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A story about a pathetic man's downfall


Francisco 2.0

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1 hour ago, Gil Bang said:

oh hell yeah. 

 

 

 

The ONLY explanation for this is that the RNC isn't going to let him keep those sweet contributions anymore.  He knows he won't get elected or every have to do policy work.  Just play golf and bitch, the only things he likes.  

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7 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

The ONLY explanation for this is that the RNC isn't going to let him keep those sweet contributions anymore.  He knows he won't get elected or every have to do policy work.  Just play golf and bitch, the only things he likes.  

Disagree. 

The contributions flow directly to him. RNC can't do shit about that. 

This is his "burn it down" moment.  A poison pill.  "You motherfuckers either nominate me, or I will make it impossible for your nominee to win the general". 

It's the destruction of the GOP that Lindsay warned about, before he started gargling Trump's shriveled, orange balls. 

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9 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

Disagree. 

The contributions flow directly to him. RNC can't do shit about that. 

This is his "burn it down" moment.  A poison pill.  "You motherfuckers either nominate me, or I will make it impossible for your nominee to win the general". 

It's the destruction of the GOP that Lindsay warned about, before he started gargling Trump's shriveled, orange balls. 

Interesting point. 

But he'll never get elected again, so having him as the official Republican nominee has no upside.  I think it's a moot point anyway since his world is crumbling.  

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9 hours ago, wood said:

Yeah like I said before that was a poor abbreviation choice on my part and I owned it. I didn't call anyone an idiot over it. But by all means, carry on making a mountain out of a molehill. You're very good at it.

You seem a bit reality challenged and definitely thin skinned.   Feel free to hang around, but realize we reserve the right to note that you seem unnecessarily thin skinned.   Your continued whining over this is not a plus snowflake. 

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Just now, Gatorubet said:

You seem a bit reality challenged and definitely thin skinned.   Feel free to hang around, but realize we reserve the right to note that you seem unnecessarily thin skinned.   Your continued whining over this is not a plus snowflake. 

I let it go a while back up the thread. Not sure why you're holding onto it. Have a good one though.

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7 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

oh hell yeah. 

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Bullneck said:

Interesting point. 

But he'll never get elected again, so having him as the official Republican nominee has no upside.  I think it's a moot point anyway since his world is crumbling.  

ron-swanson-gif-19.gif

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I'm imagining the rage that Trump has this morning.  Probably a lot more ragey than normal.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/30/trump-tax-returns-congress/

 

Quote

The House Ways and Means Committee on Friday released Donald Trump’s tax returns, dealing yet another setback to the former president and 2024 White House candidate as he faces multiple federal and state investigations.

The Democratic-led panel released the financial documents for six years, capping a protracted legal and political battle that could have been prevented had Trump followed presidential precedent and released his returns voluntarily.

 

Quote

Democrats have pushed for more than three years to make Trump’s tax returns public, and the documents were finally made available to theWays and Means Committee late last month after the Supreme Court denied a last attempt by Trump to withhold the records.

The returns show that Trump paid little, if anything, in income taxes over six years including the four in which he served as president. They have also raised questions over the lengths he took to claim tax deductions on items that may not warrant it to evade paying taxes.

 

Quote

“A president is no ordinary taxpayer. They hold power and influence unlike any other American. And with great power comes even greater responsibility," Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), chairman of the committee, had said in a statement last week. 

The release marks another blow to Trump, who is struggling to mount a campaign for president as numerous investigations and controversies continue to swirl around him. His most recent actions, from dining with avowed white supremacists to suggesting terminating the Constitution, have left many in the Republican Party reconsidering whether he remains the most viable candidate to lead the GOP after midterm voters largely rejected candidates backed by the former president.

 

Spoiler

The release of Trump’s tax information is the most sweeping such action taken by Congress in a half-century. A similar action involving a president has not occurred since 1973, when the IRS turned over President Richard M. Nixon’s tax returns to a congressional committee.

The IRS handed over the Nixon tax returns on the day that Congress requested them, a fact noted by House Democrats who were seeking the Trump documents. Republicans denied any similarity, The Washington Post has reported, noting that Nixon requested the investigation into his returns, while Trump fought such a probe.

Trump — who broke with a decades-long tradition of presidential candidates and presidents by refusing to make his tax returns public — has for years falsely claimed that he could not release them while under “routine audit” by the IRS.

Last week, the Ways and Means Committee revealed that the IRS did not audit Trump’s returns during his first two years in office, despite a rule mandating such reviews, and never completed any audits while he served.

If the IRS completes its audit work and validates some of the concerns raised by the report, the likelihood that Trump could subsequently face serious legal trouble — something beyond adjustments or fines — appears to be low. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which has been conducting a criminal investigation of Trump since the summer of 2018, has had access to Trump’s tax returns for more than a year and has not charged him.

Trump’s chief financial officer and his company were both convicted of tax crimes after investigators found that the CFO and another Trump Organization executive had received perks like luxury apartments and Mercedes Benzes while purposely concealing them from tax authorities.

The release comes as special counsel Jack Smith oversees the Justice Department’s criminal probe of Trump’s possible mishandling of classified documents at his Florida home and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Last week, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol referred four criminal charges against Trump to the Justice Department: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, inciting or assisting an insurrection, and conspiracy to make a false statement.

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who has said she had access to Trump’s federal income tax returns “for a series of years,” has filed a $250 million lawsuit against Trump, his eldest children and executives at the Trump Organization accusing them of manipulating property and other asset valuations to deceive lenders. Trump and his company have denied the allegations. A trial is set for October 2023.

Sentencing for the Trump Organization on the conviction earlier this month of tax crimes committed by two of its longtime executives is set for Jan. 13. A fine of $1.6 million is possible.

Trump also is facing a probe in Georgia where a Fulton County grand jury was investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in the state. District Attorney Fani Willis (D) has said she expects the grand jury to issue a report on its findings before the end of the year. Willis said she will then decide whether to bring criminal charges.

IRS agents began but failed to complete multiple audits of the Trumps during their time in the White House, according to a letter from acting IRS Commissioner Douglas W. O’Donnell and a detailed report from congressional tax experts, both of which the committee released. The records paint a picture of an agency struggling to meet the demands of auditing a sitting president whose finances involve nearly 500 business entities, many of them actively operating.

The agency began an audit of the Trumps’ 2015 taxes in January 2018, O’Donnell said in a letter this month to Neal, with a plan specifically to examine the Trumps’ charitable donations, capital gains, supplemental income and the couple’s having used losses from one tax year to reduce their taxes in a subsequent year (called a net operating loss carryforward).

As the audit began, an IRS agent began examining a $21.1 million deduction Trump claimed for a conservation easement at his Seven Springs estate in New York, according to a 40-page report from the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, which advises Congress on crafting and deciphering tax bills. The easement’s value was based on an appraisal, obtained by The Post in 2020, that appears to have relied upon unsupported assertions and misleading conclusions.

The IRS agent investigating the easement visited the property Jan. 24,. 2022, according to the report, and met with appraisers on Nov. 22. The agent kept notes mentioning two possible adjustments: disqualifying the entire deduction “based on the fact that the appraisal was not a qualified appraisal” or reducing the deduction to $8.95 million.

The issue remains unresolved, according to the report. Despite that work starting four years ago, O'Donnell, who began as acting commissioner on Nov. 12, wrote that the audit had not been completed.

For the 2016 tax years, the IRS also began an audit. That time, one of the issues raised by an IRS agent was a tax credit Trump claimed for rehabilitating a historic building, the Old Post Office in downtown Washington, into a luxury hotel. (It has since been turned into a Waldorf Astoria.) But the IRS did not appear to request the tax returns for that property so they were not considered in the report.

The audit of the 2016 tax year was “initially completed,” O'Donnell wrote but required information from the other audits to be finalized, which was “pending resolution.”

The IRS similarly began audits for tax years 2017, 2018 and 2019. In September 2020, after the New York Times began reporting on Trump’s taxes, IRS officials met to discuss myriad issues raised by the newspaper’s reporting, according to the report, among them Seven Springs, loans to family members, consulting payments to family members and expenditures for “fuel, meals, haircuts, makeup artists, etc.” that Trump wrote off as business expenses in his 2017 return. The discussions lead to conversations with a representative for Trump, who was not named in the report, about the parameters of the inquiry.

But for each of those years, O’Donnell repeated the same line in his letter to Neal: “The examination team has not yet concluded its work.” He said the Trumps’ 2020 returns “were not yet under examination.”

O’Donnell also told Neal the IRS is auditing two of Trump’s companies, DJT Holdings LLC and DJT Holdings Managing Member LLC. The dual companies reflect Trump’s personal ownership of his businesses; combined, they hold stakes in the vast majority of Trump’s real estate properties and businesses, according to disclosure forms Trump filed with the government as president.

The IRS has begun audits of both companies for every year from 2015 through 2019, O’Donnell wrote to Neal, but he said none of those audits is fully complete either. Other records released by the committee indicate the IRS has repeatedly sought extensions to the statute of limitations for those audits.

To ensure that the IRS can audit future president’s returns, the House passed legislation in a 220-201 vote last week that would make it mandatory for the IRS to expedite an audit on the president and their businesses and release them within 90 days of filing. The Senate did not consider the legislation before the end of the congressional term, killing the effort.

“The American people want to have trust that the most powerful individual in this country, who has vested in them all the powers of the executive branch, is making decisions based on the interest of American people and not their own self financial interest,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview.

 

 

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Has DOJ made some sort of announcement about prosecuting Trump or are the reactions above about the glacial pace of investigation and indictment?

Trump as a third party doing nothing except thwarting the GOP was one of those possibilities that was so delicious that even thinking about it too much felt like possibly jinxing it. You don't need a majority to control a political party as long as you have total loyalty from your minority.

I still think Trump didn't think he had a chance to win when he announced for 2016. He was just brand building. He wins and can't do anything bad enough to make his FOX-addicted followers even flinch. His brand-building paid off by providing him a loyal market that will literally buy absolutely anything he wants to sell including trading cards made out of nothing. 

He also finds that his backing of a candidate can actually hurt that candidate. That kind of power is better than had his backing led to victory. "I can keep you from winning" provides mover leverage than "I can help you win, so remember me when you're in office."

Now he applies this terrifying negative pressure on a national scale. What might he get from the GOP with such leverage? What new lows will that criminal organization slither to in order hold on?

I doubt Trump has thought the above, he is really not a subtle person. I don't doubt that his instincts and inclination to wring whatever he can out of whomever he meets have led him to this remarkable place of influence.

At least he can't fully enjoy it because he is being pursued by the law and lost (lost! SAD!!) on the national stage. 

 

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Let’s appreciate the fact that Trump is sending a shot across the bow of the GOP in terms of running third party.

Stop assuming any complexity of thought or strategy to TFG or his party.
They put a psychotic terrorist in charge of the party. He just threatened to shoot the hostage if they don’t give him what he wants. They’ll cave, because there’s not a single spine to be found in the party.
His threat will work, along with everything else. He will be the nominee. And, if the SCOTUS and GQP state legislatures have anything to say about it, it doesn’t matter how the people vote - he will win the White House.
That’s the play. The sociopathic party, the independent state legislature theory that will be blessed by the SCOTUS, and even more blatant voter suppression say “hi.”
All of you writing off Trump in 2024 haven’t been paying attention to the full picture. He has an excellent shot of winning. Not a guarantee, but an excellent shot.
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3 hours ago, YGIFS said:

Yep, guy tries war criminals literally at the mother fucking Hague.  But a game show host made him piss his pants.  Well done, America.  

But Wood, Brisket, and me once voted for a Republican once so it's our fault.  

It is your fault, own it. Bootstraps for thee, not for me,  it’s ok to be a former Republican.  My smell makes me a little skittish, but not so much that I can’t forgive you. 

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Is there a thread or a discussion specifically around the taxes being public now? I'd like to read about that and figured this would be the place but not seeing any discussion around it. Saw this breaking headline but it's paywalled:

Quote

 

Thousands of pages of Donald Trump’s tax returns have been made public after years of legal battles. The documents contain details that have not previously been revealed.

Here’s a running list of the key takeaways from six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns

 

 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/us/politics/trump-tax-returns-takeaways.html

 

NY times is keeping a running list, as they sort through the 6k pages.

Quote

Trump’s Taxes

Trump’s Taxes Released

Key Takeaways

Our 2020 Investigation

House Panel’s Report

Key Takeaways From Trump’s Tax Returns

Former President Donald J. Trump, who fought for years to keep his returns private, made no charitable donations in 2020, and his own tax law may have cost him. Here’s a running list of insights.

 

Give this article

 

Former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans raised the threat of retaliation for Democrats’ release of his tax returns. Credit...Ash Adams for The New York Times

 

By Jim Tankersley, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner

Dec. 30, 2022

Updated 1:47 p.m. ET

5 MIN READ

 

Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee have followed through with their vow to make public six years of former President Donald J. Trump’s tax returns, giving the American public new insight into his business dealings and drawing threats of retaliation from congressional Republicans.

 

The release on Friday morning contained thousands of pages of tax documents, including individual returns for Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania, as well as business returns for several of the hundreds of companies that make up the real estate mogul’s sprawling business organization.

 

The committee had this month released top-line details from the returns, which showed that Mr. Trump paid $1.1 million in federal income taxes during the first three years of his presidency, including just $750 in federal income tax in 2017, his first year in office. He paid no tax in 2020 as his income dwindled and his business losses mounted.

 

The documents contain new details not revealed in those earlier releases. New York Times reporters are combing the pages for key takeaways. Here is a running list.

 

Trump made no charitable contributions in 2020.

As a presidential candidate in 2015, Mr. Trump said he would not take “even one dollar” of the $400,000 salary that comes with the job. “I am totally giving up my salary if I become president,” he said.

 

In his first three years in office, Mr. Trump said he donated his salary quarterly. But in 2020, his last full year in office, the documents show that Mr. Trump reported $0 in charitable giving.

 

Also in 2020, as the pandemic recession swiftly descended, Mr. Trump reported heavy business losses and no federal tax liability.

 

In the earlier years, White House officials made a point of highlighting which government agencies were receiving the money, starting with the National Park Service in 2017. The tax documents released Friday show that Mr. Trump reported charitable donations totaling nearly $1.9 million in 2017 and just over $500,000 in both 2018 and 2019.

 

In a bad year for business, Trump didn’t take a full refund.

Mr. Trump reported nearly $16 million in business losses in 2020, which swamped his other income and left him with no federal income tax liability. But the tax documents show that he made nearly $14 million in tax payments to the federal government over the course of the year.

 

Those payments left him with the potential for a large income tax refund from the government — like the ones many taxpayers find when they go to file their taxes every March. In Mr. Trump’s case, he chose not to take the full refund available to him. He claimed a refund of just under $5.5 million, then directed the Internal Revenue Service to apply another $8 million to his estimated taxes for 2021.

 

His own tax law may have cost him.

The tax law Mr. Trump signed in late 2017, which took effect the next year, contained some provisions that most likely gave him an advantage at tax time — including the scaling back of the alternative minimum tax on high earners.

 

But one provision in particular drastically reduced the income tax deductions Mr. Trump could claim in 2018 and beyond: limits that Republicans placed on deductions for state and local taxes paid.

 

The so-called SALT deduction disproportionately hit higher earners, including Mr. Trump, in high-tax cities and states like New York. In 2019, he reported paying $8.4 million in state and local taxes. Because of the SALT limits included in his tax law, he was able to deduct only $10,000 of those taxes paid on his federal income tax return.

 

Those losses could have been mitigated at least in part by other sections of the law that were favorable to wealthier taxpayers like Mr. Trump.

 

Fred Trump is a silent actor in the returns.

Fred Trump, Mr. Trump’s long-deceased father, has continued to have an effect on his son’s finances.

 

In 2018, after a decade in which the former president declared no taxable income, he reported taxable income of more than $24 million and paid $1 million in federal taxes, nearly the entire total he paid as president.

 

That income, as previously detailed by The Times, appeared to be the result of more than $14 million in gains from the sale of an investment his father made in the 1970s, a Brooklyn housing complex named Starrett City, which became part of Mr. Trump’s inheritance.

 

But the new documents show that the effect of his inheritance in 2018 was far greater: Mr. Trump reported $25.7 million in gains from the sale of business properties that he and his siblings inherited or took through trusts, including the sale of Starrett City.

 

The sales of business properties Mr. Trump created himself came at a loss, however, dragging down his net proceeds and somewhat reducing his tax liability, the tax itemization shows.

 

That included a total of $1 million in property sold at a loss by 40 Wall Street, his office building in Lower Manhattan, and DJT Holdings LLC. He recorded another $1 million loss bailing his son Donald Trump Jr. out of a failed business to build prefabricated homes.

 

Mr. Trump also received tens of thousands of dollars in dividends while he was in the White House from trusts that were established for him when he was young, his tax returns show.

 

A new tax firm got involved in 2020.

For years, Mr. Trump used the accounting firm Mazars USA to prepare his taxes and those of his businesses. Donald Bender, Mr. Trump’s longtime accountant at Mazars, had long been listed on the former president’s taxes as his accountant.

 

The firm formally cut ties with Mr. Trump and his businesses this year, saying it could no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial statements it prepared for the Trump Organization.

 

But it turns out Mazars and Mr. Trump had begun distancing themselves from each other as early as 2020. That year, BKM Sowan Horan, a Texas-based accounting firm, prepared Mr. Trump’s taxes, his returns show.

Current list

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3 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

Just making sure. The Washington post feed had nothing, but they are often slow in posting breaking news. I didn't want to read through the strange responses to Wood walking towards the light. It is Football Boardesque.

A few recent events (Comeygate, for example), DOJ does not routinely comment on the existence or progress of criminal investigations.  I'd expect the next move to be indictments.  I'd expect one on Mar A Lago documents before 1/6.

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2 hours ago, Lurch said:


I’m curious your thoughts on Trump’s narcissistic tendencies, always making everything about himself.

Seriously?  You gonna compare me with that piece of shit ? 

Wait, my bad.  You had a yard sign you so you did you part.  God bless.  

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2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

 

This should be major news. The President of the United States lied repeatedly and denied reports that have been confirmed 100% accurate by subsequent evidence. It is only not news because said (former) President tells similar lies on a daily basis and has done so for years. This is just another lie in a mountain of lies. So this particular story gets no traction because it is not unusual for Trump. And the vast forest of lies gets lost in the shrug response to this one unremarkable tree. 

tl;dr: humans are stupid and easily distracted. 

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1 hour ago, BrickHorn said:

This should be major news. The President of the United States lied repeatedly and denied reports that have been confirmed 100% accurate by subsequent evidence. It is only not news because said (former) President tells similar lies on a daily basis and has done so for years. This is just another lie in a mountain of lies. So this particular story gets no traction because it is not unusual for Trump. And the vast forest of lies gets lost in the shrug response to this one unremarkable tree. 

tl;dr: humans are stupid and easily distracted. 

And, he frequently lies about things of little consequence like crowd sizes or things that aren't subject to completely objective proof.

This one is a good one.

This is one you can throw in their face.

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9 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

Is there a thread or a discussion specifically around the taxes being public now? I'd like to read about that and figured this would be the place but not seeing any discussion around it. Saw this breaking headline but it's paywalled:

 

Have you tried any other website but this one?  You should.

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