Your morning whataboutism by @BloggersRUs

Your morning whataboutism

by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Bin im Garten, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Donald Trump lost $1.17 billion dollars between 1985 and 1994, the New York Times reported on Tuesday after reviewing I.R.S. transcripts of his taxes for those years. Those would have been the high-flying-est for the self-promoting real estate tycoon known as "The Donald."

What about more recently? Tuesday's revelation is sure to whet House investigators' appetite for knowing what is in the six years of the sitting president's taxes they lawfully requested. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has refused to deliver them. Robert Mueller's impeachment referral concluded Russia intervened in the 2018 election on Trump's behalf and Trump tried to shut down the investigation multiple times. House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) wants to know if there is a financial connection and what legislation might be required to prevent future imperial entanglements.

What about Trump's golf courses in Scotland and Ireland? "They don’t actually make any money," Glenn Simpson of consultants Fusion GPS told a House permanent select committee on intelligence in August 2017. Trump's son Eric told a golf journalist the Trump Organization did not rely on funding from American banks, saying, "We have all the funding we need out of Russia." He later denied saying so.

Asked about possible Russian funding backing Trump's golf courses, Simpson testified:

“So we were able to get the financial statements. And they don’t, on their face, show Russian involvement, but what they do show is enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources and – or at least on paper it says it’s from the Trump Organisation, but it’s hundreds of millions of dollars.

“And these golf courses are just, you know, they’re sinks. They don’t actually make any money.

“So if you’re familiar with Donald Trump’s finances and the litigation over whether he’s really a billionaire, you know, there’s good reason to believe he doesn’t have enough money to do this and that he would have had to have outside financial support for these things.”

That criminals with ties to Russia bought Trump condos, partnered with Trump and were based at Trump Tower — his home, his place of work, the crown jewel of his empire — should be deeply concerning. It’s not hard to conclude that, as a result, the president, wittingly or not, has long been compromised by a hostile foreign power, even if Mueller did not conclude that Trump colluded or conspired with the Russians.

A large number of those involved with the Trump Ocean Club in its early phase were Russian and Eastern European citizens or diaspora members. In an interview with NBC and Reuters, Ventura Nogueira said that 50 percent of his buyers were Russian, and that some had “questionable backgrounds.” He added that he found out later that some were part of the Russian Mafia.

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.