After finding out yesterday that the dog flooded the server room, destroying evidence at Mar-a-Lago last October, oops, now we are given to know that this is not the first time that a sudden flooding of an area in a Trump-owned property has destroyed valuable evidence relating to a legal investigation. It happened 35 years ago, when New York City prosecutors spent two years probing more than $3 million in unpaid rent the city was expecting from Trump’s Grand Hyatt hotel from its operations in 1986. Imagine that? A flood, right out of the blue, in a New York skyscraper, destroyed bookkeeping ledgers that were central to an ongoing investigation. Isn’t that something? Raw Story:
That flood was detailed in David Cay Johnston’s 2016 book “The Making of Donald Trump,” and reported by CBS News at the time in the context of then-candidate Trump refusing to release his tax returns, purportedly because he was being audited. It said the two-year audit of Trump’s hotel from the late 1980s involved “stonewalling, disorganization and obfuscation at every turn.”
The story has a whole new context after CNN reported that in October of last year, a drained swimming pool at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort flooded a room with computer servers containing surveillance video. […]
In the Grand Hyatt case, city auditors filed a 73-page report, posted by CBS News. It said that Trump’s lease obligations should have required substantial documentation — “documentation (that) the Hotel — for one reason or another — could not or did not provide.”
Of particular interest today is the next sentence.
“In September, 1988, the Hotel informed us that it could not locate seven of the twelve monthly general ledgers, because they ‘were discarded after they were severely damaged by water when the room in which they were stored was flooded,’” the report said.
Shazam. Evidence just happened to be destroyed by water. That delayed the prosecutors but, alas for Donald Trump, it didn’t throw them off the case.
Two months later, the report said, “summary information” about the data being sought was found at a storage site in New Jersey.
“We determined the summaries would be sufficient for our purpose, although their use entailed substantial additional labor to reconstruct the details of the monthly transactions,” the report said.
The audit report went on to describe more delays and missing documents.
The Trump hotel’s “resistance to our review and the Hotel’s lapses in record keeping had substantial impact upon our inquiry’s scope and methodology,” the report said.
The basis of the investigation was that Trump’s hotel paid $3.7 million for rent in 1985 and then its gross revenues happily increased in 1986 — but it only paid $667,155? That will get red flags rising. What’s that you say? There’s an echo in this room? Why yes, you must be thinking of how Truth Social is worth between $5 and $25 million but Donald Trump only made $200 from it, scarcely the price of a good lunch in Palm Beach.
After lawsuits and the bankruptcy of an accounting firm used by Trump, the case was mistakenly labeled as disposed and later reopened. Trump had sold the hotel and the new owners reached an undisclosed settlement, CBS News reported.
Undoubtedly, Trump bought them off. That’s how he settles lawsuits. Unfortunately, he cannot buy off the United States. But he’ll try. Oh, he will try. If you think that the flooded server room is something, my theory is that Trump’s burning up the phone wires to whatever Republican cronies he’s got left in Washington, begging them to mitigate this case, and he’s offering them the moon. And I’ll bet they’re letting the calls go to voice mail.
I feel so sorry for Donald, being the owner of all these leaky buildings. Don’t you? I think that we should join hands and sing Kumbaya, for all these tragedies the poor man is experiencing.
“Donald’s buildings are wet, Kumbaya,
It’s as bad as it gets, Kumbaya,
Please Lord plug up the leaks, and arrest all these freaks
Oh, Lord, Kumbaya.”
Any average citizen, with his history of crimes at every level, would have been locked up YEARS AGO! FACT. Cue up the privileged white folks who believe in the propaganda on the Supreme Court building…but but but. Stop pussy footing around before the unimaginable occurs…he gets off on everything.
He has a track record of utter invincibility because he buys his way out of everything.
The people he buys are as despicable as he is. Please please please let his lifelong crime spree bite him in the ass.
If he wanted to destroy electronic records he could hire an IT specialist to replace the drives and grind the old ones to small bits. Instead he uses the wet method for destroying paper and does tens of thousands in damages to his premises, leaving the data untouched. On top of all this he invents a cockamamie story that only draws attention to his crime. There aren’t words to describe this kind of stupidity.
Trump has a unique brand of stupidity. If he was smarter than he was, he never would have run for president, because he would have understood his insanely woeful lack of ability to do the job. But he wasn’t able to see that and the GOP co-signed on this idiocy of his and here we are.
Throughout his four interminable years in office, he demonstrated lack of comprehension and lack of wherewithal to respond to many emergent situations, COVID being the worst of them.
He is a primitive thinker. And since he can’t even run a computer himself like the yous and mes, the last thing that’s going to occur to him is a technical solution.
He was never interested in doing the job. He was interested in pulling one.
Supposedly, a pool boy, drained the pool. Hmmm. When we drain ours – there is a hose that is put into the drain system – NOT THE GARAGE! It was done by plan and betcha 45 had that hose go right into the server room.
Totally. And I don’t know the details of the “accident” in the New York building years ago but I’m sure it was preventable.
Fish gotta swim.
Birds gotta fly.
Man gotta sit and ask why why why?
Kurt Vonnegut
Time to be vigilant against this creep.