Well, for example, the Cohen testimony showed that he added $4 billion to his overall wealth (earmarked as ‘brand value’) the year that he tried to buy the Buffalo Bills. Cohen claimed that Trump keeps two sets of books – one that undervalues his wealth and one that overvalues it – depending on the deal he wants to make or the taxes he wants to avoid. From what we know about Trump’s businesses, the Trump Foundation, Trump University, etc, it certainly sounds like Trump’s been committing federal tax fraud for decades while also having extremely questionable dealings with both Russian oligarchs and DeutcheBank. So yeah, getting our hands on his tax returns is pretty important.
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I agree with you that these are all important matters and that he’s a despicable con man. However, you are making my point - these are not things that would be evident if we were able to review five years of his personal tax returns. Again, my point is not that Donald Trump is a law-abiding citizen. My point is that his enemies have adopted this attitude towards his personal tax returns that’s much like the attitude we had until last Friday about the Mueller Report - that they possess some power to finally shine a light of truth onto Don’s cons, when in fact I suspect when we finally get to see them they will leave us with more questions than answers and no further along in convincing our fellow americans of his perfidy. To put it another way, if there was obvious tax fraud contained in his IRS filings the IRS would have gone after him already. He’s too smart to allow that. He’s got good lawyers and accountants.
I’m not sure why you think that Donald Trump’s personal tax returns wouldn’t include his financial information, income, and debts, but okay.
So your argument is that because he’s such a clever con man with the best lawyers and the best accountants, his cons are hidden so well that his taxes won’t show anything, and therefore we shouldn’t bother? In that case, why would Trump be so obsessed with hiding them? I think rather than assuming that Trump and his employees are so clever that they’ve successfully hoodwinked the IRS for decades, it’d be better to, I dunno… review them, as we’ve done for every President for many years?
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Well, yes but “operatives” is the sort of word people in spy thrillers use to sound as if they are real spies. Does whoever chose that word mean to imply that they consider these were nation state sanctioned agents or did they choose it because they thought it sounded cool?
It’s the difference between “some Russian business dudes offered to give us dirt on our opponents but we said no and thought no more about it” and “some Russian dudes who said they worked for the Russian state offered to give us dirt on our opponents but we said no and didn’t tell anyone about it”.
That is not a given. See Manafort. Very obvious frauds once someone could be persuaded to look. Persuading people to look can be very difficult.
There are lots of dodgy rich people doing dodgy deals. Trump was small fry until he put himself in the firing line by running for office.
Again no. He’s too well-connected for that to happen (so far at least) and until he ran for office too insignificant. It’s one of the things his friends (yes, he apparently has people who consider themselves his friends) tried to warn him about before he ran for President.
There are things rich people routinely do which are illegal but they get away with them because no one is interested in putting the scrutiny on them (to be fair that applies not just to rich people). That scrutiny does get put on politicians. As it is being. Or at least, people are trying to.
So far, I’d say citation needed on that. Cohen for example is not exactly a shining example of leet legal skillz.
Maybe. The problem with most tax arrangements is that, no matter what jurisdiction you’re operating in, if you tell your accountants and lawyers to come up with anything beyond the most plain vanilla arrangement, you are letting yourself in for a world of pain if anyone ever looks at the arrangement.
The reason for that is your accountants and lawyers can be as good as you like, if your scheme is doing anything useful for you, it will be screaming along the hair-edge of legality at the best of times. It will rely on everything being done exactly as your accountants and lawyers told you to do it. It will rely on the tax authorities and the courts taking the same view of the law as your advisers - who as indicated, will have bent the interpretation as far in your favour as they can.
It will not be tolerant of you waltzing along and saying “I need $100,000, give me some” whenever you feel like it.
Trump’s dealings so far do not indicate that he is capable of understanding the distinction between “his money” and “money that he has access to subject to jumping through hoops in the right order and at the right time”. See the fiasco of the Trump Foundation.
None of this is to say that anything will have any meaningful effect on him. I agree with you on that.
Shouting, obstructing and stamping your feet can in fact keep you out of jail if you do it long enough and loud enough and have enough people who would find it extremely embarassing if you went to jail.
Jailing the President would be embarassing. Fining him for tax fraud would be “Meh” in the current climate. He’ll say it’s politically motivated and anyway it’s his accountants’ fault; he won’t pay the fine for ages, if at all, and all his supporters will still cheer him on and say he’s a great businessman.
C’est la vie.
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They would include his income but not necessarily his debts nor anything about income or expenses incurred by the LLCs that I’m sure he’s wrapped all his business operations up in. His personal income taxes would show the distributions, partner draws, write-offs, etc from these LLCs that hit him personally but certainly wouldn’t show anything like his providing an optimistic valuation of his holdings to try to buy the Buffalo Bills a decade ago. Maybe I’m wrong but I worry that we have elevated “his tax returns” to god-like status, and when they are revealed and they don’t show anything particularly useful or interesting, he will get to claim that he’s been totally vindicated once again. What I’m arguing is that we shouldn’t be talking about the tax returns like they are the facts that will finally expose Trump as the fraud that we know he is. He’s a fraud and we know it but I don’t think his tax returns will be the key to show it.
I think you answered you own question…
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The fact that Traitor Trump was elected meant the U.S. was in existential trouble. The fact that Traitor Trump isn’t currently in prison facing multiple life sentences is confirmation that the U.S. is dead as a Constitutional entity. Please note that the U.S. is still a political entity, as are numerous other large criminal organizations.
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The issue here isn’t the letter their sending out, it’s the publicity around the letter and the letters that quote the letter. They know the letter itself is bullshit. But they are going to use it as a PR move in fundraising and publicity: “See how we’re pushing back on the MSM? Now it’s our turn!” (Also: gotta love the dripping revanchism: calling them “Democrat leaders”.)
Agreed. That is apparently the only part of the election process that is sacrosanct. But everything else is, or has the possibility of being, corrupted: the apportionment; the gerrymandering; the voter suppression laws; the infrastructure and administration of the election itself (eg, Brian Kemp in Georgia); the adjudication of any runoffs.
Although, I’d disagree that Voter ID laws are “redundant.” They have a very real effect of disenfranchising the people they were intended to disenfranchise (non-Republicans).
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We don’t have to see the report for proof of obstruction of justice. He did most of it in public!
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Redundant in that they aren’t really needed. The previous method of using your voter ID card OR a photo ID was sufficient to stop nearly all voter fraud.
My idiom was not intended to be taken quite that literally.
“Fascists are counting the votes” was intended as shorthand for “the GOP (which many people, myself included, consider to be a fascist party) is in control of electoral administration in the majority of states”.
The GOP has repeatedly demonstrated that they are willing and able to corrupt the democratic process in order to gain and hold power. This power manifests in a variety of ways, many of which were described by @petzl upthread. This power is increasing, not decreasing.
Note that most of the House gains made by the Democrats in the midterms happened in blue states. The red states are increasingly immune to democratic reform.
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OK, thanks for clarifying.
While I agree things like Gerrymadering and voter suppression via things like Voter ID laws are hindering more accurate representation in places, I don’t think that is the main reason many of the “red states are red”. It is mainly due to the prevalent political attitudes and leanings in those areas. The US is huge and the general attitudes vary greatly from one region to another. Oh sure, there are common things we all share, but there are also things that make our regional cultures different.
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