Tag: Trump organization

Trump sues Manhattan DA to block release of tax returns

Axios logoPresident Trump on Thursday sued Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance in an effort to block New York prosecutors from obtaining 8 years of his personal and corporate tax returns from his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA.

Context: The New York Times reported this week that Vance’s office had subpoenaed Trump’s tax returns as part of its investigation into hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.

  • This will be at least the third time Trump has sued to block the release of his tax returns. Earlier this year, the president filed a lawsuit against House Democratsand the state of New York over a law that would permit tax officials to turn over Trump’s state tax returns.
  • Trump, his family and his company also filed a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank to block the bank from complying with congressional subpoenas for their business records. A federal judge in Manhattan declined their request to block Deutsche Bank, which later confirmed that it is indeed in possession of Trump’s tax returns.

View the complete September 19 article by Zachary Basu on the Axios website here.

Trump reveals a motivation for his anti-homelessness push: Foreign real estate tenants

Washington Post logoOne bit of rhetoric that has been central to President Trump’s political career is the primacy of Americans above everyone else. His “America First” mantra has been used to isolate the United States internationally and to defend his dramatic immigration policies.

“Republicans believe that we must take care of our own citizens first,” he said at a rally on Monday night in New Mexico — in contrast to immigrants who enter the country illegally. He’d just made that point, reading from the teleprompter: “Our scarce resources are in danger of being rapidly depleted to the point that we will be unable to effectively care for our own citizens,” he said, “you and our existing homeless populations, many of whom are American veterans, right?”

That is indeed true. One estimate indicates 9 percent of those experiencing homelessness are veterans, nearly 38,000 individuals in total.

View the complete September 17 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Trump has been keeping close tabs on the Mar-a-Lago books during his presidency

AlterNet logoDonald Trump has not given up control of his for-profit businesses as he pretends at the task of playing president. Members of Trump’s transition team or, more likely, government ethics officials were at least able enough to convey how grotesquely improper that was, to the point where Trump was obliged to pantomime handing those companies’ management over to his adult children, but he did not financially divest from those companies, as literally every other modern president was expected to do as a matter of basic norms.

The whole thing has been a charade. A fraud. And as we hear, every month, of new instances in which government agencies, the military, the Secret Service, or the thoroughly toadying vice president have been forced to put government money into Trump’s businesses and therefore his own pockets, the pretense that Trump is somehow uninvolved with this grift of his own making is at this point barely pretensed-at.

The New York Times cites current and former White House officials to report that Trump “spends more time talking about his properties in private than he does in public, and even as president, remains intimately involved with club minutiae, like knowing all the names on his Mar-a-Lago membership roll.” To spell that out: Trump’s private business invites well-heeled supplicants to pay cash to Donald’s for-profit club. Trump is intimately involved with learning all the names that have given him those cash infusions.

View the complete September 10 post from the Daily Kos not he AlterNet website here.

Eric Trump mocked for attacking Washington Post reporter’s standard attempt at getting story

AlterNet logoEric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump, attempted to humiliate Washington Post journalist David Farenthold for sending a letter to the Trump Organization that — despite his disparaging characterization — was in fact standard journalistic procedure.

On Friday the president’s son tweeted “These are the tactics used by the @WashingtonPost. @JeffBezos – you should be very proud… ?” He also included a copy of a letter ostensibly written by Farenthold in which the journalist offered members of the Trump Organization his contact information, offered to speak with potential sources on background and provided them with an encrypted link where they could send documents anonymously.

“Ummm, Eric. This is called journalism,” Ahmed Baba, the editor-in-chief of Rantt Media, tweeted in response to the supposed outrage expressed by the president’s son. “Speaking to sources on background and anonymously sourcing documents to expose corruption is par for the course. I think you should learn how to use this other neat thing called Google before you tweet.”

View the complete post by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

The Trump Secrets Hiding Inside Deutsche Bank

New York Times logoThe president’s longtime lender has extensive documents related to Mr. Trump’s personal and business finances. Here’s what they could reveal.

Deutsche Bank’s disclosure on Tuesday that it has tax returns related to President Trump’s family or business set off a frenzy of speculation about what those materials might reveal.

But a trove of other data and documents that his longtime lender is sitting on might prove more revelatory to investigators digging into Mr. Trump’s finances. That includes records of how Mr. Trump made his money, whom he has partnered with, the terms of his extensive borrowings and what transactions he has engaged in with Russians or other foreign nationals.

For nearly two decades, Deutsche Bank was the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with Mr. Trump, who had a long record of defaulting on loans. The bank over the years collected reams of his personal and corporate information.

View the complete August 28 article by David Enrich on The New York Times website here.

Trump’s company could save millions if interest rates fall as he demands

Washington Post logoPresident Trump stands to save millions of dollars annually in interest on outstanding loans on his hotels and resorts if the Federal Reserve lowers rates as he has been demanding, according to public filings and financial experts.

In the five years before he became president, Trump borrowed more than $360 million via four loans from Deutsche Bank for his hotels in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, as well his 643-room Doral golf resort in South Florida.

The payments on all four properties vary with interest rate changes, according to Trump’s official financial disclosures. That means he has already benefited from falling interest rates that were spurred in part by a cut the Federal Reserve announced in July, the first in more than a decade — and his payments could drop by millions of dollars more annually if the central bank grants Trump’s wish and further lowers short-term rates, experts said.

View the complete August 24 article by Jonathan O’Connell, David A. Fahrenthold and Heather Long on The Washington Post website here.

Trump just got busted for inflating his golf resorts’ value by $165 million — which could be a federal crime

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump appears to have misstated the value of his Scottish golf resorts by $165 million, an act which could potentially constitute a federal crime.

The controversy came to light after seemingly conflicting financial disclosure forms regarding the president’s Aberdeen and Turnberry resorts in Scotland were submitted in the U.S. and the U.K., according to a new report by HuffPost.

In the president’s 2018 U.S. filing for those resorts, he claimed that each resort was worth more than $50 million. In his balance sheets to the British government filed for the same period, Trump claimed that the resorts’ aggregate debt was greater than their assets by 47.9 million pounds, or the equivalent to $64.8 million as of Dec. 31, 2017.

View the complete August 21 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

‘If you’re a good worker, papers don’t matter’: How a Trump construction crew has relied on immigrants without legal status

Washington Post logoOSSINING, N.Y. — For nearly two decades, the Trump Organization has relied on a roving crew of Latin American employees to build fountains and waterfalls, sidewalks and rock walls at the company’s winery and its golf courses from New York to Florida.

Other employees at Trump clubs were so impressed by the laborers — who did strenuous work with heavy stone — that they nicknamed them “Los Picapiedras,” Spanish for “the Flintstones.”

For years, their ranks have included workers who entered the United States illegally, according to two former members of the crew. Another employee, still with the company, said that remains true today.

View the complete August 9 article by Joshua Partlow and David A. Fahrenthold on The Washington Post website here.

Banks just handed over documents that may be related to Trump’s financial ties to Russia

The companies complying with subpoenas for the documents include Deutsche Bank, which has financed the Trump Organization.

A number of major Wall Street banks have handed over thousands of documents to congressional committees pertaining to Russian figures who may have had links to President Donald Trump, his family, or the the Trump Organization, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The firms, including Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, passed along the documents subpoenaed by investigators with both the House Finance Committee and House Intelligence Committee. The banks are complying with subpoenas sent to them in April.

The specific details of the documents remain scarce, as do the identities of the Russian figures or entities specifically mentioned in the material.

View the complete August 8 article by Casey Michael on the ThinkProgress website here.

Trump defends Deutsche Bank in bizarre series of tweets — and sets off alarm bells: ‘I smell trouble’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump raised eyebrows with a series of tweets defending his banking history.

The president insisted he did not need to borrow money to pursue real estate projects, and also claimed he could easily have obtained loans from any bank — rather than relying on foreign investors and the embattled Deutsche Bank.

“The Fake News Media loves the narrative that I didn’t use many banks because the banks didn’t like me,” Trump tweeted. “No, I didn’t use many banks because I didn’t (don’t) need their money (old fashioned, isn’t it?). If I did, it would have been very easy for me to get.”

View the complete July 11 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.