BREAKING: The Lid Is Off! The New York Times Has Seen Trump’s Taxes! UPDATE

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THIS IS BREAKING NEWS AS U TYPE. The New York Times has just broken the news of the ultimate October Surprise. They have personally seen 20 years of Donald Trump’s tax returns. Teri is reading the Times article and feeding me as I go along, so we’ll start with the highlights, and I can fill more later as updates.

Here are the top line highlights. In the first two years of his presidency, Trump paid $750 a year in taxes. In 2018, he must have shot his wad, as he paid no federal taxes whatsoever.

But it’s the previous years where the shit gets real. In 10 out of the last 15 years, Trump paid no taxes whatsoever. Per the NY Tomes

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

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The problem has clearly become systemic for Trump, as in the very next paragraph, the Times goes on to state

As the President wages a reelection campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. (it mine) Also having over him is a decade long audit battle with the Internam Revenue Sercice over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declatring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 milliom.

I’m sure that this news is about to bring howls of protest from Trump, and most of it aimed at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which recently got permission from the Supreme court to obtain 20 years of his taxes. Their one saving grace may be that they didn’t actually release any official tax forms for publication, and certainly the Times will refuse to name any sources that may have given them access.

This is a godsend for Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, mainly because it will allow him to use the information to continue to blow holes in Trump’s carefully crafted persona that he is one of, and for the little guy.

As I said, I will try to get through more of the article myself, and will post updates with any more relevant information. But after all of these years, the lid is finally off of the can, and the worms are turning. While we may not actually see the forms for a while, if ever, we now nonetheless conclusively what a world class fraud Donald Trump really is. It was worth the wait.

UPDATE

A couple of more things of particular interest here, before my eyes give out for the night. The New York Times goes on to point out further in the article that during Trump’s term of celebrity in The Apprentice, he was paid $427,2 million including licensing and endorsement fees. But he sank almost all of that into businesses, mostly golf courses, that as the years have gone on, have turned into spigots for red ink. Which led the Times to point out something that a lot of us have known for years, but more likely with this new information

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.

The other thing to point out, in all farness, since I have it in front of me, is the President’s response to the reporting. By the vagaries of journalistic timing, this report hit just as the President was finishing up a long winded, whiny, petulant press briefing at the White House. The press corps was able to question him on the revelations, to which his response was classic Trump, It’s fake news. Pure and simple, nothing more and nothing less.

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1 COMMENT

    • to be honest, there should be lots of people who have access to rumps returns. people who lend him money, the state of New York, the irs, his accounting people, maybe some shadier folk like Cohen. tax returns are not really secret documents. they are audited by lots of groups so all this is an open secret.

  1. Are the typos directrly from NYT article or the author of this article. “the Internam Revenue Sercice over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declatring huge losses” I owuld hate to think is form NYT or trumpcult will pick up on it and yell fake

    • Says the person who wrote “owuld” and “form” for from. Of course, they are Murf’s typos. The NYT spell-check function still works.

  2. Just a point of note. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Manhattan DA’s office could issue a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm as a part of its criminal investigation. However, the court also ruled that Trump, like any other citizen, could still challenge the validity (fairness) of a subpoena in court, which Trump has now done, claiming the subpoena is too broad. THAT challenge is CURRENTLY in federal court. Thus, Trump’s firm, Mazars, still does not have to obey the subpoena. Unless they did so anyway, this leak didn’t come from Vance’s office. It could have come from inside the IRS? Obviously the Times isn’t going to be revealing where the tax return info came from.

    • The Manhattan DA’s office already HAD issued that subpoena, that’s what was before the court…The coirt sent it back to the lower court in ofrder for trump to contest it as a privcate citizen, and both the lower court, as well as the aopellate court I believe, rejected him, clearing the way for Mazars to fork the stuff over…

      • Wrong. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of Trump for now, keeping the tax returns out of the hands of NY State prosecutors for the near future. Vance had previously agreed to wait for the Second Circuit ruling before enforcing the subpoena. More appeals will follow and oral arguments to follow.

        • Trmp challenged that subpoena, it got ruled valid, then he took it to a higher court, where he lost again. Note that this is a STATE case, not a federal case.

          • Trump originally challenged that a state court couldn’t even issue a subpoena to a sitting president in a criminal case. The Supreme Court ruled against Trump on THAT point. But, in doing so, the Supreme court also ruled that Trump could still challenge the merits of the subpoena itself. That is EXACTLY what Trump is now doing and the FEDERAL 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an existing stay of execution of the Manhattan DA’s subpoena while arguments are NOW being heard.
            I understand it is a state case but the “fairness” of the Manhattan DA’s subpoena is currently being adjudicated in the federal court system. The POINT is, there is STILL a stay on the Manhattan DA’s execution of its subpoena and even Vance is agreeing NOT to enforce the subpoena until the 2nd Circuit court has completed its disposition of the case. Meaning, the Manhattan DA’s office does not yet have Trump’s tax returns. If you have some info to link indicating otherwise, I’m all ears.

          • At this point, it’s all for naught. NYT will likely enter that info into the public record, making the legal games and cover-ups useless.

          • Maybe the “public record” of public opinion. But such is not valid evidence (without sourcing) in a court of law. Vance needs the actual records to bring formal criminal indictments. Could the NY Times revealing damage Trump in the election? Sure, and rightfully so. But, I want Trump criminally prosecuted in NY state court after being kicked out of office.
            Now, in theory, Vance could subpoena the NY Times reporters to testify in his case but he’s probably reluctant to do so. But Trump’s delay tactics come into play with potential statute of limitations on some of his crimes. In fact, Vance is making this very argument before the 2nd Circuit as we speak.

          • Let’s wait and see before assuming reluctance on Vance’s part. If NYT has those records in toto, they’ll be landing on Vance’s desk. And that’s assuming that they weren’t already there in the first place.

          • OK, that’s a bet for a beer. I’m betting the Times stands behind their reporters and defies a potential subpoena for their sources. Without the sources, the “records” themselves won’t carry much legal weight since they could be easily fabricated or falsified and easily challenged in court to be thrown out.
            Now, the Times could go ahead and reveal the sources since it would be a part of a grand jury investigation and completely sealed. But a judge could later order the GJ testimony released, or the identities simply “leaked,” and the Times might feel compromised.
            Many journalists over the years actually spent time in prison in contempt of court on similar matters. Remember how long “deep throat” remained a secret.

          • **eyeroll** All that is proceeding on a number of unproven assumptions, not lest of which is secrecy who have proven to be rather lousy at it.

  3. Trump has been taking some significant political punches. This is the equivalent of a political baseball bat to the kneecaps. We can show no mercy. If he’s on the ground we need to keep whaling on him with political baseball bats. Under NO circumstances should we allow him to even catch his breath, much less get back up. Politically kick that sumbitch when he’s down. Over, and over and over again through and PAST election day!

    • At this point, I’m flashing back to one of my favorite comic book series involving the classic pulp hero The Shadow, Hell’s Heatwave. The story’s unmasked villain runs into a lynch mob of immigrants whose lives he ruined. He offers them money, they tear him apart. That’s where we are with Donnie Boy, who is giving whole new meaning to the Shadow tagline “Crime does not pay.”

  4. He owes $300M to someone/s or an entity in 2022. He’s f*cking freaking out here folks. If he doesn’t get re-elected and play the game for whom he owes, the chits are going to be called in and he’s gonna have to pay. He may want to go to jail for fraud in NY rather than face Russian oligarchs!

    Now the question is, are we sure these are the legitimate tax returns? How did the NYT’s get them? No conspiracy just wondering because 45’s done some shi**y stuff to try and bull shi* everyone.

    • It’s likely the real deal. Seriously, how does revealing you only paid a little under what I did in taxes help him? We both know he’ll never reveal the real ones on his own and that he’s lousy at the cover-up thing. And there’s his reaction, which is following the predictable pattern of when someone is telling the truth about him.

  5. Thank you for the write up. Some add’l things that stood out to me as someone who worked in banking and finance and dealt with these documents / issues.

    1. Note that the Times article avoids conjecture, as is appropriate. But there are plenty of notes that you can see issues lurking in the subtext.

    2. Notably, they take the tax forms at their word on Trump’s endless losses and deductions. But Susanne Craig hangs a lantern several times on her 2018 piece, which covered how Fred Trump abused and manipulated the rules. Yes, it’s sort of a scandal that Trump has such huge losses that he pays no taxes. But are those losses and wrote offs legit? If they are not, that will be a whole other story.

    3. Ivanka has made millions (tens of millions?) as a consultant for Trump, fees which he writes off. Here’s another clue that there may be crimes in addition to tax schemes.

    4. Remember when Rachel Maddow got that 2006 tax return and we sorta thought maybe Trump’s side leaked it because it was a year he finally paid taxes? I’m leaning more into that theory, as we’ve now learned that HE CLAWED ALL OF THOSE TAX PAYMENTS BACK.

    • All good points. During the first campaign i argued with a local Trump supporter that given what we already know about Trump, there is likely to be some shady stuff in his taxes. He retorted “Innocent until proven guilty.” Fair enough, but given the experience of the last four years, the likelihood of tax evasion is even higher than I previously thought.

  6. As a wise bluesman once sang (and was repeated by Led Zeppelin several decades), “if it keeps on rainin’, levee’s gonna break.” And this right here, my friends, is the final collapse of the levee that Donnie Dumdum has been holding back for a long-ass time.

    Anybody saying that this maladministration was about fascism or Germany redux never fully appreciated how it was driven by more puerile motives, specifically money.

  7. Trump is under water. His net worth is very probably negative, which means he’s effectively broke and headed for personal bankruptcy. And with tax fraud indictments looming, this is just the beginning of his woes. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow.

    • “Nothing beside remains./Round that colossal decay, boundless and bare,/The lone and level sands stretch far away.”–Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

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