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Trump's Tax Returns: The Issue of 2019


MixtyMotions

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I  think he's going to be so neck deep in the fallout from the Trump Organization and its shady dealings, the tax returns will be a moot point.  The thing that is going to get him will be when he is exposed as considerably less than a billionaire.  That will sink him. 

Edited by pyrohornIII
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  • 2 years later...

Things not going well for Trump's tax returns.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/us/supreme-court-trump-financial-records.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

 

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  • Feb. 22, 2021, 9:54 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-ditch attempt by former President Donald J. Trump to shield his financial records, issuing a brief, unsigned order requiring Mr. Trump’s accountants to turn over his tax and other records to prosecutors in New York.

The court’s order was a decisive defeat for Mr. Trump, who had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep his tax returns and related documents secret.

The case concerned a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accountants, Mazars USA, by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat. The firm has said it will comply with the final ruling of the courts, meaning that the grand jury should receive the documents in short order.

Mr. Vance issued a three-word statement in response to the court’s order: “The work continues.”

Under grand jury secrecy rules, it would ordinarily be unclear when, if ever, the public would see the information. But The New York Times has obtained more than two decades of tax return data of Mr. Trump and his companies, and it recently published a series of articles about them.

 

Mr. Trump, the articles said, has sustained significant losses, owes enormous debts that he is personally obligated to repay, has avoided paying federal income taxes in 11 of the 18 years The Times examined and paid just $750 in both 2016 and 2017.

The scope of Mr. Vance’s inquiry remains unclear. It arose partly from an investigation by his office into hush-money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump, relationships the president has denied. But court filings by prosecutors suggested that they are also investigating potential crimes like tax and insurance fraud.

The subpoena sought tax records and financial statements since 2011, engagement agreements with the accountants who prepared them, the underlying raw financial data and information about how the data were analyzed.

In July, the Supreme Court soundly rejected Mr. Trump’s central constitutional argument against the subpoena — that state prosecutors are powerless to investigate a sitting president.

“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in that decision.

 

Though Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented from other aspects of the decision, all nine justices agreed with that proposition.

The majority gave Mr. Trump another opportunity to challenge the subpoena, on narrower grounds.

“A president may avail himself of the same protections available to every other citizen,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “These include the right to challenge the subpoena on any grounds permitted by state law, which usually include bad faith and undue burden or breadth.”

Mr. Trump did just that, but his arguments were rejected by a trial judge and a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York.

“Any documents produced under the Mazars subpoena would be protected from public disclosure by grand jury secrecy rules,” the panel said in an unsigned opinion, “which greatly reduces the plausibility of the allegation that the district attorney is acting out of a desire to embarrass the president.”

“There is nothing to suggest,” the panel added of the information sought, “that these are anything but run-of-the-mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers then filed an “emergency application” asking the Supreme Court to intercede. It urged the court to block the appeals court’s ruling while it decided whether to hear another appeal from Mr. Trump.

“Even if the disclosure of his papers is limited to prosecutors and grand jurors, the status quo can never be restored once confidentiality is destroyed,” the brief said. “But the harm will be more than irreparable if the records are publicly disclosed. It will be case-mooting — the strongest possible basis for a stay.”

 

In response, Mr. Vance’s lawyers — including Carey R. Dunne, who argued the case the first time around; Walter E. Dellinger III, a former acting United States solicitor general in the Clinton administration; and Michael R. Dreeben, a former longtime deputy solicitor general and a member of the team that assisted Robert S. Mueller III in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election — pointed to the Times articles. The cat, they said, was out of the bag.

“The New York Times has obtained his tax-return data and described that data in depth in a series of articles,” Mr. Vance’s brief said. “With the details of his tax returns now public, applicant’s asserted confidentiality interests have become highly attenuated if they survive at all. And even assuming any remain, they cannot justify extraordinary relief from this court that would deprive the grand jury alone of facts available to anyone who reads the press.”

“This litigation has already substantially hampered the grand jury’s investigation,” the brief said. “No legal basis exists for the extraordinary relief that applicant requests — or remotely justifies the further delay it entails.”

 
Trump’s Financial Records on the Docket

 

Edited by Bullneck
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4 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

Things not going well for Trump's tax returns.

The justices without comment rebuffed Trump's request to put on hold an Oct. 7 lower court ruling directing the former Republican president's longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, to comply with a subpoena to turn over the materials to a grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat.

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2 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

The justices without comment rebuffed Trump's request to put on hold an Oct. 7 lower court ruling directing the former Republican president's longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, to comply with a subpoena to turn over the materials to a grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat.

My guess is the DA had someone with a mobile printer sitting in Mazars waiting area ready to serve their agent immediately.   And my hope is Mazars has all this boxed/downloaded and ready to go in anticipation.  I'm sure they want to get out of the middle of this as soon as possible and get way ahead of their own complicity/culpability in these schemes.

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17 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

My guess is the DA had someone with a mobile printer sitting in Mazars waiting area ready to serve their agent immediately.   And my hope is Mazars has all this boxed/downloaded and ready to go in anticipation.  I'm sure they want to get out of the middle of this as soon as possible and get way ahead of their own complicity/culpability in these schemes.

They (Mazars) has always said they stood ready to produce upon a definitive ruling.

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11 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

So what does he do to delay it now?  There’s always another delay.

Not really this time.  A stay is basically a "cat out of the bag" order that says, well, you may or may not have legal grounds to undo the lower court's order, but letting the cat out of the bag can't be undone, so  . . .

Denying such a stay basically says "you don't have a leg to stand on, so the cat's getting out."

  • Hook 'Em 1
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"I don't care what the tax returns say.  Fake numbers.  Fake taxes.  Fake IRS.  Fake everything.  A lot of my wealth is tied up in Infrastructure this Week anyways."  

Edited by Lobo
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14 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

To be fair, how would one tell the difference?

Yeah, I used to be a stickler for the definitional and practical differences between parody and satire.  But I just fucking gave up about two years ago.  

If I'm honest, I kinda still cared but then Trump did 90 seconds on "cans of soup" after a Portland protest and i decided the difference no longer matters even to Strunk & White.  

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22 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

To be fair, how would one tell the difference?

I, too, think Trump honestly believes those 3 work for him because he picked them from a list handed to him by Mitch McConnell and FedSoc. 

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3 hours ago, Lobo said:

Yeah, I used to be a stickler for the definitional and practical differences between parody and satire.  But I just fucking gave up about two years ago.  

If I'm honest, I kinda still cared but then Trump did 90 seconds on "cans of soup" after a Portland protest and i decided the difference no longer matters even to Strunk & White.  

This soup is for my family.

If I HAD to pick a "favorite" dotard line (gun to my head) from the past 5 years, this is probably it.

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13 hours ago, dingleberryswitzer said:

It was supposed to take only 2 weeks!

Shortest audit ever.  Didn't share them before the election but claimed he'd share them if he got elected.  He got elected, didn't share them or have to because he was a sitting president.  Still hiding them once out of office and suing to keep them out of public scrutiny.  He's a liar if nothing else but since he's worth several billion, let's see if he claimed it.  

Edited by Mdhorn
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17 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Me reading and getting to the New York murder numbers feeble cry baby attack line

giphy.gif

 

Well, there is certainly no doubt he wrote that bullshit himself. I do enjoy the image of his fat ass laboring over the keyboard for three hours as he typed this shit on Microsoft Word. 

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He sounds like an innocent man, doesn't he?  An innocent man would say "I'm guilty of nothing and this will be proved in a court of law"  and that's it.

Remember when Michael Cohen said under oath that Trump inflates his assets when he's attempting to get a loan and then minimalizes them when he goes to pay taxes?  

 

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