Tag: trump organization indictment
Endorse This! Colbert Hits Trump Where It Hurts Most

Endorse This! Colbert Hits Trump Where It Hurts Most

We all know that President Trump's artificially tanned skin is as thin as the pseudo-hair on his head -- and if there's any topic that really irks him, it's the question of his fake "billionaire" status.

“The one thing he hates more than anything is people hearing he’s not as rich he claims he is,” said Stephen Colbert during his latest monologue.

Colbert evidently noted that New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused Trump and his entire family of “staggering” fraud that involves drastically inflating the value of his assets, especially his Mar-a-Lago home.

Hilariously, Trump claimed the Florida estate is worth $739 million -- while James estimates the actual value as just one-tenth of that number. That's a lot of money to store classified documents with ketchup all over them. And Colbert appeared to pick up on that as well.

“Well, of course, it’s worth less now,” he quipped. “The FBI took away all the most re-sellable documents.”

Watch the entire segment below:


Ivanka Trump, center, with former President Trump in the Oval Office.

Will Ivanka Be Indicted Next In Trump Organization Criminal Probe?

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Back in November 2020, after investigations into decades of Donald Trump's tax returns revealed the former president didn't seem to ever pay any taxes, reports came out in TheNew York Times detailing inquiries being made by the New York district attorney's office concerning "consulting fees" Ivanka Trump pulled in over the years. A reported $747,622 of these fees were paid to Ivanka by way of a company she co-owned, and appeared within the $26 million in "deductions" claimed by Donald Trump over the years. Whether there were more "consulting fees" received by Ivanka or any of the other Trump offspring was not reported, but considering what we know about the Trumps, speculating that the answer is a resounding and very provable yes seems like a safe bet.

Now that prosecutors have charged the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg with contributing to (and benefiting from) a tax fraud scheme, Weisselberg's financial compensation from the company he helped run seems to have been very clearly set up to hide taxable income. Prosecutors reportedly have two sets of books used by the Trump Organization over the years to delineate how they were scamming the government out of taxes. Since that time it has become clear that even more Trump tax information has been seized by investigators, and what those documents might detail remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, to all who are paying attention: Ivanka Trump and other family members tied to the Trump Organization are clearly under investigation as well.

When the Times story came out in November 2020, Ivanka tweeted, "This is harassment pure and simple." Not unlike her father, Ivanka seems to use her Twitter account to whine about being persecuted while lying about things in general. One of the more problematic aspects of Ivanka's $747,622 consulting fee that appeared on a 2017 disclosure form is that"Ivanka was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments." This means she received consultant tax breaks for a company of which she was also a full-time employee. It's an old-timey tax dodge.

On Monday, former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne gave MSNBC her opinions on what investigators were doing now that Weisselberg has been charged, saying, "Prosecutors went to an amazing amount of effort to show Weisselberg 'we have everything we need,' and they're really not only pressuring him to flip, but the amount of detail in this indictment tells me that they're trying to tell other people you have got to flip, because 'we have everything; we have the double books. We know what you told your tax accountants was a lie. We know that we're gonna be able to prove these cases.'" She went on to say that while we don't know exactly who the unnamed individuals inside of the Weisselberg indictments are, they are likely the next people who will receive the New York prosecutors' legal attentions. "We've heard a lot of this reporting about Ivanka Trump getting consulting fees, consulting fees for things she may or may not have done. That looks to be the next place," said Alksne. "We'll just have to see."

Donald Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio told CNN that the Trump Organization's dirty dealings don't take the highest level of investigation to uncover, calling much of the corruption "all so obvious." D'Antonio explained that the most shocking aspect of the multimillion-dollar organization's tax dodging is "how unsophisticated it is. This is just simple greed, the kind of things almost anyone could imagine, and the minute [prosecutors] went looking for it they found it."

"The other person who I think is in peril is Ivanka Trump. One of the things that Allen Weisselberg is in trouble for is taking money as a contractor and then claiming self-employed status so that he can get some of the retirement benefits that the tax code allows for self-employed people. Well, we know that Ivanka Trump got quite significant sums paid to her as non-employee compensation. That freed the Trump Organization from paying part of her taxes, and it put her in a status that I think the IRS would have lots of questions about. So, these folks don't know how to play the game straight. I think everything they do is crooked," D'Antonio said.

On Saturday, former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had this insight into Donald Trump.

You can watch Trump's biographer D'Antonio talking about the Trump family's legal problems on July 4, and below that you can watch former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne talking about what might be happening next for the Trump gang.

Trump biographer Ivanka's tax issueswww.youtube.com


Former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne talks about the Trump family's potential tax fraud problemswww.youtube.com

Barbara Res

Ex-Trump Org Executive Confirms New York Indictment’s Charges

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In a recent piece for the New York Daily News, former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res offered an insider's view of criminal charges against the ex-president's company and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg.

Res, who worked with Donald Trump on the construction of Trump Tower in the 1980s, has a grim assessment of his integrity and business practices from that era. And while it's been decades since she worked for the man, and her time at his company dates back well before the current charges, she argued that the allegations made against the Trump Organization and Weisselberg — which include a scheme to defraud the government out of taxes on the CFO's non-salary compensation benefits — rings completely true. Based on her view of the inside of Trump's operation, the prosecutor's story lines up exactly with his typical conduct.

"Flaunting and ultimately disobeying the tax laws was a way of life," she explained. "I was on salary, but some executives on the payroll were paid as independent contractors. That meant that Trump could avoid paying his share of payroll taxes and the employee could deduct all sorts of things to diminish his income that you can't do on salary. It was a win-win for everyone except the city, state and federal governments."

Her piece also provides answers to one of the mysteries that arose in the wake of the indictment. The prosecutors accuse the Trump Organization of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million of compensation to Weisselberg over more than a decade. This is a hefty sum from any average person's perspective, and it's certainly the kind of amount that can catch the eye of law enforcement if they're paying attention. But in the perspective of the Trump Organization's size, it's really not that much money. Why wouldn't Weisselberg and Trump just pay the proper taxes? Why take the risk of avoiding taxes when it wouldn't really affect the company's bottom line in any substantial way?

These were reasonable questions. But Res provides a compelling answer, and one that accords with the way Trump behaves in public: This is just how he acts. He tries to cut every corner and cheat at everything, because he thinks he's entitled to.

"If I know the way Trump thinks, and I do, Trump never gave a serious thought about what was legal, only to whether it could be gotten away with. And as far as he was concerned, he could get away with anything. As he has proven so far," she wrote. "The man's M.O. was bending and breaking the rules for maximum profit and advantage."

Another factor, too, helps explain the rationale behind this risky conduct. According to Res, it was about maintaining loyalty from people like Weisselberg:

Trump went to great lengths to make people loyal to him. The definitive example of this was giving a job to an employee's child. This was a default for Trump; it was easy and it cost him nothing. Often Trump "found" jobs, sometimes making them up. The employee then could not go against Trump because the child would lose his job. And he did this with his most loyal employees.
Trump went even further with Weisselberg's kids. Trump paid for one to live in a very expensive apartment and gave him a lucrative job. He helped the other get a prestigious job at a company he did business with. So that made Weisselberg even more loyal and his kids super loyal.

And inducing someone to break the rules with you — to be complicit in the crime of, say, defrauding the government by concealing the true extent of your compensation — binds them to you. They have an interest in protecting you, because you're all in on the same misdeeds.

Res argues that this may even be a force that could keep Weisselberg from flipping against Trump now. She suggests Trump may know about additional criminal conduct Weisselberg engaged in, or that Weisselberg's children may have engaged in, which the ex-president could expose if he feels betrayed. But Res ultimately argues that Weisselberg will cooperate with prosecutors against Trump.

Crucially, too, she says that Trump would've been aware of the illegal tax scheme the company has been charged with.

"In my experience, as with all facets of his business, major decisions like paying someone's rent or tuition were made by Trump and Trump alone. And with his other tax avoidance schemes, Trump had his minions to carry them out — but he was always in charge," she wrote. She told several anecdotes to illustrate the point, including:

The workers who did the demolition prior to the erection of Trump Tower were not paid fair wages and most of them were illegal immigrants. When this came up in court, Trump denied having any knowledge of it. In fact, he had a man on the job watching everything that happened and reporting it back to Trump, every day. Trump knew exactly what was going on.

All this would seem to make Trump himself criminally culpable, but he remains uncharged. One reason observers suspect prosecutors want to get Weisselberg to flip is so they can get him to testify about Trump's own intent to violate the law. Then they could bring criminal charges directly against the former president, rather than just against his company.

As I recently explained, Trump seems to be anticipating this. He is already trying to push the narrative that he was ignorant about the relevant tax laws — and in this case, ignorance of the law can be a legally useful defense. Prosecutors will likely have to prove Trump willfully and knowingly violated the law if they want to criminally charge him.

For those wondering, though, there's little chance Res's account on its own will change Trump's legal circumstances or help prosecutors make the case against him. It's a compelling narrative about his past, and can lead the casual observers to draw damning inferences, but it's not the type of evidence that will likely be allowed in court, as legal experts Eric Columbus and Joyce Vance explained: