New York state tax department reviewing fraud allegations involving Trump in NYT article

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/10/02/ny-state-reviewing-nyt-tax-fraud-allegations-on-trump-tax-tax-history-father-new-york-times-white-house-tax-return-new-york-tax-department.html

New York state tax department reviewing fraud allegations involving Trump in NYT article

Opinion | Donald Trump and the Self-Made Sham - The New York Times

"Now let’s see your tax returns, Mr. President.



By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.



“I built what I built myself.”



This boast has long been at the core of the mythology of Donald Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. As the oft-told story goes, young Mr. Trump accepted a modest $1 million loan from his father, Fred, a moderately successful real estate developer from Queens, and — through smarts, hard work and sheer force of will — parlayed that loan into a multibillion-dollar global empire.



It’s a classic American tale of ambition and self-determination. Not Horatio Alger, exactly, but appealing, and impressive, nonetheless.



Except that, like so much of what Mr. Trump has been selling the American public in recent years, this origin story was a sham — a version of reality so elaborately embellished that it qualifies as fan fiction more than biography. Also, as we’ve come to expect from Mr. Trump, the creation of this myth involved a big dose of ethically sketchy, possibly even illegal activity.



As an in-depth investigation by The Times has revealed, Mr. Trump is only self-made if you don’t count the massive financial rewards he received from his father’s business beginning as a toddler. (By age 3, little Donald was reportedly pulling in an annual income of what today would be $200,000 a year.) These benefits included not only the usual perks of hailing from a rich, well-connected family — the connections, the access to credit, the built-in safety net. For the Trumps, it also involved direct cash gifts and tens of millions in “loans” that never charged interest or had to be repaid. Fred Trump even purchased several properties and business ventures, putting ownership either fully or partly in the names of his children, who reaped the profits.



As Donald Trump emerged as the favorite son, Fred made special deals and arrangements to increase Donald’s fortunes in particular. The Times found that, before Donald had turned 30, he had received close to $9 million from his father. Over the longer haul, he received upward of what, in today’s dollars, would be $413 million.



Along the way, it seems that certain liberties were taken with tax laws. The Times found that concocting elaborate schemes to avoid paying taxes on their father’s estate, including greatly understating the value of the family business, became an important pastime for Fred’s children, with Donald taking an active role in the effort. According to tax experts, the activities in question show a pattern of deception, a deliberate muddying of the financial waters. Asked for comment on The Times’s findings, a lawyer for the president provided a written statement denying any wrongdoing and asserting that, in fact, Mr. Trump had little to do with the dizzying transactions involving his family’s wealth.



Everyone can understand the impulse to polish one’s background in order to make a good impression. For Mr. Trump, whose entire life has been about branding and selling a certain type of gaudy glamour, this image-polishing has been all the more vital to his success. And he has pursued it with a shameless, at times giddy, abandon.



Veterans of New York news media still laugh to recall how Mr. Trump would call them up, pretending to be a publicist named John Barron, or sometimes John Miller, in order to regale them with tales of Mr. Trump’s glamorous personal life — how many models he was dating, which actresses were pursuing him, which celebrities he was hanging out with. As gross and tacky and bizarre as this all seemed, it was aimed squarely at fostering the image of Donald Trump as a master of the universe who, as the cliché goes, women wanted and men wanted to be.



This mythos was burnished and expanded by Mr. Trump’s years on “The Apprentice,” where he played the role of an all-powerful, all-knowing business god who could make or break the fortunes of those who clamored for his favor. Occasionally he could be harsh or even insulting, but it was always in the context of delivering the tough love that the contestants so needed to hear. And who was more qualified to deliver those lessons than Donald Trump? As with all reality TV, it was total bunk. But it promoted precisely the golden image that Mr. Trump — with a multimillion-dollar assist from his father — had carefully cultivated for his entire life.



With this glimpse into the inner workings of the Trump family finances, some of the grimier, ethically suspect aspects of Mr. Trump’s mythmaking begin to emerge — and with them, many questions about all that we still do not know about the man and his business empire. Seeing as how that empire and his role in building it are so central to who Mr. Trump claims to be — the defining feature of his heroic narrative — the American public has a right to some answers. For starters, now would be an excellent time for Mr. Trump to hand over those tax returns on which he has thus far kept a death grip.



In his 1987 memoir “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump famously offered his take on the origins of his success: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”



But increasingly, Mr. Trump’s willingness to bend the truth — and the rules — in the service of his myth looks less like innocent exaggeration than malicious deception, with a dollop of corruption tossed in for good measure. It’s not the golden, glittering success story he has been peddling. It’s shaping up to be something far darker."



Opinion | Donald Trump and the Self-Made Sham - The New York Times

Lessons From The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Nomination Fight

Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father - The New York Times

"The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.



President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.



Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.



But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.



Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.



These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.



The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.



The president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for this article. But a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings. “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”



Mr. Harder sought to distance Mr. Trump from the tax strategies used by his family, saying the president had delegated those tasks to relatives and tax professionals. “President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters,” he said. “The affairs were handled by other Trump family members who were not experts themselves and therefore relied entirely upon the aforementioned licensed professionals to ensure full compliance with the law.”...



Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father - The New York Times

New York Times: Police questioned Kavanaugh after bar fight in 1985 - CNNPolitics

"Washington (CNN)Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was involved in an altercation at a bar when he was an undergraduate student at Yale and was accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report obtained by The New York Times.



Kavanaugh and four other men were questioned by the New Haven, Connecticut, police department as a result of the incident in September 1985, the Times reports. Kavanaugh was a junior at Yale at the time.

The police report referred to the altercation as "an assault," according to the Times. There is no indication that charges were filed, and the report did not say whether anyone was arrested.

A 21-year-old man accused Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him "for some unknown reason," according to the report obtained by the Times. A witness reportedly said that Chris Dudley, a close friend of Kavanaugh's who has come out in support of his nomination, then hit the man in the ear with a glass.

The victim, Dom Cozzolino, "was bleeding from the right ear," according to the report obtained by the Times, and later was treated at a local hospital.

Dudley denied the accusation to the police, and Kavanaugh did not want "to say if he threw the ice or not," the Times reports that the police report said. The incident reportedly occurred at a bar called Demery's.

Dudley has spoken out in support of Kavanaugh's nomination, and on Monday the White House released joint statements from him and a former Yale suite mate, Dan Murphy, rebutting any claims that Kavanaugh drank to the point of blacking out.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests from the Times for comment on Monday. Dudley also did not respond to the Times, and Cozzolino declined to comment to the newspaper.

Chad Ludington, a former classmate of Kavanaugh's, has said Kavanaugh did not tell the truth about his drinking in his testimony Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In Ludington's statement released Sunday he also mentions an altercation involving Kavanaugh: "On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man's face."

Ludington told CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" anchor Chris Cuomo that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert, when he and a group of friends were drinking at Demery's.

They were sitting near a man who they thought looked like the lead singer of UB40, Ali Campbell, and were trying to figure out whether it was him, Ludington told Cuomo.

The man noticed Ludington, Kavanaugh and the others looking at him and -- according to Ludington -- aggressively asked them to stop.

Ludington told Cuomo he initially remembered Kavanaugh then threw his beer at the man, but recently found out from the report that there were ice cubes in the thrown drink.

"We weren't drinking water, so it must've been some sort of mixed drink," Ludington told Cuomo.

The man next then "took a swing at Brett," Ludington continued, and then they were "two guys fighting -- that was all very quick."

Dudley then took his drink and "proceeded to smash it up against the guy's head," Ludington recalled.

There was some shouting, and then the police showed up, Ludington said. They looked around and asked questions, he said, and then Dudley was put in a squad car and taken to jail."



New York Times: Police questioned Kavanaugh after bar fight in 1985 - CNNPolitics

Opinion | Victimizing the Victims, Again - The New York Times

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation is on the case.



The agency is now looking into allegations that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh engaged in aggressive sexual misconduct — including assault and possibly rape — when he was in high school and college.



And yet there is a gnawing in my gut that nothing we do now will fully or even sufficiently cause us to recover from the tremendous damage already done by the way the Senate has treated these allegations and the way that the media has covered them.



We have severely damaged the confidence of survivors of sexual assault, particularly childhood sexual assault, to come forward to the authorities and talk openly about what happened to them.



At the same time that the accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s example has inspired countless victims to feel empowered and share their trauma in all manner of forums, the way that her courage has been met in the Senate with condescension, contempt and hostility has secured in many survivors a sense that power will not be sympathetic to the disclosure; it will treat it as an affront and an attack.



The message that the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent to survivors, mostly women, but also many men, is this:



Your pain is not our problem. Your bodies are not your own. Your voice, even at its strongest, is still weaker than any man’s, no matter how sniveling and snide. We are here to protect the order, an old order, in which men rule, even when unruly and reprobate.



They are saying to survivors: Your word and your credibility may be all that you have, but they are not enough for you to be believed. They are saying that fear and trauma may have shocked you into silence, but in the end, you will be punished for that silence. They are saying that the failure of survivors, including children, to properly report and document their victimizations will be viewed later not as evidence of fear and shame, but as evidence of concoction and deceit.



More from opinion on the Kavanaugh-ford hearing



“Why didn’t somebody call the F.B.I. 36 years ago?” Trump asked on Fox News. Can you imagine: a 15-year-old girl struggling with processing a sexual assault having the presence of mind, composure and wherewithal to track down the proper F.B.I. contact in the pre-internet age and report something that few people even talked about in those days?



These senators are telling teenage boys this:



You can drink beer like it’s water and we will believe you when you say you have had perfect recall your entire life in spite of it. You can write all sorts of damning horribleness in your yearbook and have multiple people accuse you of sexual assault, and yet we will still hail you as a paragon of integrity and tell you in front of the world that “you’ve got nothing to apologize for,” as Senator Lindsey Graham said of Kavanaugh during the hearing.



What those senators are saying to all of us is that, for them, patriarchy and privilege occupy positions of primacy in this country. And, when that primacy is threatened, it is perfectly reasonable that those affected would whine and rage at the possibility of being denied that to which they are owed, as birthright and gender benefit.



As sexual assault accusers go, one would have been hard pressed to find one more able and affable than Ford. She is a professor who talked about the alleged assault before Kavanaugh’s nomination, one who by all accounts wanted to remain anonymous. Compelled by her own sense of patriotism, she finally came forward and told her story with grace and composure as millions of Americans watched.



The senators, unable to impeach her credibility outright and leery of exposing their callousness and contempt, chose instead a patronizing paternalism. They shed crocodile tears for Ford, painting her as a victim, yes: not of Kavanaugh but rather of the Democrats on the committee. To them, somehow she was a clueless pawn in the Democrats’ game to besmirch and indeed destroy the name of a good man.



This diminished and belittled in every way the very real and very credible accusation that Ford made and completely blotted out the incredible courage it would take for a person to appear before them if it indeed happened to them.



In other words, the Republicans on the committee patted her on her head while spitting in her face.



And somehow we still have the gall to feign astonishment that people wouldn’t immediately report an attack, instead holding it for a year, decades, maybe even a lifetime.



People don’t come forward because of authorities like the Republicans on the committee, the ones who will scoff at you, blame you and not believe you.



Just as Ford was creaking the door open and empowering others to come out of the closet with their own stories, Republicans on the committee rushed to slam it back shut and secure its closure with enmity if necessary.



They demand to make survivors quake with fear again."



Opinion | Victimizing the Victims, Again - The New York Times

Opinion | Trump Wants to Turn the Safety Net Into a Trap - The New York Times

 "The Trump administration wants to change how the government defines who is or is likely to become a “public charge.” The Department of Homeland Security released a draft regulation on Sept. 22, in which it proposed that any immigrant who is likely to use or who has already used Medicaid, public housing or a rent voucher, cash assistance or food stamps could be barred from the country or kept from getting permanent resident status.
The proposed rule change is part and parcel of the Trump administration’s hostility to immigrants. But it’s also about more than that. The administration would remake the idea of self-sufficiency, admitting only those who never need to turn to the public safety net, but instead rely solely on “their own capabilities” or the resources of their families and private charity. It even asserts that people who use public programs “in a relatively small amount or for a relatively short duration” are still considered dependent on the welfare state.
This redefinition of self-sufficiency ignores the way that most people use these programs. Even people with jobs often cycle on and off assistance as work comes and goes, or to plug the gaps when it just doesn’t pay enough. These programs allow people to remain healthy and solvent — supporting their independence. This rule therefore hurts everyone, not just immigrants, by stigmatizing the safety net funded by all of us to help people survive when they fall on hard times.
Take food stamps. According to a study in March by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly three-quarters of the non-disabled adults below the age of 59 who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in a typical month worked in the year before receiving assistance or in the year after. Over half work in the same month they participate. Most people aren’t on food stamps for very long; they go on and off as work comes up or falls through, using the program to keep themselves and their families fed when money is short.
Medicaid is similar. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported in June that nearly two-thirds of non-elderly, non-disabled enrollees work, but most have low-wage jobs that don’t come with many benefits, including health insurance. The majority of Medicaid recipients work full-time, but they still face high rates of financial insecurity. Medicaid helps ensure that they and their children can stay healthy even if their employers don’t offer insurance. The same pattern appears among those who get help with rent: Among families who received rental assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2016, 58 percent worked; they just didn’t make enough to afford the roof over their heads.
These families would most likely chafe at the idea that they aren’t independent or self-sufficient. They’re working and trying to earn a decent living. But given the way our low-wage, service sector economy functions — offering erratic, stingy jobs — it’s often not enough to survive. So families patch together the holes in their finances with the threads of our safety net.
Under the administration’s new rule, any immigrant who needed this kind of help — food stamps when work dries up, Medicaid and rental vouchers when it doesn’t stretch far enough — could be denied an extension of their stay or a more permanent status because of that need. By making such a change and labeling these people “public charges,” the administration is signaling even to the native born that using government programs as stopgap measures makes you a leech on the system.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the deterrent effect of this rule would result in immigrants forgoing $2.3 billion in federal and state benefits a year, benefits that they would otherwise be eligible for. The department does not estimate how many other Americans will be pushed away from these programs because of the potential stigma. But if the rule becomes federal policy, it’s hard to see how anyone would feel the right to use the social safety net.
And that is indeed the point. The Trump administration has been seeking ways to keep people from using these programs, mainly through its quest to add work requirements for recipients of nearly any public program. Such requirements similarly ignore the reality of recipients’ lives and add another bureaucratic hurdle many can’t clear. The administration is also considering reorganizations and budget cuts that threaten these programs’ existence.
The sum of its actions is to further steep the social safety net in a stew of shame. The average American will use between four and five government benefits in a lifetime, and yet 44 percent are against “welfare.” Right now, some public assistance programs, such as Medicaid, still enjoy widespread support. But if the Trump administration gets its way, virtually any assistance the government offers will be smeared with the same sentiment."
Opinion | Trump Wants to Turn the Safety Net Into a Trap - The New York Times

Opinion | James Comey: The F.B.I. Can Do This - The New York Times

 

"Although the process is deeply flawed, and apparently designed to thwart the fact-gathering process, the F.B.I. is up for this. It’s not as hard as Republicans hope it will be.
F.B.I. agents are experts at interviewing people and quickly dispatching leads to their colleagues around the world to follow with additional interviews. Unless limited in some way by the Trump administration, they can speak to scores of people in a few days, if necessary.

They will confront people with testimony and other accounts, testing them and pushing them in a professional way. Agents have much better nonsense detectors than partisans, because they aren’t starting with a conclusion.
[Receive the day’s most urgent debates right in your inbox by subscribing to the Opinion Today newsletter.]
Yes, the alleged incident occurred 36 years ago. But F.B.I. agents know time has very little to do with memory. They know every married person remembers the weather on their wedding day, no matter how long ago. Significance drives memory. They also know that little lies point to bigger lies. They know that obvious lies by the nominee about the meaning of words in a yearbook are a flashing signal to dig deeper.

Once they start interviewing, every witness knows the consequences. It is one thing to have your lawyer submit a statement on your behalf. It is a very different thing to sit across from two F.B.I. special agents and answer their relentless questions. Of course, the bureau won’t have subpoena power, only the ability to knock on doors and ask questions. But most people will speak to them. Refusal to do so is its own kind of statement."

Opinion | James Comey: The F.B.I. Can Do This - The New York Times

Brett Kavanaugh: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)