Oh what a surprise

 Money launderers stick together.

Trump 2.0 - Get rich quick

 

Trump 2.0 - clearing the way for money laundering

 

And in related news...

Dupes

Pretty sure they don't see themselves that way.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice indicted two employees of RT, formerly Russia Today, a Russian state-run media outlet, for covertly shoveling millions of dollars at MAGA influencers happy to do Russia’s bidding.

[...]

Putin has already howled that Russia’s response will make “everyone shudder.” It’s all part of the DOJ’s fight against election interference and an open acknowledgment that the Kremlin favors a Trump win. It’s a more aggressive approach, thankfully, than Obama took in 2016, and will hopefully lead us to a better election result this time around.

[...]

[The indictment] has led to the delightful specter of high-profile rightwing commentators loudly insisting they were too stupid to know that Russian money was behind the wildly exorbitant sums they received for producing content.

[...]

The indictment names Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, aka Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, aka Lena, as the RT employees who laundered close to $10 million through foreign shell companies, ultimately raining all that money down on an unnamed American media company, US Company-1, who then passed it along to unnamed commentators 1-6.

[...]

Kostya and Lena are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). [...] The key here is the covert part. There’s no prohibition on publications from foreign governments overtly and transparently attempting to shape American opinion. The idea is just that Americans have the right to know.

Kostya and Lena are also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, as the $10 million they gave to Tenet was sent through a truly staggering maze of shell entities in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. They also lied about what the money being sent to Tenet was for, with the indictment noting that the wire transfers to Tenet often referred to the purchase of electronics rather than paying for media services.

[...]

And earlier this year, the DOJ indicted Barry Bennett and Douglas Watts, both of whom worked on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, for their failure to register and disclose they were lobbying on behalf of Qatar.

[...]

Though unnamed, the company and several commentators are easily discernible to anyone paying attention to the rightwing media grift. The company is most definitely Tenet Media, and its founders are most definitely Lauren Chen, who was also at BlazeTV until the indictment dropped and they fired her, and her husband, Liam Donovan.

And the commentators? Tenet’s ridiculous website describes them as “heterodox commentators” and “creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning.” That would be Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, Matt Christiansen, and Tayler Hansen.

[...]

Media companies are exempt from registering if they’re organized under the laws of any US jurisdiction, are at least 80 percent owned by US citizens, are run by US citizens, and are not “owned, directed, supervised, controlled, subsidized, or financed by any foreign principal or agent.”

So, if Tenet had been genuinely financed and controlled by Chen and Donovan, there would be no problem here, even if they had some relationship with RT. The issue is that it appears Tenet was wholly financed by RT in secret, Chen and Donovan knew it, and the RT employees got to shape coverage.

[...]

Besides the fact that laundering pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine content in secret through willing American talking heads allowed Russia to pretend that sentiment was homegrown, RT had another reason for going through Tenet: RT itself was dropped by American cable distributors, banned in Europe, and RT America went out of business in March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

[...]

And now we arrive at the part where all of these right-wingers can only get out from under these allegations by claiming they are very dumb.

  Public Notice

And they are not too proud to do just that.  MAGA cannot be shamed or embarrassed.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:21 am:

It's very obvious Justin Hart "read" it right.

Good God, do the Thomases do anything above the board?

And Kellyanne Conway is right in the middle of this stinking pile.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork.

[...]

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

  WaPo

JFC.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Of course.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

Impeach Clarence Thomas. How much corruption do you need to make the case?

Of the effort to keep Thomas’s name off paperwork, Leo said: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

[...]

[A]lthough justices must report the name of companies that pay their spouses, they are not required to report the names of the companies’ clients. In this case, even if there were such a requirement, it is not clear that the Judicial Education Project would have been listed as a client, because the fees intended for Ginni Thomas were to go through Conway.

With instructions not to name Ginni. Nothing suspicious there?

“The idea that Leonard Leo, who has a passionate ideological interest in how the court rules and who has worked hard for years to advance that interest, could pick up the phone and generate substantial compensation to Virginia Thomas, which also benefits Clarence Thomas — that idea is bad for the country, the court and the rule of law,” Gillers said. “It’s not the way the Supreme Court should do its business or allow its business to be done.”

No it is not.

As the Judicial Education Project pushed for a conservative court, the group grew into a financial juggernaut and was rebranded as the 85 Fund. Between 2020 and 2021, its revenue nearly doubled from about $66 million to more than $117 million, tax forms show.

Even so, the group has never had more than a handful of employees, tax filings show. It has listed its main office address as a UPS Store situated amid rowhouses and retail stores in the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C.

Could you get any more suspicious than using a UPS Store as your main office address? And money is going through that company to Ginni Thomas without naming her. I smell Tide.

But wait!  That's not all we learned about the Thomases today.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

[...]

Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year.

[...]

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well.”

[...]

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

  ProPublica

He managed to avoid reporting anything about the millions of dollars worth of gifts he got from Crow.

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

[...]

Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

Yes! Impeach the bastard.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:57 pm:

UPDATE 05/05/2023:

The second bank to fold...

New York State regulators took over Signature Bank today, the second financial institution to fold in less than a week as the FDIC and Treasury, however, assured depositors at both that they would be made whole in an attempt to stem the growing crisis.

Signature was a banker to crypto clients. It recently indicated plans to retreat from that business, but customers grew concerned recently given its high share of uninsured deposits — especially in the wake of Friday’ collapse of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB, or Silicon Valley Bank, which housed assets of Roku and many other tech companies and startups.

  Deadline

I understand that the fallout from not making all these people and companies "whole" would be tremendous. But that means to me there should be some serious restructuring of banking regulations. 

And perhaps people shouldn't be allowed to put more than $250,000 (the insured limit) in any one bank without a signed agreement that they understand any more than that is not insured through FDIC, and therefore, they will not be getting it back in case of bank failure or bank runs. Or maybe they could purchase individual insurance - perhaps even through the FDIC - for higher amounts of deposits. Or maybe $250,000 just isn't high enough these days.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03/16/2023:  

Justice Department’s offices in Manhattan and Washington were investigating whether the bank took enough measures to detect possible money laundering schemes orchestrated by clients.

[...]

Signature Bank was seized by The New York Department of Financial Services on Sunday “to protect depositors” after its customers withdrew billions from the bank after the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday. The bank had $89 billion in deposits end of last year, according to the department, but more than $79 billion of those deposits were not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), The New York Times reported.

  

Shouldn't regulations prevent that kind of ratio? The answer is, yes. And they used to.

The pair of bank closures over the weekend has raised concerns in the banking industry, and has prompted some lawmakers to call for reform. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to repeal rollbacks in banking regulations that was enacted during the Trump administration.

If enacted, the bill would put banks with at least $50 billion in assets back under strict Federal Reserve oversight and make them subject to Dodd-Frank Act stress tests. This would reverse at the Trump-era banking regulation rollback that raised the limit to $250 billion that exempted dozens of banks — including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — from the strictest federal oversight.

Married to the mob

Trump's Russia ties are ongoing.

Towards the end of last year, federal prosecutors started examining two loans totaling $8m wired to Trump Media, through the Caribbean, from two obscure entities that both appear to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

[...]

The expanded nature of [a] criminal investigation [into the matter] threatens to delay the completion of the merger between Trump Media and DWAC, which would provide the company and Truth Social with up to $1.3bn in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.

[...]

Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions, the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024.

  Guardian

His base loves him for all his "criminal exposure." And he loves getting away with it.

The first $2m payment to Trump Media came in December 2021 when the company was on the brink of collapse after the planned merger with DWAC – that would have unlocked millions for the company – was delayed when the SEC opened an inquiry into whether the arrangement broke regulatory rules.

[...]

The statutes broadly require prosecutors to show that defendants knew the money was the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity and the transaction was designed to conceal its source.

But money laundering prosecutions are typically based on circumstantial evidence and can be based on materials that show that the money in question was unlikely to have legitimate origins, legal experts said.

[...]

Trump Media needed a bridge loan to keep the company afloat. But it struggled to get financing until DWAC’s chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced a $2m loan wired from Paxum Bank registered in Dominica, according to the wire transfer receipt reviewed by the Guardian.

The wire transfer identified Paxum Bank as the beneficial owner, although the promissory note identified an entity called ES Family Trust as the lender. Two months later, an unexpected second $6m payment arrived in Trump Media’s account from ES Family Trust.

[...]

Though the two payments to Trump Media ostensibly came from two separate entities – first Paxum Bank and second ES Family Trust – the trustee of ES Family Trust, a person called Angel Pacheco, appears to have simultaneously been a director of Paxum Bank.

[...]

The obscure origins about the $8m loans caused alarm at Trump Media and, in the spring of 2022, Trump Media’s then-chief financial officer Phillip Juhan weighed returning the money.

[...]

But the money was never returned.

[...]

Prosecutors appear to have also taken a special interest in the payments because the off-shore Paxum Bank has a history of providing banking services for the pornography and sex worker industries, which makes it higher risk of engaging in money laundering and other illicit financing.

Don Jr., Kash Patel, and Devin Nunes are all involved in this hot mess.

Trump was the chairman of Trump Media at the time, though it was unclear whether he was aware of the opaque nature of the two loans. Trump typically did not seem to be particularly interested in managing the day-to-day running of Trump Media.

Didn't have to. All he had to do was provide the connection to shady bankers and mobsters.

Trump was interested in the deal [...] because he got to own 90% of the shares without putting in any money into the company.

And from October of 2022...

A co-founder of Truth Social’s media parent company was forced off the board of the firm after he ignored demands by Donald Trump to give some of his stock to Melania Trump, a whistleblower has told The Washington Post.

Trump pushed for the giveaway to his wife even though he had already been given 90% of the stock in the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) in exchange for the use of his name and some other “minor involvement,” former company executive Will Wilkerson told the Post.

The company co-founder reportedly dodged the request, telling Trump that it would leave him with a tax bill he couldn’t pay. “Do whatever you need to do,” Trump snapped back, according to Wilkerson.

  HuffPo

No doubt he has to keep Melania happy (and quiet) these days. She has him by the balls over his many criminal exposures.

The incident was one of a series of bombshell revelations supported by several documents viewed by the newspaper about bitter infighting in the Trump business, technical screwups, questionable financial representations, and what Wilkerson insisted were violations of Securities and Exchange regulations, according to the Post.

Wilkerson submitted a whistleblower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission in August regarding the company. Wilkerson’s attorney’s told the newspaper that he is also cooperating with current investigations into Trump Media by the SEC and by federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York.

Letitia James must have a warehouse to house all the files on Trump's criminal exposure.

Wilkerson was fired from his job [...] as TMTG senior vice president of operations after he spoke to The Post.

[...]

A major web-hosting operator complained in August that Truth Social owed about $1.6 million in contractually obligated payments, an allegation suggesting the operation’s finances are in “significant disarray,” Fox Business News reported.

Another Trump-alienating move by Fox.

Digital World Acquisition Corp. — the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that Truth Social needs to go public — revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last month that investors had already backed out of $139 million in commitments of the $1 billion previously announced by the company.

There’s likely more to come.

Likely.

UPDATE 03/15/2023:

Ordinarily, I'd say that's a very good question.  Only in this case, I wouldn't doubt it if she has negotiated legal rights to have her attorneys go over Trump's finances with a fine tooth comb to see what he's trying to hide from her.

Money laundering is a dangerous business

An informant who aided federal investigators with key documents and information about the German financial company Deutsche Bank and aided in a probe into former President Trump’s dealings with the bank was found dead in Los Angeles County on Monday.

Valentin Broeksmit, 46, was confirmed deceased by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. His cause of death at this moment is under investigation.

His body was found in the early morning hours on Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School, according to the Los Angeles Times. There was no evidence of foul play

[...]

Broeksmit was reported as missing by the Los Angeles Police Department in April 2021 and last seen driving a 2020 red Mini Cooper, which was later recovered without Broeksmit inside.

Broeksmit was the son of the late Deutsche Bank senior executive Bill Broeksmit, who died by suicide in 2014.

Valentin Broeksmit had a trove of bank documents and cooperated with the FBI amid an investigation into the financial giant over alleged money laundering operations and other fraud allegations.

[...]

Scott Stedman, a reporter for Forensic News who worked with Broeksmit to uncover Deutsche Bank’s connections to Russia, said he didn’t suspect foul play in the death of his friend.

“Val’s father took his own life in 2014 and it consumed Val in recent years.

  The Hill

They can afford to lose the odd yacht here and there

If action against Russia isn’t paired with reforms at home, the battery of sanctions set to come will fall flat, undone by the same Western nations professing to be aghast at this resurgence of empire, and at this return to warfare in Europe.

[...]

If Western policy makers hope to hold Putin’s cronies truly accountable, sanctions will have to be paired with pro-transparency reforms that can disassemble this web of secrecy. Western governments should start by ending anonymity in shell companies and trusts; demanding basic anti-money-laundering checks for lawyers, art gallerists, and auction-house managers; and closing loopholes that allow anonymity in the real-estate, private-equity, and hedge-fund industries. That is, if the sanctions are to retain their bite, the entire counter-kleptocracy playbook needs to be implemented—immediately.

[...]

Rampant financial anonymity in places like the U.S. makes it relatively easy for powerful rich people to evade sanctions. A Russian oligarch may have multimillion-dollar mansions in Washington, D.C.; or multiple steel plants across the Rust Belt; or a controlling stake in a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut; or an entire fleet of private jets in California; or an array of lawyers setting up purchases at art houses around the country. And all of that wealth can be hidden—perfectly legally—behind anonymous shell companies and trusts that are enormously difficult to penetrate.

[...]

With few Americans paying attention, the U.S. transformed over the past few decades into the world’s leading financial-secrecy haven, providing all of the anonymity services kleptocrats in Moscow and around the world needed to continue their transnational money-laundering operations.

States such as Delaware opened anonymous shell companies for whoever came calling, while South Dakota and others invented new financial-secrecy tools that prevented even the federal government from figuring out who’s behind trusts in those states.

[...]

The most conspicuous jurisdiction feasting on ill-gotten Russian gains is the U.K. As illustrated by a recent report from Chatham House (of which I was a co-author), the U.K. has helped launder billions in questionable, illicit, and dirty post-Soviet money, especially out of Russia. In the process, suspect Russian wealth has flowed into British real estate, London’s luxury-goods market, and even the Conservative Party’s coffers.

[...]

So long as the policies that enable dirty money to flow around the globe remain in place, untouched even by those Western politicians now railing against Russia, any sanctions-related response will be less than the sum of its parts.

[...]

In Washington, at last week’s State of the Union, President Joe Biden announced the formation of an interagency “KleptoCapture” task force to target oligarchs. And Johnson’s government in London announced the same day that a long-delayed economic-crime bill—which would create a registry of offshore-owned property—would finally move forward in Parliament. Yet that bill is yet to be passed, let alone implemented, and the announcement came only as protesters gathered in Whitehall to remind legislators that russian money < ukrainian lives. Progress is far from assured.

  The Atlantic

But also,,,

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jan 6 Committee deep dive

Did Trump find new ways to keep the money coming in after his loss by shifting from a presidential campaign to a "Stop the Steal" effort?

[...]

The committee's investigators are broken down into highly skilled teams with core areas of focus, including one that's on the money.

[...]

"These are questions, they're allegations, they're not yet determined," [Norm Eisen, a former House lawyer in Trump's first impeachment case] notes. However, some examples of these questions are "were false representations made in order to fleece people of their funds? Was it wire fraud? Was it money laundering?"

The Eastman court filing could become a part of a much larger path forward if the committee potentially issues criminal referrals against Trump by the conclusion of its probe.

[...]

"I think the level of grift that was involved with the Trump campaign and people close to the former president, how the January Six efforts were for many of them, this is what they were doing to make money," said California Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar, a member of the Jan. 6 panel. "We are looking into that."

[...]

While it investigates, the panel is also documenting possible crimes.

Although it has no criminal jurisdiction, the committee can issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department, as it has done in cases of some witnesses who have refused to cooperate.

Last week, the committee detailed possible crimes Trump might have committed related to Jan. 6 in a recent court filing involving attorney John Eastman, who was advising Trump's Stop the Steal efforts.

[...]

Among the challenges: the committee will have to prove intent behind the efforts. And such a criminal referral could be laced with political landmines, putting pressure on the Justice Department's independent and impartial role.

[...]

In the coming days, the committee could unearth another rash of financial details with information from a newly subpoenaed witness.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.'s fiancée, is due to turn over documents to the panel today and testify next week. Last year, ProPublica reported Guilfoyle bragged in text messages that she helped raise $3 million for the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse, where she was one of the speakers.

[...]

The committee has also quietly sought banking records, including in the case of Taylor Budowich, a Trump spokesman who sued to keep his financial institution from complying with a subpoena.

"There's no doubt that there is a very big moneymaking operation component to this story," said Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, another committee member who was the lead manager of the House team in Trump's second impeachment.

[...]

OpenSecrets has identified at least nine groups that may have contributed to funding the rally, including Stop the Steal, Women for American First, Tea Party Patriots and Turning Point Action.

[...]

This spring, the committee hopes to hold its first hearings illustrating the findings so far and issue an interim report by the summer with a final report this fall.

  NPR

Just in time for the mid-term elections.

Good if it works

The Treasury Department on Tuesday proposed rules meant to snuff out money laundering through the use of anonymously owned businesses.

The department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a proposed set of regulations that would force the controlling owners of a wide range of companies to register themselves with the federal government. The rules are meant to prevent individuals from using shell companies and other opaque corporate structures to evade taxes and international finance laws.

[...]

Not all U.S. states and territories require beneficial ownership information when a business is registered, which experts say can help facilitate money laundering and other financial crimes.

Under the proposed rules, certain domestic and foreign companies would be forced to disclose any individual who “exercises substantial control” over the firm, or owns or controls at least 25 percent of the firm’s ownership interests. Beneficial owners would be required to disclose their name, date of birth, a current address and a state identification number.

[...]

The proposal is open for public comment until Feb. 7. FinCEN did not specify when the rules would take effect.

[...]

Publicly traded companies — which are already subject to Securities and Exchange Commission transparency rules — are not covered by the regulations. Businesses based in the U.S. with more than 20 employees, a physical office and at least $5 million gross revenue are also exempted from the regulations, along with a wide range of limited partnerships and trusts.

[...]

The rules are the latest step the Treasury Department has taken to implement the Corporate Transparency Act, which was included in a major defense policy bill signed by former President Trump in 2020.

  The Hill

I'd bet my life he didn't know that was in the bill.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why, no, it's not money laundering, why do you ask?

.

..but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Of COURSE it's money laundering

Complete thread here.

Also:  Viral 'Crime Infested' Trump Tower Thread Details Convicted Criminals, Russian Mobster Tenants Over The Years

Heads will roll

The New York Times investigators are still working on Trump's finances, and they've unleashed a doozie: they got his tax returns.

The [New York] Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

[...]

All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it. While most of the tax data has not previously been made public, The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records previously obtained by The Times.

  NYT

He would have been grifting and lining his pockets with taxpayer money anyway, but it does raise questions about what he may have lined up with Russia and/or Saudi Arabia.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public.

How many people could there be who didn't assume that already?

His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

As we also assumed.

This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

Lawsuits coming!

By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate [...] .”

Of course.

After The Times declined to provide the records [used for this article], in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees.

In hopes we'll do the same.

Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

[...]

[The records] reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

Pretty sure that's not news to anyone. Even MAGAheads.

“While you claim that President Trump paid no taxes in 10 of the 15 previous years,” Mr. Garten said, “you also assert that President Trump claimed a massive refund for tens of millions for taxes he did pay. These two claims are entirely inconsistent and, in any event, not supported by the facts.”

Sounds like his tax lawyer isn't any better than his other lawyers. Technically, he PAID taxes. he just got them back. For most of us, that means he didn't pay taxes.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

And hopefully, when he's been removed from office and in total disgrace, his name will be mud.

[W]ithout any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.

The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

[...]

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

[...]

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

[...]

His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

[...]

The vast new trove of information analyzed by The Times completes the recurring pattern of ascent and decline that has defined the president’s career. Even so, it has its limits.

Tax returns do not, for example, record net worth — in Mr. Trump’s case, a topic of much posturing and almost as much debate. The documents chart a great churn of money, but while returns report debts, they often do not identify lenders.

The data contains no new revelations about the $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress who performs as Stormy Daniels.

[...]

While the tax records revealed no previously unknown financial connection [to Russia] — and, for the most part, lack the specificity required to do so — they did shed new light on the money behind the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

But then I wouldn't expect his tax records to contain any information about money laundering for Russian mobsters.

The records show that the pageant was the most profitable Miss Universe during Mr. Trump’s time as co-owner, and that it generated a personal payday of $2.3 million — made possible, at least in part, by the Agalarov family, who would later help set up the infamous 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials seeking “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

[...]

The committee interviewed a top Miss Universe executive, Paula Shugart, who said the Agalarovs [- singer Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras, a billionaire who boasts of close ties to Mr. Putin -] offered to underwrite the event; their family business, Crocus Group, paid a $6 million licensing fee and another $6 million in expenses. But while the pageant proved to be a financial loss for the Agalarovs — they recouped only $2 million — Ms. Shugart told investigators that it was “one of the most lucrative deals” the Miss Universe organization ever made, according to the report.

That is borne out by the tax records.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s avoidance of income taxes is one of the most striking discoveries in his tax returns, especially given the vast wash of income itemized elsewhere in those filings.

[...]

Even the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans could have caused him to pay more than $100 million.

[...]

So how did he escape nearly all taxes on that fortune?

[...]

The answer rests in a third category of Mr. Trump’s endeavors: businesses that he owns and runs himself. The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.

[...]

That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Mr. Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.

[...]

As The Times’s previous reporting on his 1995 return showed, the nearly $1 billion in losses from his early-1990s collapse generated a tax deduction that he could use for up to 18 years going forward.

The newer tax returns show that Mr. Trump burned through the last of the tax-reducing power of that $1 billion in 2005.

[...]

For 2005 through 2007, cash from licensing deals and endorsements filled Mr. Trump’s bank accounts with $120 million in pure profit. With no prior-year losses left to reduce his taxable income, he paid substantial federal income taxes for the first time in his life: a total of $70.1 million.

As his celebrity income swelled, Mr. Trump went on a buying spree unlike any he had had since the 1980s, when eager banks and his father’s wealth allowed him to buy or build the casinos, airplanes, yacht and old hotel that would soon lay him low.

[...]

By the end of 2015, he had 15 [golf] courses and was transforming the Old Post Office building in Washington into a Trump International Hotel. But rather than making him wealthier, the tax records reveal as never before, each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.

[...]

Mr. Trump has an established track record of stiffing his lenders. But the tax returns reveal that he has failed to pay back far more money than previously known: a total of $287 million since 2010.

[...]

[C]onfidential records show that starting in 2010 he claimed, and received, an income tax refund totaling $72.9 million — all the federal income tax he had paid for 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

The legitimacy of that refund is at the center of the audit battle that he has long been waging, out of public view, with the I.R.S.

[...]

If the auditors ultimately disallow Mr. Trump’s $72.9 million federal refund, he will be forced to return that money with interest, and possibly penalties, a total that could exceed $100 million. He could also be ordered to return the state and local refunds based on the same claims.

[...]

Although he had more than enough credits to owe no taxes at all, his accountants appear to have carved out an allowance for a small tax liability for both 2016 and 2017.

When they got to line 56, the one for income taxes due, the amount was the same each year: $750.

[...]

It is possible that the [IRS audit] case has been paused because Mr. Trump is president, which would raise the personal stakes of re-election. If the recent Fox interview is any indication, Mr. Trump seems increasingly agitated about the matter.

“It’s a disgrace what’s happened,” he told Mr. Hannity. “We had a deal done. In fact, it was — I guess it was signed even. And once I ran, or once I won, or somewhere back a long time ago, everything was like, ‘Well, let’s start all over again.’ It’s a disgrace.”

"I guess it was signed."

Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income.

[...]

Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

[...]

Ms. Trump had been an executive officer of the Trump companies that received profits from and paid the consulting fees for both projects — meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father’s business.

Maybe she'll get an audit, too.

The I.R.S. has pursued civil penalties against some business owners who devised schemes to avoid taxes by paying exorbitant fees to related parties who were not in fact independent contractors.

[...]

There is no indication that the I.R.S. has questioned Mr. Trump’s practice of deducting millions of dollars in consulting fees. If the payments to his daughter were compensation for work, it is not clear why Mr. Trump would do it in this form, other than to reduce his own tax liability. Another, more legally perilous possibility is that the fees were a way to transfer assets to his children without incurring a gift tax.

Where have we seen that before?

A Times investigation in 2018 found that Mr. Trump’s late father, Fred Trump, employed a number of legally dubious schemes decades ago to evade gift taxes on millions of dollars he transferred to his children. It is not possible to discern from this newer collection of tax records whether intra-family financial maneuverings were a motivating factor.

We may not have proof, but we have common sense.

On the failed hotel deal in Azerbaijan, which was plagued by suspicions of corruption, a Trump Organization lawyer told The New Yorker the company was blameless because it was merely a licenser and had no substantive role, adding, “We did not pay any money to anyone.” Yet, the tax records for three Trump L.L.C.s involved in that project show deductions for consulting fees totaling $1.1 million that were paid to someone.

In Turkey, a person directly involved in developing two Trump towers in Istanbul expressed bafflement when asked about consultants on the project, telling The Times there was never any consultant or other third party in Turkey paid by the Trump Organization. But tax records show regular deductions for consulting fees over seven years totaling $2 million.

[...]

The tax records show that the three [Trump] siblings had each drawn a salary from their father’s company — roughly $480,000 a year, jumping to about $2 million after Mr. Trump became president — though Ms. Trump no longer receives a salary.

[...]

The ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

The tax records for Mr. Trump and his hundreds of companies show precisely how much money he has received over the years, and how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president.

[...]

It did not take long for conflicts to emerge when Mr. Trump ran for president and won. The Philippines’ strongman leader, Rodrigo Duterte, chose as a special trade envoy to Washington the businessman behind the Trump tower in Manila. In Argentina, a key person who had been involved in a Uruguayan licensing deal that earned Mr. Trump $2.3 million was appointed to a cabinet post.

[...]

When Turkish-American relations were at a low point, a Turkish business group canceled a conference at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel; six months later, when the two countries were on better terms, the rescheduled event was attended by Turkish government officials. Turkish Airlines also chose the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia to host an event.

More broadly, the tax records suggest other ways in which Mr. Trump’s presidency has propped up his sagging bottom line. Monthly credit card receipts, reported to the I.R.S. by third-party card processing firms, reflect the way certain of his resorts, golf courses and hotels became favored stamping grounds, if not venues for influence-trading, beginning in 2015 and continuing into his time in the White House.

The credit card data does not reflect total revenue, and is useful mainly for showing short-term ups and downs of consumer interest in a business. While two of Mr. Trump’s marquee draws — the Washington hotel in the Old Post Office and the Doral golf resort — are loaded with debt and continue to lose money, both have seen credit card transactions rise markedly with his political ascent.

[...]

One Trump enterprise that has been regularly profitable, and is a persistent source of concern about ethical conflicts and national security lapses, is the Mar-a-Lago club. Profits there rose sharply after Mr. Trump declared his candidacy, as courtiers eagerly joining up brought a tenfold rise in cash from initiation fees — from $664,000 in 2014 to just under $6 million in 2016, even before Mr. Trump doubled the cost of initiation in January 2017. The membership rush allowed the president to take $26 million out of the business from 2015 through 2018, nearly triple the rate at which he had paid himself in the prior two years.

[...]

Walgreens, the pharmacy giant that resolved an antitrust matter before federal regulators in 2017, pays $3.4 million a year for a lease at 40 Wall Street, a Trump-owned office building in Manhattan.

Another renter at 40 Wall, for $2.5 million a year, is Atane Engineers, which changed its name in 2018 after a corruption scandal that culminated in two former top executives’ pleading guilty to paying bribes for city infrastructure contracts. Despite the criminal case — which landed the company on New York State’s list of “non-responsible entities” that require a waiver to obtain state contracts — the newly christened Atane registered as an eligible federal contractor with no restrictions listed in its file.

[...]

The tax records show that the cost of existing leases there has risen. and at least four law firms appear to have moved in since Mr. Trump ran for president.

[...]

{Trump's] tax records make clear that he is facing a battery of threats to his business and his own financial well-being.

Over the past decade, he appears to have filled the cash-flow gaps with a series of one-shots that may not be available again.

[...]

What’s more, the tax records show that Mr. Trump has once again done what he says he regrets, looking back on his early 1990s meltdown: personally guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a decision that led his lenders to threaten to force him into personal bankruptcy.

This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years.

[...]

While business owners can use losses to avoid taxes, they can do so only up to the amount invested in the business. But by taking personal responsibility for that $421 million in debt, Mr. Trump would be able to declare that amount in losses in future years.

[...]

In Mr. Trump’s telling, any difficulty in his finances has been caused by the sacrifices made for his current job.

So quit.

UPDATE:

And many of them cheat on their taxes, too, I would imagine.  So, it's more than they don't care: they admire him for it.

Jackass.  Of course he knew.  That's why he was whining on Sean Hannity.

UPDATE:

If you're surprised by this, you've been living in a cave

[...]

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

complete thread

ICIJ article

Not sure where this is going, but...

FBI and IRS agents in Cleveland and Miami on Tuesday raided the offices of a company tied to a Ukrainian oligarch suspected of pushing dirt on Vice President Joe Biden. Vicki Anderson, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Cleveland office, confirmed the raids of Optima Management to TPM, declining to comment any further because the matter “is still under seal.”

[...]

Optima Management is partly owned by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, per court documents filed in Delaware last year.

Kolomoisky has faced a federal criminal investigation out of the Northern District of Ohio for at least a year. The oligarch told the New York Times in November 2019 that, were he the President of Ukraine, he would open the investigations into Biden that Trump and Giuliani have sought.

The next month, associates and political allies of Kolomoisky’s met with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in Kyiv, offering the former NYC mayor a fabricated narrative about Biden.

[...]

The oligarch appears to have stayed involved in the campaign to damage Biden since then.

[...]

Buzzfeed reported in May that a Cleveland federal grand jury was examining allegations of money laundering against Kolomoisky.

  Talking Points Memo

Maybe that's the only place this is going, but who knows? Money laundering, Ukraine, Trump, Giuliani, Kolomoisky - they're all connected.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Money laundering bank to investigate money launderer

Deutsche Bank has opened an internal investigation into the longtime personal banker of President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, over a 2013 real estate transaction between the banker and a company part-owned by Mr. Kushner.

In June 2013, the banker, Rosemary Vrablic, and two of her Deutsche Bank colleagues purchased a Park Avenue apartment for about $1.5 million from a company called Bergel 715 Associates, according to New York property records.

Mr. Kushner, a senior adviser to the president, disclosed in an annual personal financial report late Friday that he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, had received $1 million to $5 million last year from Bergel 715.

[...]

When Ms. Vrablic and her colleagues bought the apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner were her clients at Deutsche Bank. They had received roughly $190 million in loans from the bank and would seek hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Typically banks restrict employees from doing personal business with clients because of the potential for conflicts between the employees’ interests and those of the bank.

Deutsche Bank said it had not been aware that Ms. Vrablic and her colleagues had done business with a company part-owned by Mr. Kushner until being contacted by The New York Times.

[...]

Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump had not previously disclosed their stake in Bergel 715. (They did list the entity used to make the investment in Bergel 715.)

[...]

There is no indication that the three Deutsche Bank employees bought the apartment — described on Zillow as a 908-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath unit with a balcony overlooking Park Avenue — at a below-market price.

[...]

In 2014, the deed for the apartment, Unit 12A, was transferred to a limited liability company registered to Ms. Vrablic’s home address, according to property records. The next year, the apartment was sold for $1.85 million — a not-unheard-of 22 percent increase from the 2013 purchase price.

  NYT

One year later? Can you say "money laundering"?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.