“What a beautiful ballroom,” President Trump said as he walked into a campaign fundraiser recently at a hotel in downtown Chicago.
Donors laughed. The hotel was Trump’s. They were paying the president to cater his own fundraiser.
The Chicago event exemplifies a pattern of the Trump presidency: It was another presidential trip that brought Trump private benefits. The hotel was paid about $100,000 for the lunch, according to a Republican official who helped coordinate it.
Mr. Trump’s decision to shift his home base to Palm Beach also comes at a time when the president has been disengaged from daily operations at the Trump Organization.The chorus of Bronx cheers from New York officials at the news that President Trump changed his primary residence to Florida was confirmation of what friends and advisers have said for months: Resuming his former life in Manhattan would be impossible.
But Mr. Trump’s decision to shift his home base to his resort in Palm Beach, which a person close to the president said was primarily to escape New York taxes, also comes at a time when the president has been disengaged from daily operations at the Trump Organization, which he once ran from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
Mr. Trump turned over the family real estate company to his sons after his election and company executives say they doubt he will have a day-to-day management role in the business when he leaves the White House.
“When my father became commander in chief of this country, we got out of all international business.”
— Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, in an interview on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Oct. 15
“We’ve been international businesspeople for decades, but we can’t even do those kinds of deals anymore. We can’t even continue, and because we chose not to, because we didn’t think it was appropriate. So that’s the double standard. The media said, ‘Oh, you’re enriching yourselves.’ We’re like, ‘We literally stopped.’ ”
— Donald Trump Jr., executive vice president of the Trump Organization, in an interview on “Fox and Friends,” Oct. 30
The president’s sons say the Trump business empire no longer makes money from foreign deals.
It’s a false claim whether you take Eric Trump’s version (“we got out of all international business”) or Donald Trump Jr.’s formulation (“we literally stopped”).
View the complete November 1 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post webs here.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.
For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.
Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.
View the complete October 16 article by Heather Vogell from ProPublica on the AlterNet website here.
WASHINGTON — Eric Trump sounded shocked that Hunter Biden hadn’t drawn more criticism for his lucrative business deals in Ukraine and China while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president.
“Can you imagine if I took 3 cents from the Ukraine or 4 cents from China?” President Trump’s second-oldest son asked in a recent Fox Business appearance.
Eric Trump and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., run the Trump Organization, which conducts business — and takes in tens of millions of dollars annually — around the globe and is still owned by the president. The company is forging ahead with projects in Ireland, India, Indonesia and Uruguay, and is licensing the Trump name in such turbulent areas as Turkey and the Philippines.
The Trump Organization’s two Scottish golf courses lost $14.3 million in 2018, extending a multiyear string of losses that have intensified since Donald Trump took office, according to annual financial reports released this month.
The results add further pressure to two of President Trump’s key overseas investments at a time when the company faces backlashes on many fronts, including customers who shun the president’s family business for political reasons and golf course neighbors upset by the company’s plans to build hundreds of new homes on bucolic farmland.
The losses at the two Scotland courses — the Turnberry resort along the southwestern coast and another seaside course near Aberdeen in the northeast — were detailed in documents filed by the Trump Organization with the British government and posted online in recent days.
View the complete October 8 article by Joshua Partlow on The Washington Post website here.
An anti-Muslim group that had been planning a gala at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida said Monday that the Trump Organization had abruptly canceled the event.
The group, ACT for America, issued a statement saying Trump’s company had “caved to the Left’s bullying tactics” in canceling its Nov. 7 dinner gala. After Florida newspapers reported on the planned gala last weekend, the event was condemned by groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“Regrettably, the Trump attorneys in New York caved to the Left’s bullying tactics and made a decision to cancel our event within hours,” ACT said in a statement posted to Twitter.
View the complete October 7 article by David A. Fahrenthold on The Washington Post website here.
Judge had ruled earlier Monday against Trump’s efforts to block Manhattan DA’s subpoena for his taxes and other financial infoPresident Donald Trump won a temporary stay of an earlier court ruling Monday to compel release of his tax returns to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York granted the motion due to “the unique issues raised by this appeal,” which had been filed by Trump’s lawyers in the morning seeking an answer by 1 p.m.
“The notion that the President would be subject to criminal process while he is challenging the constitutionality of that very process is self-refuting,” wrote Trump attorney Patrick Strawbridge. “Whether or not the Court ultimately agrees with the President’s constitutional challenge to the subpoena, he is entitled to appellate review before his papers are forcibly disclosed to a state grand jury.”
View the complete October 7 article by Doug Sword on The Roll Call website here.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump‘s lawsuit challenging a subpoena from New York prosecutors for his tax returns.
Judge Victor Marrero, a district judge in New York appointed by former President Clinton, rejected Trump’s argument that he cannot be subject to the criminal process while in office.
“This Court cannot endorse such a categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process as being countenanced by the nation’s constitutional plan,” Marrero wrote in a 75-page ruling.
View the complete October 7 article by Naomi Jagoda on The Hill website here.
A military official formerly in charge of all White House communications for the U.S. Army at Mar-a-Lago was sentenced to three years of probation on Friday after he made false statements to a federal agent during a child pornography investigation.
Richard Ciccarella — a non-commissioned officer who told federal agents he was in charge of communications at President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort — became a target of an investigation after he uploaded photos of a young girl to a seedy Russian website between 2017 and 2018, according to court documents.
Ciccarella used the username RICH25N to upload suspicious photographs and folders to the website iMGSRC.RU between November 2017 and February 2018, according to court documents.
