

It is quite astonishing that there is still a tweet for almost every Trump scandal but here we are again and predictably it didn't take people long to fish it out and shame the president for this tweet which has aged horribly. Trump did have the right to have some grievance with Obama back then as it was reported by the LA Times that Obama's tax rate was lower than most in that wage bracket but only because he had made $172,130 in charitable donations that year.

Trump does not have the same excuses to fall back on as the New York Times report revealed that Trump has avoided paying taxes by adding many things such as his own properties and even his hairstyling costs as business expenses which helped reduce the amount he owed. The report also detailed the financial problems he had developed prior to becoming president and how many of his businesses have profited since he came to power.

Trump complained about how much Obama paid in taxes in 2012 | indy100

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She apparently received “consulting fees” paid by the Trump Organization, helping reduce the Trump family’s tax bill, while she was simultaneously an employee of the organization. “Trump’s private records show that his company once paid $747,622 in fees to an unnamed consultant for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia,” the Times noted. “Ivanka Trump’s public disclosure forms – which she filed when joining the White House staff in 2017 – show that she had received an identical amount through a consulting company she co-owned.” While Trump was quick to issue his standard defense, dismissing the tax report as “fake news”, Ivanka has been conspicuously silent about her alleged violation. In the past she has worked to put daylight between herself and the biggest scandals of her father’s administration.

Revelation of vast 'consulting fees' threatens damage for Ivanka Trump | US news | The Guardian