The Legal & Financial Problems of Donald Trump & Family

[TopHatter]

From Ev.com

Roughly 10 days ago, the former president began to tease a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT that he said was coming on Thursday. Now, whenever he says something like that, particularly in ALL CAPS, one should be very cautious. He is Donald Trump, after all. That said, since announcing his candidacy for president, he's done literally nothing that a candidate for office usually does. No speeches. No rallies. No policy statements. He hasn't even hired a campaign manager, much less other staffers. So, the Trump faithful thought that he might be planning to unveil something of substance.

He wasn't, as you've probably guessed. No, the MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT was that Trump is unveiling his own line of NFT trading cards. They feature a blend of "action" and "fantasy" poses. Here are some examples:




Hold on. Didn't we see those the last time we visited the Louvre? No, wait, that was the Venus de Milo. Sorry, small hands, no hands... we get confused.

The images are absolutely ridiculous, of course. And to sell them as NFTs, when you already have a reputation as a grifter? At a time when the NFT market, and the very much related crypto market, are in freefall? Wow. Trump was skewered on social media and on late-night talk shows in a way we haven't seen in at least a year or two. Jimmy Kimmel, for example, observed that "It's literally Cards Against Humanity," making reference to the popular game. "You know your campaign isn't going well when your re-election strategy is, 'Maybe people will like me as a Pokemon,'" joked Jimmy Fallon. Stephen Colbert went in a similar direction, but used "Grope-e-mon." Seth Meyers said: "Also, got to love the timing of a former president launching his NFT line the same week a crypto scammer gets arrested. 'They got S.B.F.? Looks like there's an opening available, then!'

Quite a few Democrats also jumped in, among them the leader of the Party:


Joe Biden doesn't usually indulge in this sort of thing. Maybe he relaxed his usual rules as an early Christmas present to himself.

More significantly for Trump, a lot of people on Team Donald reacted with dismay and/or anger. Steve Bannon, for example, said:
.

I can't do this anymore. He's one of the greatest presidents in history, but I gotta tell you: whoever—what business partner and anybody on the comms team and anybody at Mar-a-Lago—and I love the folks down there—but we're at war. They oughta be fired today.

The Blaze host Chad Prather wrote: "We have a nation going down the toilet, and Donald Trump is selling Pokémon cards. No thanks." The on-air staffers at Newsmax, which interrupted its daily programming to cover the announcement, were... nonplussed, to say the least. You can watch the 80 seconds they ultimately gave to the story here:

One Trump supporter tweeted "I Can't Believe I'm Going to Jail for an NFT Salesman." Another added: "Which $99 Donald Trump Limited Edition Digital Trading Card NFT are you? I'm Overly Photoshopped Dinner Guest." We could easily continue this with another 100 tweets.

As you can see, the price for the cards was $99 a pop. And all 45,000 of them have reportedly sold out, meaning that Trump collected about $4.5 million in one day (which goes into his pocket; this was not a campaign fundraiser). So maybe it was worth it for him. Or, maybe not. Trump insiders are concerned that stunts like this will reduce donations to his campaign. Further, the next time he has a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT, it will get considerably less attention, probably even from Newsmax. As to the schadenfreude angle, CNN and CBS contributor Ron Filipkowski put it this way:
.

All I can say is that those of us who have lost friends, fought with relatives, resigned positions, been called traitor, left our party, all because we saw very clearly what a con-man, huckster and fraud this man is, have never felt more vindicated.

[TopHatter]

Donald Trump's NFT Collection Sells Out, Raising $4.45M
Trump's "major announcement" of an NFT collection featuring himself was widely derided. But all 45,000 pieces sold in 12 hours.

Earlier in the week, Donald Trump teased a "major announcement" on Truth Social, the platform he took to after being banned from Twitter last year. Some speculated Trump would be announcing his running mate for the 2024 presidential election, or some other key detail for his campaign. The news turned out to be a disappointment even to some of Trump's supporters: a Trump-themed NFT collection.

"My official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection is here!" he posted on Thursday. Trump never used the abbreviation "NFT" in the post, but that's indeed what the "digital trading cards" are: 45,000 NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, priced at $99 each.

Though the NFTs were widely mocked by both Trump supporters and detractors alike, all 45,000 sold out in around 12 hours, according to OpenSea data. At $99 each, that means $4.45 million has been raised. The collection's creators also receive 10% of every sale on secondary markets like OpenSea. Thus far traders have spent $406,000 (320 ether) buying and selling the NFTs on OpenSea. Who that money goes to and how it's used remains a mystery.

NFT INT, the company behind the collection, says on its site that the money raised won't be funneled into Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. A blurb on its site states that NFT INT is not owned by Trump or any of his organizations, and that Trump himself isn't actually behind the collection. Instead, Trump licensed his name, image and likeness for the project.

Even if the money being raised by NFT INT isn't funding Trump's 2024 campaign, however, the money Trump makes through licensing his name and likeness may.

NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are tokens on a blockchain that prove ownership of a digital asset. They are to digital goods what a deed is to a house. The first NFT collections date back to 2017, but the market exploded last year as a powerful wave of speculation drove prices up to stunning levels. The most famous collection, The Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched at around $250 and peaked in price earlier this year at $400,000 a pop.

Yet economic uncertainty and rising interest rates have greatly dampened excitement. Trading volume on OpenSea, the biggest market for such wares, hit $250 million last month -- compared with $2.5 billion in May. Trump's foray into NFTs follows his wife Melania's but comes at a much less auspicious time.

Trump described the art as "very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting."

Buying a Trump NFT enters you into a raffle to win a number of prizes, including a one-on-one meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Those who purchase over 45 of the cards automatically get to meet the former president at a gala dinner in Florida. Thus far 202 people have more than 45 of the NFTs in their digital wallet, according to Dune data.
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Let no one say that Trump is not master of the Art of the Grift. His name is now basically worthless on the sides of buildings, hotels and resorts, so he's reinvented himself yet again.

This is also a solid, stinging rebuke to the "Trump's popularity is diminishing" crowd. He just raised $4.5 million dollars in 12 hours for something that doesn't even physically exist.

[TopHatter]

[JRT]

Trump's "major announcement" of an NFT collection featuring himself was widely derided. But all 45,000 pieces sold in 12 hours.

"My official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection is here!" he posted on Thursday. Trump never used the abbreviation "NFT" in the post, but that's indeed what the "digital trading cards" are: 45,000 NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, priced at $99 each.

Though the NFTs were widely mocked by both Trump supporters and detractors alike, all 45,000 sold out in around 12 hours, according to OpenSea data. At $99 each, that means $4.45 million has been raised. The collection's creators also receive 10% of every sale on secondary markets like OpenSea. Thus far traders have spent $406,000 (320 ether) buying and selling the NFTs on OpenSea. Who that money goes to and how it's used remains a mystery.

in his announcement video, Donald John Trump clearly stated, "Hello everyone. This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite President of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J Trump NFT collection right here and right now. They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards. These cards feature some of the really incredible artwork...," etc.

I highlighted the word 'first', because he seems to be implying that there will be more NFTs available for sale, maybe a lot more.

I also would not be surprised if he might be using this as means of trying to launder money into an offshore account where it would be more difficult for US federal or state government(s) to seize, and/or in case he may need to flee the country to avoid prison. I would be curious to know if the "Trump Organization", or his campaign funds, or his leadership PAC, or any other US organization under his control, bought any of those NFTs, or perhaps bought many of those NFTs, and would also be curious if the seller of those NFTs is an off-shore organization controlled by Trump.

He operates like a racketeer. I hope they find a way to apply the RICO statute, which has great big teeth.

[Albany Rifles]

And another brilliant business move the greatest business mind ever!!!

Donald Trump's superhero trading cards timed the market all wrong | CNN Business

Donald Trump’s NFT superhero trading cards timed the market all wrong



By Jon Sarlin, CNN
Published 3:01 PM EST, Fri December 16, 2022


Donald Trump’s entrance into the NFT world came at the worst possible moment.

The former president’s hyped-up “major announcement” turned out to be a set of digital trading cards for $99 a pop, sparking widespread mockery from late-night hosts to even some Trump loyalists like Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.

But the worse news for Trump is that, by almost any metric, the NFT bubble has burst.


Non-fungible tokens are digtal art and collectibles that are typically bought with cryptocurrencies. NFT art and collectible collections exploded in popularity and value beginning in 2020. Digital cartoon apes and other NFT imagers became ubiquitous as celebrities hawked them on-air and on social media.

But the heyday seems to be over.

Total NFT volume last month was down 89% from its peak in January, according to CryptoSlam. Trading volume on NFT marketplace OpenSea is at its lowest since June 2021, according to Dune Analytics. A collector can now buy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT — the most famous collection in the space — for a measly $80,466, an 81% drop from its peak value.

NFTs have tumbled in value during the so-called crypto winter brought on by fading interest and overall chaos in the crypto markets. The dramatic fall of major crypto exchange FTX (and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried) has been the cap to a tumultuous year in the space, with the total market value of crypto drop more than 63%, according to Coinmarketcap.

The crypto winter is showing few signs of thawing as prices fall to new lows, and regulators and Congress now have crypto in their sights.

It bears noting, however, that despite the bad timing Trump’s NFT collection has shot to the top of NFT marketplace OpenSea’s ranking and has raked in more than $1.4 million since its launch. On the Trump Digital Trading Cards website, the Trump collection claims to be “sold out” and the floor price for a single card has risen to $177.99, according to analytics site CoinGecko.

It’s not clear how much Trump himself will take from those profits. The Trump Card Collection site includes a disclosure that says the Trump collection is “not owned, managed or controlled” by Trump or his companies and instead his likeness was licensed to “NFT INT LLC.” The LLC has no website and lists its address at a mall in Park City, Utah, next to an Asian restaurant and vape store.

Celebrity promotions


Celebrity crypto endorsers are under particular scrutiny right now.

Earlier this month a class-action lawsuit was filed against celebrities including Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber and Serena Williams, accusing them of improperly promoting The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. “Celebrity promotions of cryptocurrencies are fraught with problems,” reads the complaint, which quoted an SEC statement from 2017 cautioning against such endorsements.

Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen and Steph Curry were also recently sued for promoting FTX, and in October Kim Kardashian was fined $1.26 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for “unlawfully touting” EthereumMax tokens.

Trump’s eleventh-hour NFT entrance mirrors another late attempt to jump on a market trend: special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), which allow companies to go public without the regulatory burden that comes with a traditional initial public offering. SPACs boomed in 2020 with celebrities and investors piling in, but rising interest rates and a troubled stock market has led to a dramatic fall in SPAC value.

A SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corp launched in October 2021, months after the SPAC boom’s peak, and has been attempting to merge with Trump’s social media company that own Truth Social. Trump’s entrance into the SPAC world came after the boom.

“When The Donald launched his SPAC in October 2021, the writing was already in blood on the wall for the SPAC bubble,” said hedge funder Benn Eifert of QVR Advisors. “He bought into a clear collapse.”

[TopHatter]

Trump Faces a Week of Headaches on Jan. 6 and His Taxes

After more than five years of dramatic headlines about controversies, scandals and potential crimes surrounding former President Donald Trump, the coming week will be among the most consequential.

On Monday, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Trump’s supporters will hold what is almost certainly its final public meeting before it is disbanded when Republicans take over the majority in the new year.

The committee’s members are expected to debate criminal referrals to the Justice Department in connection with the riot and Trump’s efforts to cling to power, which culminated Jan. 6 as the pro-Trump mob tried to thwart the certification of his successor’s 2020 electoral victory. The biggest topic is whether to recommend that Trump face criminal charges.

On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee will meet privately to discuss what to do with the six years of Trump’s tax returns that it finally obtained after nearly four years of legal efforts by Trump to block their release.

The committee could release them publicly, which would most likely be done in the final days of Democratic control of Congress.

And on Wednesday, the Jan. 6 committee is expected to release its report on the attack, along with some transcripts of interviews with witnesses.

Taken together, this week will point a spotlight on both Trump’s refusal to cede power and the issue that he has most acutely guarded for decades, the actual size of his personal wealth and his sources of income.

“Trump has spent decades avoiding transparency and evading accountability,” said Tim O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “Now both are rushing toward him in the forms of possible tax disclosures and a criminal referral. However much he might want to downplay the significance of all of that, it’s momentous.”

Any public release of his tax information would come as Trump seeks another White House bid, a time in which he’s facing multiple investigations without the immunity that the presidency gave him from indictment.

The Justice Department is investigating Trump’s mishandling of presidential records and classified material, and it remains to be seen whether either he or anyone around him is charged in that case.

How much new information will be disclosed this week is unclear. Over the course of more than a year and a half, through nearly a dozen public hearings, the Jan. 6 committee has used testimony and information culled from over 1,000 witnesses to present Trump as being at the center of an effort to remain in power and thwart the results of a free and fair election.

The Justice Department has been conducting a simultaneous investigation but has not been working in lockstep with congressional investigators.

A congressional referral to the Justice Department does not obligate prosecutors to act. Nonetheless, some of Trump’s advisers are privately concerned about what the House committee will recommend.

Some of Trump’s tax information is in the possession of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., spent years investigating Trump and his company.

Trump is also facing a civil suit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has alleged a widespread practice of fraud over a decade by the former president, his children and his company. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, helped spur that investigation with testimony before a House committee in 2019 in which he discussed how Trump, who has always fought anyone asserting he’s worth less than he claims to be, valued his properties.

The New York Times has also investigated Trump’s tax returns, including information from 2020. The investigation showed that Trump paid no federal income tax for 11 of 18 years the Times examined.

Trump reacted with fury to that investigation. And the possibility of a public disclosure of his tax information looms especially large for Trump, who has fiercely guarded his actual net worth and the sources of his income.

For years leading up to 2016, associates in New York City predicted that, despite repeated feints about a potential campaign, he would never declare because he would have to make his financial information available.

He did submit a federally required personal financial disclosure, but during the 2016 presidential campaign he refused to release his tax returns, a voluntary disclosure nearly every candidate has provided since President Richard Nixon. Voters had no ability to analyze where the wealthiest person ever to run for president in the United States was getting some of his money, and how much of it he sent the government in taxes.

During a debate in 2016, his Democratic opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, took note of the rare times that Trump had been forced to disclose his earnings and tax payments.

“The only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax,” Clinton said.

Trump fired back: “That makes me smart.”

Through myriad congressional and Justice Department investigations, including ones related to whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russian officials to sway the election that year, Trump has repeatedly attacked the investigations, calling them a “witch hunt.” For decades he has insisted that he is a victim whenever he faces scrutiny. Trump had the same response when his company was convicted of 17 charges of tax fraud and other financial improprieties roughly two weeks ago.

But the details that could become public after this week are more consequential, O’Brien argued, as Trump prepares to woo voters for his third run for the presidency.

“There’s existential consequences on the legal side and reputation and business ones on the tax side,” O’Brien said.
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[TopHatter]

Justice Is Coming for Donald Trump
Every effort to hold Donald Trump accountable has been thwarted by those who made it someone else’s job. Not any more.

“Many secrets, no mysteries”: That is the basic rule of all Donald Trump scandals.

There has never been any mystery about what happened on January 6, 2021. As Senator Mitch McConnell said at Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

Thanks to the work of the congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Americans now have ample detail to support McConnell’s assessment. They know more about when and how Trump provoked the event. They have a precise timeline of Trump’s words and actions. They can identify who helped him, and who tried to dissuade him.

But with all of this information, Americans are left with the same problem they have faced again and again through the Trump years: What to do about it? Again and again, they get the same answer: “It’s somebody else’s job.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Trump’s collusion with Russia. Mueller brought charges against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort; against Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn; against Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen; against Trump’s longtime political ally Roger Stone; against many Russian nationals and organizations too. But on Trump himself, Mueller refused to pass judgment, because he believed he had no legal power to indict a serving president. He further believed that because he did not have that power, he should make no clear comment on whether the president’s conduct was indictable. Mueller presented evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice, but beyond that … he tossed the responsibility over to Congress.

Within a few months of Mueller’s report, brave whistleblowers revealed Trump’s scheme to blackmail the president of Ukraine to help Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. This time, Congress took responsibility for investigating the matter. Testimony on the record confirmed the whistleblowers’ allegations. The House impeached Trump; the Senate tried him. The main argument of Trump’s defense? Holding Trump to account should be somebody else’s job: in this case, the voters.

Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone argued, “For all their talk about election interference, they’re here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history—and we can’t allow that to happen.” If Trump did wrong, let an election decide the matter, not Congress. Enough Republican senators accepted that argument to ensure Trump’s acquittal.

In November 2020, the voters delivered their verdict. By a vote of 81 million to 74 million, they repudiated Trump. Trump and his supporters refused to accept the outcome. First by fraud, then by force, they tried to overturn the election. Once again, they argued, it was somebody else’s job to hold Trump to account: not the voters but the state legislatures, which should reject the popular vote and appoint their own electors instead.

Trump’s plot led to his second impeachment—and to one more round of “It’s somebody else’s job.” Trump’s attempted coup had failed, his enablers argued, and he would be leaving office on schedule. Impeachment is not the only remedy for presidential misconduct, McConnell said: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

And so the circle was complete. Criminal prosecution? No, it’s up to Congress. Congressional impeachment? No, leave the decision to the voters. Refusal to accept an election defeat? Back to criminal prosecution.

To repeat McConnell’s phrase, it’s “practically and morally” very difficult to hold a wayward president to account. An American president is bound by law and operates through legal institutions, but a president also has sources of personal authority that are not beholden to the law and are exercised outside institutions. Trump drew more deeply than most presidents on nonlegal, noninstitutional authority.

He and his core supporters repeatedly threatened that any attempt to apply laws to him would provoke violence against the law. Trump allies and Trump himself have warned of riots if he were ever prosecuted.

Maybe these threats are empty boasts. But nothing like them has ever been heard before from a modern American leader. On January 6, Trump welcomed political violence on his behalf—and got what he wanted. He has not repented or reformed in the two years since.

But the very threat makes it all the more necessary to proceed with the January 6 Committee’s criminal referrals. If Trump does not face legal consequences for the events of that day, he and his supporters have reason to believe that Trump somehow frightened the U.S. legal system into backing down from otherwise amply justified action.

Show Trump a line, and he’ll cross it. That was his record as president, down to his last days in office, when he absconded with boxes of government materials as though they were his private property. Trump has already announced a run for president in 2024. Whatever happens with that run, his likeliest Republican rivals are studying his methods, considering which to emulate and which to discard. The incitement of violence by the head of the government is not an infraction that can be dismissed and forgiven by any political system that hopes to stay constitutional.

For six years, the job of upholding the rule of law against Donald Trump has been passed from one unwilling set of hands to the next. Now the job has returned to where it started. There is nobody else to pass it to. The recommendation has arrived. The time for justice has come.
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[TopHatter]

Trump taxes: House panel to release report on returns

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to publicly release a report on Donald Trump’s tax returns, which the former president has long tried to shield.

Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., said supporting materials will be released along with the report. Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the committee's top Republican, raised concerns about privacy as the documents could contain information such as Social Security numbers.

The report could provide a fuller look into Trump's personal and business finances, possibly revealing how much money he paid in taxes, what income he derived from foreign operations and whether his income was as large as the reputed multibillionaire has suggested.

The report comes after a yearslong battle that ultimately resulted in the Supreme Court clearing the way last month for the Treasury Department to send the returns to Congress. The committee received six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses.

Democrats are under pressure to act aggressively. With just two weeks left until Republicans formally take control of the House, Tuesday’s meeting was an opportunity for Democrats to disclose whatever information they have gleaned on a figure who still shapes U.S. politics despite losing reelection in 2020.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee met Tuesday to vote on whether to publicly release years of Donald Trump's tax returns, which the former president has long tried to shield.

Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., has kept a close hold on the actions of the panel, which planned to vote on the release in a closed session that could span several hours. And if lawmakers move forward with plans to release the returns, it's unclear how quickly that would happen.

But after a yearslong battle that ultimately resulted in the Supreme Court clearing the way last month for the Treasury Department to send the returns to Congress, Democrats are under pressure to act aggressively. The committee received six years of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses. And with just two weeks left until Republicans formally take control of the House, Tuesday's meeting could be the last opportunity for Democrats to disclose whatever information they have gleaned.

Republicans have railed against the potential release, arguing that it would set a dangerous precedent.

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the committee’s top Republican, called any release of Trump’s tax records a “dangerous new political weapon” that “even Democrats will come to regret.”

“Our concern is not whether the president should have made his tax returns public, as is traditional, nor about the accuracy of his tax returns,” Brady said. “Our concern is that, if taken, this committee action will set a terrible precedent that unleashes a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president and overturns decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since the Watergate reforms.”

Trump has long had a complicated relationship with his personal income taxes.

As a presidential candidate in 2016, he broke decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax forms to the public. He bragged during a presidential debate that year that he was “smart” because he paid no federal taxes and later claimed he wouldn't personally benefit from the 2017 tax cuts he signed into law that favored people with extreme wealth, asking Americans to simply take him at his word.

Tax records would have been a useful metric for judging his success in business. The image of a savvy businessman was key to a political brand honed during his years as a tabloid magnet and star of “The Apprentice” television show. They also could reveal any financial obligations — including foreign debts — that could influence how he governed.

But Americans were largely in the dark about Trump's relationship with the IRS until October 2018 and September 2020, when The New York Times published two separate series based on leaked tax records.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 articles showed how Trump received a modern equivalent of at least $413 million from his father's real estate holdings, with much of that money coming from what the Times called “tax dodges” in the 1990s. Trump sued the Times and his niece, Mary Trump, in 2021 for providing the records to the newspaper. In November, Mary Trump asked an appeals court to overturn a judge’s decision to reject her claims that her uncle and two of his siblings defrauded her of millions of dollars in a 2001 family settlement.

The 2020 articles showed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018. Trump paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the past 15 years because he generally lost more money than he made.

The articles exposed deep inequities in the U.S. tax code as Trump, a reputed multi-billionaire, paid little in federal income taxes. IRS figures indicate that the average tax filer paid roughly $12,200 in 2017, about 16 times more than the former president paid.

Details about Trump's income from foreign operations and debt levels were also contained in the tax filings, which the former president derided as “fake news."

At the time of the 2020 articles, Neal said he saw an ethical problem in Trump overseeing a federal agency that he has also battled with legal filings.

"Now, Donald Trump is the boss of the agency he considers an adversary," Neal said in 2020. “It is essential that the IRS’s presidential audit program remain free of interference.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office also obtained copies of Trump’s tax records in February 2021 after a protracted legal fight that included two trips to the Supreme Court.

The office, then led by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., had subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm in 2019, seeking access to eight years of Trump’s tax returns and related documents.

The DA’s office issued the subpoena after Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress that Trump had misled tax officials, insurers and business associates about the value of his assets. Those allegations are the subject of a fraud lawsuit that New York Attorney General Letitia James filed against Trump and his company in September.

Trump’s longtime accountant, Donald Bender, testified at the Trump Organization’s recent criminal trial that Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including nearly $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010.

Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP who spent years preparing Trump’s personal tax returns, said Trump’s reported losses from 2009 to 2018 included net operating losses from some of the many businesses he owns through his Trump Organization.

The Trump Organization was convicted earlier this month on tax fraud charges for helping some executives dodge taxes on company-paid perks such as apartments and luxury cars.

The current Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told The Associated Press in an interview last week that his office’s investigation into Trump and his businesses continues.

“We’re going to follow the facts and continue to do our job,” Bragg said.

Trump, who refused to release his returns during his 2016 presidential campaign and his four years in the White House while claiming that he was under IRS audit, has argued there is little to be gleaned from the tax returns even as he has fought to keep them private.

“You can’t learn much from tax returns, but it is illegal to release them if they are not yours!” he complained on his social media network last weekend.

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[TopHatter]

House Committee Voted on Trump's Tax Returns

Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has the past six years of Donald Trump's tax returns. Yesterday he convened the panel at 3 p.m. to discuss what to do with them, since Democratic control of the committee will soon be at an end (for at least 2 years). The options varied from keep everything a complete secret to publishing all of them verbatim on the Committee's website. The discussion was expected to be—how shall we put this—spirited, so after a short photo op, Neal told all the reporters and photographers to leave so the Committee could do it work in private.

There has been endless speculation on why Trump has tried so hard to keep his tax returns secret. Some people have speculated that he isn't actually a billionaire at all, but only a middling millionaire at most. Or worse yet, that he is an extremely bad businessman and almost never makes money on his businesses. Others have speculated that he has loans from Russian banks, deducts the interest he pays to them, and is deeply in hock to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is also possible that he does things that are borderline illegal.

After Neal and his Committee had their... discussion, they voted on the matter, with all the Democrats voting to release the returns and all the Republicans voting to keep them secret. The Democrats are in the majority, of course, so they win. As with the 1/6 Committee documents (see above), there will have to be some redactions (e.g., blacking out Social Security numbers), so the returns aren't available quite yet. That will happen later this week. For now, the Committee has released a 39-page report summarizing, in effect, the top-level numbers from the returns.

Based on what is in the report, those who hoped that the returns would be very damning are going to be disappointed. The main takeaway is that Trump rarely pays much in taxes, often less than $1,000. That is hardly a revelation. The New York Times got ahold of some of Trump's older tax returns in 2020 and reported that he had vast write-offs that wiped out nearly all of his tax bills.

While the Times' article summarized some general aspects of Trump's tax situation, it provided far less information than would just publishing the literal tax returns, something the Times didn't do for legal reasons. So, maybe the release of the returns will reveal something new and very damaging. But we are inclined to doubt it. If there was something really bad in there, presumably Neal would have put it into the preliminary report. But beyond the low tax bill, the only other "revelation" in the report is that the IRS failed to audit Trump until 2019. That means that the IRS failed to do its legally mandated job, and that Trump was lying about being unable to release his returns because he was under audit. The former revelation is bad for the IRS, but has little to do with Trump. And as to the latter revelation, well, anyone who didn't know that Trump was lying has had their head in a hole approximately 30,000 times in the last 6 years. (Z)
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[TopHatter]

Trump's IRS auditor relied on an accounting firm his company called "negligent"
When Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation investigated the IRS audits of Donald Trump's taxes, an agent's note in the review of Trump's 2017 filings stood out.

The IRS agent wrote that Trump "hires a professional accounting firm and Counsel to prepare and file tax return," and they "ensure" that Trump "properly reports all income and deduction items."

Joint Committee staff were befuddled by the note, according to a report on the IRS' mandatory audit of the former president's taxes, published Tuesday by the House Ways and Means Committee.

"The staff failed to understand why the IRS believed that use of counsel and an accounting firm ensures accuracy," the Ways and Means Committee wrote in its report.

The accounting firm, Mazars USA, is one of the country's largest, and it worked for Trump for decades until February of this year, when it cut ties with the former president and his company. In the months since, Trump and attorneys for his company have harshly criticized the firm's work.

It's a common practice for IRS agents to give some deference to large accounting firms, according to forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky.

"If I'm a revenue agent and I see that he's got Mazars or (another firm) I'm going to go, 'Okay, look, the returns are all computerized, they're done properly. I've got some level of faith that somebody in their quality control process—because all these firms have a quality control review process—has laid eyes on several layers on this, and I'm not gonna look at every number,'" said Dubinsky.

But Mazars' work was recently criticized by lawyers for two Trump Organization companies that were found guilty on Dec. 6 of 17 New York State criminal counts related to tax fraud. During the trial, a Trump Organization attorney claimed during closing arguments that a Mazars accountant "failed in his job" to spot wrongdoing from company executives.

That accountant, Donald Bender, described Trump's annual tax returns as a stack of paper "multiple feet" tall, gesturing with his hands high over the witness stand. Bender testified that he worked on Trump's and the company's taxes for nearly four decades, but that relationship came to a screeching halt in February.

Mazars wrote in a letter to the Trump Organization's general counsel that a decade's worth of the reports "should no longer be relied upon." In the letter, a Mazars attorney wrote that the company "performed its work in accordance with professional standards" and compiled the statements based on information provided by the Trump Organization.

In the letter, a Mazars executive cited revelations from a New York attorney general's civil investigation as among the reasons the accounting firm could no longer stand by its Trump financial statements. In September, the New York attorney general sued Trump and his company, alleging a massive yearslong fraud tied to the valuations of Trump Organization properties.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization said in a February email that, "While we are disappointed that Mazars has chosen to part ways, their February 9, 2022 letter confirms that after conducting a subsequent review of all prior statements of financial condition, Mazars' work was performed in accordance with all applicable accounting standards and principles and that such statements of financial condition do not contain any material discrepancies."

But Trump and his team have since soured on Mazars, frequently criticizing the company.

Trump on Nov. 18 summarized his defense team's stance on Mazars, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

"The highly paid accounting firm should have routinely picked these things up - we relied on them. VERY UNFAIR!" Trump wrote.

During her closing argument on Dec. 1, Trump Organization attorney Susan Necheles said Mazars "was either totally negligent or he turned a blind eye."

Mazars and Bender did not reply to requests for comment, but during the Trump Organization's trial, prosecutors showed an agreement between the company and Mazars in which the accounting firm stipulated that its work "does not include any procedures designed to detect errors, irregularities, illegal acts, including fraud or defalcations, should any exist."
__________

Anybody still want to claim that "If there was something wrong with Trump's taxes, the IRS or Trump's tax preparation company would've caught it!" ? Anybody?

Meanwhile in reality, everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else "It's not OUR fault, it's THEIR fault!"

[TopHatter]

Trump Audit Shows Depths of IRS Funding Woes

WASHINGTON — Before Donald Trump became president and after, his exceedingly complex and voluminous tax returns came under regular scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service. The number of agents assigned to the audit team: one.

After Trump left office, the IRS said it was beefing up the audit team, to three. The tax agency itself acknowledged that it was still overwhelmed by the complexity of Trump’s finances and the resistance mounted by the former president and his sophisticated army of accountants and lawyers, which included a former IRS chief counsel and raised questions early last year about why even three revenue agents should be assigned to audit him.

“With over 400 flow-thru returns reported on the Form 1040, it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues,” IRS agents said of Trump’s tax returns in an internal memo that was released by the House Ways and Means Committee this week as part of its oversight of the mandatory presidential audit process.

The IRS is a sprawling agency, and an audit notice can strike fear in most taxpayers. But the committee reports released this week highlight how depleted the IRS has become in the past decade, as Republicans starved it of funding. They also show how the agency has become increasingly unable to crack down on wealthy taxpayers who push the legal limits to lower their tax bills and have the means to fend off audits if they get caught.

That has led to a $7 trillion “tax gap” of revenue over a decade that is owed but goes uncollected, in many cases from superrich taxpayers such as Trump, who has boasted that he fights to pay as little tax as possible. But the resource shortfall is playing out against the backdrop of a partisan and ideological battle over the IRS that appears sure to continue to constrain its ability to match the capacity of an industry dedicated to tax minimization and avoidance.

The agency’s workforce of about 80,000 is the same size as it was in 1970. Its enforcement staff has fallen by more than 30% since 2010, and audits of millionaires have declined by more than 70%. Its budget has declined by nearly 20%, when accounting for inflation, during the past decade.

Republicans have for years accused the IRS of political bias and unfairly targeting conservatives. For that reason, they have fought to cut the agency’s funding or, in some cases, called to abolish it altogether.

The spending package that Congress is voting on this week reduces the base funding levels for the IRS by $275 million to $12.32 billion, which Republicans hailed as a victory.

However, that does not account for the $80 billion in supplemental funding that the IRS was granted through the Inflation Reduction Act this year to buttress its resources over the next decade and hire more than 80,000 agents and staff members. The Biden administration has broad discretion over how and when to deploy that money to modernize the agency and bolster its enforcement capacity.

The Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, is planning to use some of those funds to hire more auditors who can tackle complicated tax returns.

Chuck Rettig, who was appointed as IRS commissioner by Trump and left the post last month, has denied any involvement in the audits of the former president. But he suggested in an email to The New York Times that the additional funding the agency is receiving will help it undertake such complex examinations.

“IRS desperately needs additional specialized examiners and related support to conduct additional meaningful examinations of complex individual returns involving partnerships and tiered arrangements of partnerships and similar pass-through entities, foreign transactions, complex financial arrangements and similar,” Rettig said. He added that “many decisions within the IRS have long been resource driven.”

The funds for the IRS are expected to become one of the first big fights in Congress next year when Republicans take control of the House, as Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is seeking to become speaker, signaled in September.

“On that very first day that we’re sworn in, you’ll see that it all changes,” McCarthy said. “Because on our very first bill, we’re going to repeal 87,000 IRS agents. Our job is to work for you, not go after you.”

In November, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, made clear that Republicans believe that a bulked-up IRS is a political liability for Democrats.

“I think we ought to fight an epic, knockdown, drag-out fight over stopping the Democrats from funding 87,000 new IRS agents to harass and intimidate and persecute Americans and their political enemies.”

Democrats are also doubling down on the findings. Rep. Richard Neal, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, has introduced legislation that would require the IRS to publish presidential tax returns, audit them “in a timely manner” and update the public on the results. The House passed the legislation Thursday, although it appears to have little prospect of passage by the Senate.

The Biden administration has emphasized its ambitions of modernizing the antiquated technology at the IRS and improving its customer service. In an August memo laying out how the money would be deployed, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the agency would be focused on cracking down on rich tax dodgers and big companies that have long evaded paying what they owe to the federal government.

She also promised that middle-class households would not face more onerous scrutiny and that their audit rates would not rise.

“These investments will not result in households earning $400,000 per year or less or small businesses seeing an increase in the chances that they are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen wrote. “Instead, they will allow the IRS to work to end the two-tiered tax system, where most Americans pay what they owe, but those at the top of the distribution often do not.”

The revelations about Trump’s audits laid bare the difficulty that the IRS has had in auditing the rich. The former president proved to be particularly uncooperative, as his team failed to provide facts needed to resolve certain issues and threatened to protest or appeal the process.

The process of auditing Trump apparently even grew contentious. An internal IRS memo detailed by the committee said, “There has been some animosity between our counsel and taxpayer’s counsel.”

The report suggested that as the IRS tried to work its way through Trump’s maze of tax returns, revenue agents appeared to take for granted that the assertions made by Trump’s accounting firm were true.

Michael J. Graetz, the deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department from 1990 to 1991, said the acquiescence of the IRS to big accounting firms was striking.

“Any return with that degree of complexity and those dollars at stake is going to be prepared by professionals, and so if that was the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, then there would be very little need to be auditing those kinds of returns,” Graetz said.

But it was clear from the committee report that for the most part, the IRS was just outgunned.

An agency memo that was recounted in the report described an audit team manager laying out the daunting nature of Trump’s returns.

“This return has about 400 flow-through returns reported on Schedule E and, since some of these are tiered, report a total of about 500 flow-through returns,” the auditor said.

Underscoring the need for more resources, the memo went on to say that to “do a thorough review of these returns, we would need a team much larger than the current team.”
____________

Been saying this for years.

1. The IRS would not have immediately - or ever - caught major league cheating by Trump because...
2. The IRS is a toothless old hound, and has been for decades, by design....thanks to the Republican Party.

[TopHatter]

Trump's Tax Returns Are Full of Red Flags

Donald Trump's tax returns are extremely complicated since he owns over 500 entities personally and all of the profits and losses of all of them show up on his personal tax returns. No member of Congress could possibly understand what he did and whether it was legal or not. Well, OK, maybe Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Steven Palazzo (R-MS), Tom Rice (R-SC), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Victoria Spartz (R-IN) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY), since they used to be CPAs. But not the other members. Fortunately, Congress possesses a secret weapon: the Joint Committee on Taxation. It is a nonpartisan agency that advises Congress on tax issues and is staffed with people who actually understand the tax laws. It would be nice if the people who wrote the tax laws actually understood what they were doing, but such is not the case.

For the last few weeks, the JCT has had Donald Trump's past 6 years; worth of tax returns and has been studying them intensely. They have already flagged five items that IRS really needs to examine very closely, as follows:

• Business losses: The single biggest reason Trump paid no taxes in many years is that he is a terrible, awful, dreadful businessman. He routinely "loses" tens of millions of dollars a year. He can't compete with Elon Musk, who can lose tens of millions of dollars in a few hours, but really good businessmen (and businesswomen) make millions a year. They don't lose millions (or billions) a year.
  
  But there is a huge question of whether the reported losses are real or more like the "fake news" Trump likes to talk about. The returns the Ways and Means Committee got may not help clarify this because the losses happened in previous years and carried forward. It is known that Trump casinos, Trump Airlines, Trump steak, Trump vodka, and many other Trump products were indeed failures, but there is a huge difference between "I bought this building for $40 million and then had to sell it for $30 million so I get a $10 million loss" and "My brand is tarnished so I am deducting $50 million for that." IRS might be able to sort this out, but some of the losses are so long ago that Trump could legitimately respond to questions from IRS with "I threw out all the paperwork years ago."
• Mingling expenses: There are multiple places where Trump apparently bought things for personal use and deducted them as business expenses. That's one of IRS' little no-nos. It is known that closely held entities often mix up business expenses with personal expenses. In Trump's case, he deducted $342,182 in 2020 for a rental property that had no income. If it was a rental property, shouldn't there have been some income? Could it be that he used the property personally (which means the expenses are not deductible)?
  One of his companies, DT Endeavor I LLC (aviation), reported gross income one year of $680,886 and expenses of $680,886. Coincidences happen, of course. It's normal. Also Melania Trump (modeling) took in $3,848 in income and reported $3,848 in expenses. Must be those pesky coincidences again. But coincidences aside, buying a large Boeing 757 jet and using it a couple of times a year to visit a rental property and using it the rest of the time for personal trips doesn't mean you can deduct the whole purchase price and operating costs as a business expense.
• Loans to his kids: Trump reported receiving over $100,000 in interest from Ivanka, Junior, and Eric. Apparently not from Tiffany. If you're not a "10," you don't count with Trump. Disguising a gift as a loan could be an illegal way to try to avoid paying gift tax. Also, the kids would get to deduct the interest they paid on the "loan," but if it really wasn't a loan, that would be illegal, too. To qualify as a legitimate loan, there would have to be an agreement about when the loan was to repaid, potential penalties for not repaying on time, etc. IRS could (and should) ask for a copy of the loan agreement. This fails the smell test.
• Land conservation: Trump owns a property called Seven Springs in Westchester County, NY. Lovely place. He took a conservation easement on it in 2015. This means that the deed was updated to prevent anyone from ever developing the property into houses, a shopping center, etc., in the future. Giving up the development rights (or equivalently selling or donating these rights to an environmental organization) would entitle Trump to a tax deduction because the property would then be worth less. He claimed a $21 million deduction for this. Was the property really worth that much less without the possibility of development? If local zoning laws prohibited development in the first place, then voluntarily "giving up" his rights to development meant nothing and the $21 million deduction is completely fraudulent. It wouldn't be hard for IRS to contact a local real estate broker in Westchester to ask about zoning laws and get property appraisals for the land, with and without development rights. The agency finally got around to talking to property appraisers—last month. It should have done it years ago.
• Foreign taxes: The U.S. has double-taxation treaties with many countries that state how international taxation is handled. For example, if an American has income in, say, Scotland, from a golf course he owns, the treaty specifies which country can tax it. These treaties are immensely complicated and run hundreds of pages because many situations are complex. Imagine an American citizen living in England who has stock in a French company that owns a mine in Arizona that produces ore that is sold to buyers in Germany and Michigan. Who gets to tax what? In some cases, when an American pays taxes to a foreign government, the treaty states that the American gets a credit for the foreign taxes paid against his U.S. taxes (and vice-versa, of course). But this applies only if the taxes are really paid to the foreign government and accrued taxes weren't avoided by some accounting trick. IRS could (and should) ask to see the bank statements showing the wire transfers for the tax payments.

And these are only the most obvious red flags. Knowing that Trump pushes the envelope on everything, the JCT (and certainly the IRS) should assign experts to go over every line on Trump's recent tax returns and demand proof for every questionable item. (V)
___________

[TopHatter]

The IRS Really, Really Should Have Audited Trump
The failure to do so is outrageous and needs to be investigated.

Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president.

But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the returns themselves: The IRS did not even begin auditing Trump’s taxes until 2019, on the same day the committee began asking the agency about them. This is outrageous, and it must be investigated.

Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making.

Examining Trump’s tax returns and discovering all they can reveal about how his finances may have intersected with his presidency will take time. The committee released an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation stating that Trump had paid nothing, or close to it, in some years of his presidency. The income information included in that analysis also seems to support the assertion that Trump’s use of the presidency to steer business to himself from the government and those seeking to influence it may have reversed years of financial losses for Trump’s companies and led to hefty profits in 2018 and 2019, until COVID’s arrival in 2020 reversed his fortunes again. Now that the detailed returns are available, we’ll learn much more about those companies’ earnings, losses, and tax payments, and about Trump’s financial interests.

But the revelation about the IRS’s failure to perform the required audit of Trump’s taxes—that it did not happen at all for more than two years, and that, according to the committee, his 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns were not even selected for audit until after he left office—deserves yet more scrutiny. The IRS’s own regulations mandate that a president’s taxes must be audited every year. Not only that, but ongoing audits were the purported reason Trump gave for refusing to disclose his tax returns. Spokespeople for President Barack Obama confirmed that his taxes were subject to routine annual audits during his presidency, and a spokesperson for President Joe Biden said that his have been too. The Ways and Means Committee reported that, despite Trump’s complex finances, when review finally began in 2019, the audit was initially assigned to a single employee, and no audits of the years requested by the committee—2015 to 2020—have yet been completed.

The requirement to audit the president could not have simply evaded notice at the IRS. Trump’s taxes have been a major public issue since he initially refused to disclose them as a candidate in 2016. The IRS is drastically under-resourced, but insufficient resources are unlikely to be to blame, because they didn’t stop the agency from promptly reviewing the tax returns of the president immediately preceding Trump and the one immediately following him. That a unique resource crunch happened to coincide only with Trump’s presidency strains credulity.

So what happened here? It’s possible that the IRS was aware of all the controversy around Trump’s taxes and simply didn’t want any part of it. That’s inexcusable, but it’s not nefarious.

A more troubling explanation is possible—even likely: that Trump used the levers of government to shield himself from scrutiny.

There’s certainly no reason to think that he had qualms about abusing his power for his own benefit. Throughout his presidency, Trump manipulated and misused component after component of the federal government to protect himself and advance his personal and political interests.

He and his compliant attorney general Bill Barr misused the Justice Department to undercut investigations of Trump, target perceived enemies, and assist the president’s allies, including by dropping cases, opposing the sentencing recommendations of career prosecutors, and issuing pardons. The Department of the Interior produced videos lauding Trump and arranged for national-park land to be used for his political events. Trump fired or sidelined inspectors general whose investigations harmed him, and he sought to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Senior employees throughout the executive branch routinely praised Trump and attacked his political opponents in violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits most government employees from using their position for politics; Trump ensured that the illegal practice was encouraged rather than punished. And, of course, Trump ultimately tried to use the Justice Department and other parts of government to keep himself in power after losing an election.

Was the IRS’s failure to audit Trump as required by law another instance of the former president’s misuse of the government to protect himself? It is already known that Trump frequently discussed arranging IRS audits of perceived enemies and that two of those enemies, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, received highly unusual audits; an inspector-general investigation was unable to determine how that happened.

It is also known that Trump installed loyalists at the IRS. In 2018, he appointed Commissioner Charles Rettig, who had previously defended Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns and who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from renting out units in a Trump-branded property. In 2019, Trump prioritized a longtime associate’s confirmation as the agency’s general counsel. These or other loyalists may have acted to protect Trump out of devotion to him, as so many others throughout the government did. IRS employees may also have acted out of fear, shirking their responsibilities to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The Senate Finance Committee must investigate the IRS’s failure. Its chair, Ron Wyden, has already expressed interest in doing so. The agency’s inspector general should investigate too. The public needs to know whether one more key government function was politicized, allowing a president to shield possible conflicts of interest and escape accountability. The American people need reassurances that transparency, oversight, and accountability will once again become matters of course rather than subjects of prolonged litigation.

Donald Trump attempted to hijack the United States government to keep himself in power, and American democracy almost didn’t survive. His tax returns may have been another part of that effort. That merits investigation—not over another six years, but now.
_________

[TopHatter]

Congressman says Donald Trump 'abused his power' to hide his finances on a scale not seen since Nixon


Congressman says Donald Trump 'abused his power' to hide his finances on a scale not seen since Nixon

• Rep. Don Beyer said Donald Trump "abused his power" to hide his finances.
• The Democrat compared Trump's attempts to "block basic transparency" to Richard Nixon.
• A House committee published six years' worth of Trump's tax returns on Friday after a years-long legal fight.

A Democratic congressman compared former President Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, saying Trump "abused his power" to hide his finances from the public.

"Despite promising to release his tax returns, Donald Trump refused to do so, and abused the power of his office to block basic transparency on his finances and conflicts of interest which no president since Nixon has foregone," Democratic Virginia Rep. Don Beyer said in a statement Friday.

Six years of Trump's personal and business tax returns were released by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday.

Beyer accused the former president of having "something to hide" as he refused to release tax documents as presidents since Nixon had done and fought Congress' attempts to access them.

"As the public will now be able to see," Beyer continued, "Trump used questionable or poorly substantiated deductions and a number of other tax avoidance schemes as justification to pay little or no federal income tax in several of the years examined."

Beyer noted that tax laws in the US are "often inequitable, and that enforcement of them is often unjust."

"Trump was able to bypass even the mandatory IRS presidential audit program for years, but many other wealthy and powerful people evade billions in tax dues every year through more quotidian tax avoidance. Congress has so much work to do to make tax enforcement in this country fairer, and that will continue to be a major priority for me as a member of the Ways and Means Committee going forward," Beyer said.

The Ways and Means Committee voted on December 20 to release Trump's tax returns from 2015 to 2020 after a long legal battle in which none of the courts who heard the case — including the US Supreme Court — sided with Trump.

The returns revealed just how much Trump earned in each of those years, showing that the former president — who campaigned as a successful businessman and passed sweeping tax cuts while in office — told the IRS he lost millions in the years before and during his presidency.
____________

[Albany Rifles]

The IRS Really, Really Should Have Audited Trump
The failure to do so is outrageous and needs to be investigated.

Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president.

But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the returns themselves: The IRS did not even begin auditing Trump’s taxes until 2019, on the same day the committee began asking the agency about them. This is outrageous, and it must be investigated.

Getting Trump’s tax returns should not have been this hard. Every president elected since Richard Nixon—with the exception of Trump—has publicly disclosed his tax returns. Tax returns can tell the American people, and Congress, whether a president is following the law and behaving honestly. Crucially for Trump, who uniquely and inappropriately retained ownership of a massive international business while president, they can provide information about conflicts of interest that may have swayed his decision making.

Examining Trump’s tax returns and discovering all they can reveal about how his finances may have intersected with his presidency will take time. The committee released an analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation stating that Trump had paid nothing, or close to it, in some years of his presidency. The income information included in that analysis also seems to support the assertion that Trump’s use of the presidency to steer business to himself from the government and those seeking to influence it may have reversed years of financial losses for Trump’s companies and led to hefty profits in 2018 and 2019, until COVID’s arrival in 2020 reversed his fortunes again. Now that the detailed returns are available, we’ll learn much more about those companies’ earnings, losses, and tax payments, and about Trump’s financial interests.

But the revelation about the IRS’s failure to perform the required audit of Trump’s taxes—that it did not happen at all for more than two years, and that, according to the committee, his 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns were not even selected for audit until after he left office—deserves yet more scrutiny. The IRS’s own regulations mandate that a president’s taxes must be audited every year. Not only that, but ongoing audits were the purported reason Trump gave for refusing to disclose his tax returns. Spokespeople for President Barack Obama confirmed that his taxes were subject to routine annual audits during his presidency, and a spokesperson for President Joe Biden said that his have been too. The Ways and Means Committee reported that, despite Trump’s complex finances, when review finally began in 2019, the audit was initially assigned to a single employee, and no audits of the years requested by the committee—2015 to 2020—have yet been completed.

The requirement to audit the president could not have simply evaded notice at the IRS. Trump’s taxes have been a major public issue since he initially refused to disclose them as a candidate in 2016. The IRS is drastically under-resourced, but insufficient resources are unlikely to be to blame, because they didn’t stop the agency from promptly reviewing the tax returns of the president immediately preceding Trump and the one immediately following him. That a unique resource crunch happened to coincide only with Trump’s presidency strains credulity.

So what happened here? It’s possible that the IRS was aware of all the controversy around Trump’s taxes and simply didn’t want any part of it. That’s inexcusable, but it’s not nefarious.

A more troubling explanation is possible—even likely: that Trump used the levers of government to shield himself from scrutiny.

There’s certainly no reason to think that he had qualms about abusing his power for his own benefit. Throughout his presidency, Trump manipulated and misused component after component of the federal government to protect himself and advance his personal and political interests.

He and his compliant attorney general Bill Barr misused the Justice Department to undercut investigations of Trump, target perceived enemies, and assist the president’s allies, including by dropping cases, opposing the sentencing recommendations of career prosecutors, and issuing pardons. The Department of the Interior produced videos lauding Trump and arranged for national-park land to be used for his political events. Trump fired or sidelined inspectors general whose investigations harmed him, and he sought to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Senior employees throughout the executive branch routinely praised Trump and attacked his political opponents in violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits most government employees from using their position for politics; Trump ensured that the illegal practice was encouraged rather than punished. And, of course, Trump ultimately tried to use the Justice Department and other parts of government to keep himself in power after losing an election.

Was the IRS’s failure to audit Trump as required by law another instance of the former president’s misuse of the government to protect himself? It is already known that Trump frequently discussed arranging IRS audits of perceived enemies and that two of those enemies, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, received highly unusual audits; an inspector-general investigation was unable to determine how that happened.

It is also known that Trump installed loyalists at the IRS. In 2018, he appointed Commissioner Charles Rettig, who had previously defended Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns and who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from renting out units in a Trump-branded property. In 2019, Trump prioritized a longtime associate’s confirmation as the agency’s general counsel. These or other loyalists may have acted to protect Trump out of devotion to him, as so many others throughout the government did. IRS employees may also have acted out of fear, shirking their responsibilities to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The Senate Finance Committee must investigate the IRS’s failure. Its chair, Ron Wyden, has already expressed interest in doing so. The agency’s inspector general should investigate too. The public needs to know whether one more key government function was politicized, allowing a president to shield possible conflicts of interest and escape accountability. The American people need reassurances that transparency, oversight, and accountability will once again become matters of course rather than subjects of prolonged litigation.

Donald Trump attempted to hijack the United States government to keep himself in power, and American democracy almost didn’t survive. His tax returns may have been another part of that effort. That merits investigation—not over another six years, but now.
_________

You want to know to know why the Biden Administration has funding for 87,000 new workers? Its so they can efficiently enforce the law. No the least bit surprised by any of this news.