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| credit: M. Luckovich |
Now that his taxes for the last six years are public record, pundits have been diving into the details, and they are finding a lot of potential illegal tax evasion by Herr Trumpillini. My goodness, what is it going to take to get an indictment of this white-collar criminal, who happens to be a former el presidente? Perhaps the most blatant evasion is his repeated use of Schedule C to claim business losses for businesses that did not make a dollar of income. He suffered a defeat in a 1984 New York administrative court battle for exactly this practice of offsetting taxables income with Schedule C losses from companies he owns (Trump Org is composed of over 500 taxable entities). The judge in that case wrote a scathing opinion disallowing the deductions. Trump filed 65 Schedule Cs of which 26 had zero revenue in the returns made public. Quite a hobby! David Cay Johnston explains Trumpillini's tax scheming in his book "Big Cheat".
Congresse's resident tax experts, the Joint Committee on Taxation have raised five red flags that merit further inquiry. In just one example from 2016, Trump registered $30 million in earnings, but claimed $60 million in losses. He paid just $750 in taxes that year; in 2020 he paid none. Some of those losses may be personal expenses, which are not deductible. In several instances the income reported exactly matched the losses reported. For example the filing for DT Endeavor LLC showed income of $680,886.00 and the exact same amount in losses. He deducted expenses of $342,182 for a rental property that did not generate a single dollar of income, raising the question of whether the property was for personal use. He deducted what may be gifts to his children which he reported as loans to avoid the stiff gift tax rate of 40%.
Then there is the $21 million deduction for a land conservation easement on his New York Seven Springs estate in 2015 that is being litigated by New York's Attorney General. She alleges that the property received inflated asset valuations to increase the size of the conservation deduction. And he also took a $1.3 million credit for taxes paid to foreign countries in 2018 without providing a receipt.
If Merritt Garland gives this grifter/tax chet a pass he will destroy what is left of the DoJ's claim to fair and impartial law enforcement in this country. His apparent unwillingness to prosecute a person who committed the greatest crime in the United States of this century--one that corrupted the very fundamental political process on which our Republic rests--is incomprehensible and unacceptable. Passing legislation to plug the obvious lacuna in our federal election process is simply an inadequate response. The man "who lit the fire" must answer for his crimes in federal court.
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| credit: B. Plante BJ Idonwanna sez: Repugnant? You bet'cha. |