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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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As to whether Congress may obtain a president’s tax returns, there is no ambiguity: Federal law empowers the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to submit a written request to the Treasury Department, which oversees the Internal Revenue Service, for “any return or return information.” The Treasury secretary then “shall furnish” the requested information to the committee so that it may conduct its legislative functions.
Perhaps that statute is not clear enough for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The secretary on Monday rebuffed just such a request from Representative Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In April, Mr. Neal requested six years’ worth of federal tax returns for President Trump and several of his companies.
The purpose of the request was not “harassment” of the president, as Mr. Trump and his defenders have branded efforts by Democratic House members to perform legitimate oversight functions. Rather, as https://waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/files/documents/Neal%20Letter%20to%20Rettig%20(signed)%20-%202019.04.03.pdf, the committee “is considering legislative proposals and conducting oversight related to our Federal tax laws, including, but not limited to, the extent to which the I.R.S. audits and enforces the Federal tax laws against a President.”
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The Treasury secretary cited no authority for this stonewalling, which is consistent with the Trump administration’s broad resistance to congressional oversight and the president’s push to quash any investigation into his finances. Instead, Mr. Mnuchin noted that the Justice Department expects to publish a legal opinion soon setting out the administration’s fuller rationale. Hinting at what’s to come, Mr. Mnuchin volunteered that Mr. Neal’s otherwise straightforward request “presents serious constitutional questions” and that fulfilling it “may have lasting consequences for all taxpayers.”
Just as the law is clear on this matter, so too is Supreme Court precedent. The court has repeatedly affirmed the validity of congressional actions taken within the “sphere of legitimate legislative activity” — and it has recognized that this sphere is far-reaching, encompassing “inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes.”
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.
The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.
Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, journalists at The New York Times and elsewhere have been trying to piece together Donald J. Trump’s complex and concealed finances. Now The Times has obtained 10 years of previously unrevealed figures from the president’s federal income tax returns. The tax numbers, for the years 1985 through 1994, paint a far bleaker picture of Mr. Trump’s deal-making abilities and financial condition than the one he has long put forth.
Mr. Trump became an unprecedented president — a businessman and reality television star with no government experience — and he broke with decades-old presidential tradition by refusing to release his income tax returns. Questions about what secrets they may hold — about his recent business dealings and the sources of his financing — only intensified with the Russia inquiry, and the Trump administration is now locked in a battle with House Democrats demanding the last six years of the president’s returns. On Monday, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he would not give a House committee access to the returns.
The newly revealed tax information covers an earlier period of Mr. Trump’s business career. And The Times did not obtain Mr. Trump’s actual tax returns. But it obtained printouts from his official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, from someone who had legal access to them. They represent the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes. And they show that during a tumultuous decade of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse, Mr. Trump’s core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings — ran up $1.17 billion in losses.
The White House’s response to the findings has shifted over time.
Several weeks ago, a senior official issued a statement saying: “The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments. That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay large amount of taxes.”
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If the new tax information does not offer a new narrative of Mr. Trump’s career, its granular detail gives a precise accounting of his financial failures and of the constantly shifting focus that would characterize his decades in business. Here are some key takeaways.
1. Mr. Trump was deep in the red even as he peddled deal-making advice …
2. In multiple years, he appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer …
3. He paid no federal income taxes for eight of the 10 years …
4. He made millions posing as a corporate raider — until investors realized he never followed through …
5. His interest income spiked in 1989 at $52.9 million, but the source is a mystery …
It is the first time such a statement has been cancelled since the Arctic Council was set up in 1996.
A Finnish delegate, Timo Koivurova, said "the others felt they could not water down climate change sentences".
There is international concern that Arctic temperatures are rising twice as fast as in the rest of the world.
On Monday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressed the forum in Rovaniemi, northern Finland, with a speech welcoming the melting of Arctic sea ice, rather than expressing alarm about it.
"Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade," he said. "This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days."
"Arctic sea lanes could become the 21st-Century Suez and Panama Canals," Mr Pompeo said.
At short notice he cancelled talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Tuesday, in a surprise move.
Last year, the New York Times found that Trump had inherited more than $400 million from his father, largely through a series of illegal schemes. Now, in a new report, the Times has discovered that, from 1985 through 1994, Trump businesses suffered losses of more than $1 billion.
It’s hardly a mystery why Trump is desperate to keep his tax returns secret. The most innocent narrative they might possibly reveal is that he’s a horrible businessman who relied on handouts from his father. The question is why anybody else would buy this story.
Perhaps the most explosive finding in Robert Mueller’s investigation is that Trump was secretly negotiating a building deal in Moscow that promised profits of several hundred million dollars, with no risk. Russia habitually gives out sweetheart deals to its overseas political partners, structured in the form of putatively legitimate investments that disguise simple bribes. George Sorial, the current executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, dismisses that deal in a Wall Street Journal op-ed as “a fantasy that no one in the office took seriously.” (Sorial does not explain why, or even mention that, Trump signed a letter of intent for this project if nobody took it seriously.)
What the Times reporting underscores is how utterly vulnerable Trump must have been to an offer like this. The Times information covers only one (very bad) period in Trump’s life, and he did recover by learning how to profit off his image as a successful businessman by renting out his name. Still, there’s little reason to think he stopped being a horrible capitalist. “Year after year,” the Times finds, “Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer.”
Keeping Trump’s tax returns private is not like keeping Mitt Romney’s tax returns private. This is a man who was handed hundreds of millions of dollars, flushed it down the toilet, and was desperate to maintain his image of wealth and success. You couldn’t invent a more inviting target for a foreign intelligence service to manipulate.
Republicans have, incredibly, treated the question of obtaining Trump’s tax returns as a pure political vendetta. Democrats “dislike him with a passion, and they want his tax returns to destroy him,” said Senate Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley. “That’s all that this whole process is about, and it’s Nixonian to the core.”
There’s no public interest in discovering who is paying the mobbed-up, money-hemorrhaging failed casino operator whose sons have described him as reliant on Russian financing? Do Republicans believe Trump’s financial secrets contain no signs of serious corruption or vulnerability to leverage by a hostile power? Or would they rather not know?
Trump’s most profitable business during this period, the Times reported, was not in real estate but in the stock market. As the Times described it, Trump would buy stock in a company, then make public statements that indicated he was contemplating a hostile takeover of that company. The publicity would make the stock price rise, and then Trump — rather than buying more shares to make good on his takeover threat — would sell his stocks at a profit.
That sort of faux takeover talk earned Trump $57 million by 1988, the Times reported. But eventually, investors stopped falling for it: When Trump bought stock in American Airlines and talked about a takeover, the market didn’t bite. Trump lost $34.9 million on short-term stock trades that year, the Times said.
1/ Mark Burnett sold the illusion the Trump was a mega success with a reality TV show filmed on a gimcrack fake boardroom set in e eponymous Tower.
We saw it in focus groups in 2016: the mulish, intractable stupidity of Republican and white male Democratic voters.
2/ "MISTER Trump us the richest man in America." "He's the most successful builder in New York!" "Trump is so rich, that no one could buy him!"
Even when you gave them the truth, the power of 15 years of reality TV indoctrination overcame it.
3/ I was screaming to Republican campaigns about this in 2015 and 16, begging them to pay attention, but for reasons you can see in my book they all had their motivations for not attacking Trump or telling the truth about his financial record.
4/ I would caution though that even as Trump's true financial picture is revealed it won't move the numbers with his base much. It will help at the margins.
It does provide fodder for hearings and has the additional benefit of sending him out of his goddamn mind.
5/ It's also a reminder the Trump is a masterful con man and will apply the same level of b.s. in the 2020 election that he used on his endless chain of credulous lenders; lies, fraud, deception, and falsified financials are likely going to expose him to both risk and ridicule.
Thread by @TheRickWilson: "1/ Mark Burnett sold the illusion the Trump was a mega success with a reality TV show filmed on a gimcrack fake boardroom set in e eponymous […]"
We saw it in focus groups in 2016: the mulish, intractable stupidity of Republican and white male Democratic voters.
2/ "MISTER Trump us the richest man in America." "He's the most successful builder in New York!" "Trump is so rich, that no one could buy him!"
Even when you gave them the truth, the power of 15 years of reality TV indoctrination overcame it.
3/ I was screaming to Republican campaigns about this in 2015 and 16, begging them to pay attention, but for reasons you can see in my book they all had their motivations for not attacking Trump or telling the truth about his financial record.
4/ I would caution though that even as Trump's true financial picture is revealed it won't move the numbers with his base much. It will help at the margins.
It does provide fodder for hearings and has the additional benefit of sending him out of his goddamn mind.
5/ It's also a reminder the Trump is a masterful con man and will apply the same level of b.s. in the 2020 election that he used on his endless chain of credulous lenders; lies, fraud, deception, and falsified financials are likely going to expose him to both risk and ridicule.
Thread by @TheRickWilson: "1/ Mark Burnett sold the illusion the Trump was a mega success with a reality TV show filmed on a gimcrack fake boardroom set in e eponymous […]"
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