Self-made sham
by Tom Sullivan
"Trump crime family" appears nowhere in the 13,000-word report from the New York Times exposing Donald Trump's self-made billionaire myth. That message nonetheless runs throughout the massive account of how Fred Trump transferred wealth from his New York real estate empire to his children.
“All of this smells like a crime,” says former chief of investigations for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Adam S. Kaufmann, about just one method the Trump family used to transfer Fred's wealth to his children while dodging federal taxes.
The Times bases its findings not only on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers, but on 100,000 pages of public filings and tens of thousands of pages of confidential financial records including, the Times reports, "bank statements, financial audits, accounting ledgers, cash disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks." So confident is the Times in its reporting that it does not hesitate to use "outright fraud" to describe some of the tax schemes now-President Trump engaged in as part of the family business.
Donald Trump's real business, Jonathan Chait observes, is not building and investing, but inheriting. The Times documented 295 revenue streams by which Fred Trump transferred his wealth to Donald and his other children over decades.
As for Donald Trump's carefully crafted image as the consummate deal-maker, self-promotion is the one thing he is good at. The rest is smoke and mirrors. The Times admits its own reporting in the mid-1970s contributed to Trump's mythmaking. The documents reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner assembled confirm what Trump claimed as his own successes belonged to his father:
In the chauffeured Cadillac, Donald Trump took The Times’s reporter on a tour of what he called his “jobs.” He told her about the Manhattan hotel he planned to convert into a Grand Hyatt (his father guaranteed the construction loan), and the Hudson River railroad yards he planned to develop (the rights were purchased by his father’s company). He showed her “our philanthropic endeavor,” the high-rise for the elderly in East Orange (bankrolled by his father), and an apartment complex on Staten Island (owned by his father), and their “flagship,” Trump Village, in Brooklyn (owned by his father), and finally Beach Haven Apartments (owned by his father). Even the Cadillac was leased by his father.Donald Trump portrays himself as self-made, claiming he turned a "small" $1 million loan from his father (“I had to pay him back with interest!”) into an empire worth billions:
“So far,” he boasted, “I’ve never made a bad deal.”
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.The family spent much of the 1980s and 1990s finding ways to launder handouts from Fred as legitimate business expenses that went to his children instead of as outright gifts that would exposed the transfers to a 55 percent estate tax. Lax Internal Revenue Service enforcement of gift tax rules made it easy.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
“None of this can be charged criminally because it’s statute of limitations, but certainly the IRS could go back and look at it from a civil perspective,” Goldman said.White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders criticized the Times report as a "misleading attack against the Trump family." She repeated talking points about the successes of the Trump presidency, complaining the “Times can rarely find anything positive about the President and his tremendous record of success to report.”
Trump’s sister, federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, was heavily implicated in the Times report, and Goldman said she could face punishment for her alleged role in fraud.