According to the New York Times, Donald Trump engaged in a series of “dubious tax schemes … including outright fraud” to funnel at least $413 million in funds from his father’s pocket to his own. It’s not just that Trump inherited much of his father’s empire upon the death of Fred Trump. Tens of millions of dollars poured down on Donald Trump from the time he was a toddler. Donald Trump’s “salary” at the age of 3 was $200,000 a year.
He wasn’t just born on third base: his father bought him the stadium.
Donald Trump has long pretended to be a “self-made” man. Sure, he grew up in gold-plated luxury. Yes, he was walked through private school, prep school, and private college with a bag of money buying his way. And okay, so he did take a million or two from his pop to get things started. But then … well, as it turns out the several million dollars that Trump’s father continued to slip him to prop up his flailing casinos and tottering real estate schemes was just a fraction of what really flooded from Trump the Elder to Trump the Bone Spurier.
Trump didn’t even learn to lie, swindle, and scam on his own. That also came from his old man.
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.
The total amount that slid from Trump’s parents to Donald and his siblings was over $1 billion. That massive level of gift should have netted over half a billion in taxes for the IRS. Instead they not only paid a mere 5 percent of what they owned, Trump and his family used their sham corporations to actually take a tax break from these transfers. Donald Trump and his family stole hundreds of millions of dollars right out of the pocket of every American, and lined their own pockets with obscene levels of wealth via fraud and tax evasion.
The tax evasion charges against Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort went back to 2008 … so it doesn’t seem out of the question that either Robert Mueller or the U.S. District Court in New York is looking into tax evasion by Trump from a decade earlier.
Donald’s brother Robert Trump issued a letter in response to questions declining to comment on “matters that happened some 20 years ago” and saying that he wished the Times would respect “the privacy of our deceased parents, may God rest their souls.” But hiding behind the “privacy” of the deceased seems like a big ask when a billion dollars or more of scam appears to be behind those tombstones.
Assuming that the Times story is based around genuine, and new, evidence, the IRS is limited to just how far back it can reach when filing charges in criminal court. For some charges that limit can be as short as three years, while for others it’s pegged at 10. But deliberate tax evasion isn’t treated the same way as simply making an error, and not every federal official faces the same regulatory limits as the IRS. In addition to potential criminal charges, there’s no limit to how far back the IRS can look when suing for civil fraud. It’s rare for the IRS to go back more than seven years, and extended civil charges dating back 20 years would require meeting a high burden of proof but … a billion dollars isn’t a typical tax case.
Simple tax evasion or tax fraud isn’t the only possible charge in this instance. Fred Trump died in 1999, and both Donald Trump and his sister, federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, served as executor. Either might face charges, or impeachment, based on their knowing participation in a fraudulent scheme.
The review by the Times looked at thousands of pages of documents, and presented a clear picture of blatant fraud, obvious scams, and a Donald Trump whose only real achievement was being born to a family of wealthy crooks.
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. ...
By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. By the time he was 17, his father had given him part ownership of a 52-unit apartment building. Soon after Mr. Trump graduated from college, he was receiving the equivalent of $1 million a year from his father. The money increased with the years, to more than $5 million annually in his 40s and 50s.
Donald Trump is a scam artist, was a scam artist, and is from a family of scam artists. Everything he has was handed to him—and at least half of it came right out of the pockets of ordinary Americans who had to cover for his tax fraud.
The New York Times figured all this out. And they don’t have former Trump attorney Michael Cohen—but special counsel Robert Mueller does. And they don’t have former Trump Co. executive Allen Weisselberg—but the Southern District of New York’s attorneys do. And they don’t have Trump’s taxes—but the Democrats in the House will … after November.
