Month: October 2018

Diaper Don?

by digby

Just thought I’d throw this out there:

Decades before he started making headlines as a First Son with a controversial record of meeting with Russian nationals, President Donald Trump‘s eldest child was a self-confessed hard-partying fraternity brother at the University of Pennsylvania.

There, Donald Trump Jr. was so notorious for his strong interest in women that a friend who went to frat parties with him tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story: “Everyone was warned to stay away from Donnie Trump.”

It’s a warning that reverberates with similarities to the reputation his father built long outside of college.

In October 2016, The Washington Post published a 2005 video that showed Trump, then in his late 50s, bragging about forcing himself on women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” the reality-TV star and businessman said in the 2005 conversation. “Grab ’em by the p—y.”

In the months that followed, Trump was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, including PEOPLE writer Natasha Stoynoff, who alleged that Trump attacked her during a 2005 interview at Mar-a-Lago. He has denied all of the allegations.

At his father’s alma mater, the Wharton School at Penn, Don Jr.’s reputation also included getting into “drunken, ‘do-you-have-any-idea-who-I-am?’ fights,” according to a 2004 profile in New York magazine.

“To be fairly candid, I used to drink a lot and party pretty hard,” Don Jr. admitted in the 2004 interview. “And it wasn’t something that I was particularly good at. I mean, I was good at it, but I couldn’t do it in moderation.”

In another account of Don Jr.’s college years, Scott Melker, a former Penn classmate, wrote on Facebook: “Donald Jr. was a drunk in college. Every memory I have of him is of him stumbling around on campus falling over or passing out in public, with his arm in a sling from injuring himself while drinking.”

Regarding his past drinking, a source who worked for the Trump family tells PEOPLE: “‘There is a lot of impulsive behavior in the family.”

After graduating, Don Jr. initially declined to join the family business, instead moving to Aspen, Colorado, where he hunted, fished, camped, lived out of the back of a truck, and bartended, according to Vanity Fair — which also reported that Don Jr. stopped talking to his father during this time.

He returned to the East Coast to join the Trump Organization in 2001, the same year he spent 11 hours in a New Orleans jail on charges of public drunkenness.

They called him Diaper Don:

During his partying days at college, a drunken Donald Trump Jr. once told rivals from another school, “That’s all right! That’s OK! You’re gonna work for us some day!” according to a new book.

“Born Trump,” written by Vanity Fair senior reporter Emily Jane Fox, sheds new light on the president’s four eldest children, including anecdotes from the eldest son’s hard-partying time at the University of Pennsylvania, the school President Trump attended as well.

This particular incident happened 1,500 miles away from the Ivy League school’s Philadelphia campus at a bar during a spring break trip to Jamaica, as Donald Trump Jr. and his fellow Penn students bemoaned their basketball team’s loss in March 1999 to Florida during a March Madness game.

“The inebriated fans on both sides erupted. Slaps on the back. Shots to celebrate or numb the pain. Sloppy high fives or consoling pats on the back,” Fox wrote. “But Don Jr. took it a step further. He climbed atop a table in the bar and started a chant that he’d hoped would catch on with the rest of his fellow disgruntled Quakers in the room.”

One Penn student who was at the bar pointed out, “These were kids from a state school.”

“The subtext wasn’t hard for anyone to figure out. And it just came out so easy,” the student told Fox of Donald Jr.’s outburst.

That incident was part of a broader narrative about the eldest Trump son’s college days.

He was given the nickname “Diaper Don” by his peers for his habit of passing out from too much drinking in classmates’ beds.

“Diaper Don would wake up in some stranger’s dorm room or off-campus apartment or bedroom in his frat house, covered in piss, walk back to his own room, and get blitzed that evening or the next anew,” Fox wrote.

Just sayin’

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It’s all “creative accounting,” no big deal

by digby

Keep the suckers suckered

Over in Bizarroworld, here’s how they’re dealing with the blockbuster NY Times story that lays out a compelling, highly detailed case that Trump is a criminal:

Fox News leaped to the president’s defense after the New York Times published a bombshell story on Tuesday detailing how Donald Trump — despite the image he’s promoted of himself as a self-made billionaire — used tax dodges to siphon nearly a half-billion dollars from his dad’s real estate empire into his own pockets.

In an extraordinary move, the story’s lede accuses the sitting president of crimes, alleging the newspaper’s investigation turned up “instances of outright fraud” that Trump used to enhance the fortune he took from his dad.

But before most people may have had a chance to make it through the lengthy piece, the president’s favorite TV channel got busy defending him.

Shortly after the story was published, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto dismissed tax fraud as “creative accounting,” saying, “I don’t know if there’s a there there outside of the fact the president benefited from having a rich father and a good marketing skill.”

Fox’s business show calls the activities in the NYT report “creative accounting” and dismisses it as Trump benefiting from a rich dad

CAVUTO: “I don’t know if there’s a there there outside of the fact the president benefited from having a rich father and a good marketing skill” pic.twitter.com/9CS1o8apgA

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) October 2, 2018

Fox’s business show calls the activities in the NYT report “creative accounting” and dismisses it as Trump benefiting from a rich dad

On Wednesday morning, Fox & Friends advanced a different talking point to defend the president. Host Brian Kilmeade actually spun the story as a positive, arguing it proves “there’s no financial benefit for Donald Trump running for president.”

Fox & Friends’ takeaway from to bombshell NYT story about Trump benefiting from fraudulent tax schemes is that it proves there was “no financial benefit for Donald Trump running for president.” #StateMediaWatch pic.twitter.com/IsEnTT0kcD

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) October 3, 2018

Ainsley Earhardt added that the revelations amount to “bashing his dad who has been dead for a very long time” — despite the fact that the New York Times story does not “bash” Trump’s father Fred, who died in 1999.

Kilmeade’s spin isn’t even accurate. On the same day that the NYT published its investigation of Trump’s wealth, Forbes ran a piece about how Trump — who broke precedent by refusing to divest from his business interests when he took office — is trying to profit off the presidency, but largely failing.

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Trump is tearing up every last treaty

by digby

Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues its slow-motion implosion:

In response to a U.N. court order that the U.S. lift sanctions on Iran, the Trump administration said Wednesday it was terminating a decades-old treaty affirming friendly relations between the two countries. The move is a largely symbolic gesture that highlights deteriorating relations between Washington and Tehran.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said withdrawing from the 1955 Treaty of Amity was long overdue and followed Iran “groundlessly” bringing a complaint with the International Court of Justice challenging U.S. sanctions on the basis that they were a violation of the treaty.

The Iranians have ignored the treaty “for an awfully long time,” Pompeo told reporters. “We ought to have pulled out of it decades ago.”

The treaty was signed when America and Iran were allies after the 1953 revolution, fomented by Britain and the U.S., that ultimately cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Diplomatic relations were severed following Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the takeover of the U.S. Embassy and ensuing hostage crisis. Nonetheless, the treaty remains in force.

Pompeo said the practical fallout from the U.S. decision to withdrawal remains to be seen.

“This marked a useful point for us to demonstrate the absolute absurdity” of the treaty. He said.

On Wednesday, the U.N. highest court ordered the United States to lift sanctions on Iran that affect imports of humanitarian goods and products and services linked to civil aviation safety.

President Donald Trump moved to restore tough U.S. penalties in May after withdrawing from Tehran’s nuclear accord with world powers. Iran challenged the sanctions in a case filed in July at the court.

In a preliminary ruling, the court said Washington must “remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments arising from” the reimposition of sanctions to the export to Iran of medicine and medical devices, food and agricultural commodities and spare parts and equipment necessary to ensure the safety of civil aviation.

By limiting the order to sanctions covering humanitarian goods and the civil aviation industry, the ruling did not go as far as Iran had requested.

I don’t think they’ll rest until the entire world bands together in opposition to the United States of America in every way. What could go wrong?

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He was a sloppy, black-out drunk

by digby

Brave New Films has produced a powerful short film about Brett Kavanaugh’s lying about his heavy drinking in high school and college:

Keep in mind that there’s a very good reason he is lying so blatantly. If he were to admit that he drank to excess and blacked out at times, it would lend credibility to Ford’s testimony. Why? Because it would mean that he and his admitted black-out drunk pal Mark Judge could very well have committed the act they are accused of — they were sloppy, rowdy drunks who showed contempt for the girls they socialized with (he’s alleged to have waved his wang in his Yale classmate’s face) and may even not remember doing it.

So he lied. Because to tell the truth would have been to admit that it was possible. High school and college frat boys may drink a lot of beer. But when they drink this much, this excessively, and talk about girls the way they talked in their yearbook pages, it lends credibility to the accusations. And he knows that. All those drunken assholes he hung out with in school know it. That’s why he can’t even admit that he was such an excessive drinker that he commonly drank until he vomited.

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What does he mean by “we need to get tough?”

by digby

He’s on record saying women need to be punished for having abortions. Now he seems to be saying they need to be punished for reporting sexual assaults which the perpetrator denies happened (which, of course, they all do.) He would think that. He’sbeen accused at least 19 times of assaulting women. His ex-wife accused him of raping her and tearing out her hair when her plastic surgeon did a bad job on his scalp reduction surgery so …

Anyway, here he is being the dignified statesman he always is:

He called Democrats who are against Kavanaugh “evil people” who want to “destroy people.”

He reiterated his earlier claims Tuesday that nowadays you are “guilty until proven innocent,” and stepped up his line of argument that men are under attack in America, without mentioning survivors of sexual assault.

“Think of your son. Think of your husband,” Trump told the rally, noting he has had “many false allegations” against him.
He launched into a hypothetical riff about a young man who got a job at IBM or General Motors but is falsely accused of sexual assault. “What do I do, Mom? What do I do, Mom?” Trump said, role-playing a conversation between a son and mother.

“It’s a damn sad situation, OK? And we better start as a country getting smart and getting tough.”

“It’s a damn sad situation, OK? And we better start as a country getting smart and getting tough.”

He usually reserves that line for terrorists, gang members and foreign enemies. Apparently, women have joined the ranks of those whom Trump promises to “get tough” with. His right-wing fascist followers all seemed to agree. They LOVED his mockery and smears.

And anyway, it’s no big deal if women are assaulted. It’s just their bodies. It’s not as if it’s something important like property or anything:

.@SandraSmithFox brought @RepSwalwell on her show so she could smear sexual assault victims as being crisis actors who are really just fronts for George Soros. Shameful stuff. pic.twitter.com/fmdyvZb4ef— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 3, 2018

Meanwhile, back in America:

The first time Kristi was ever arrested was a week ago, she told me.

It happened outside of Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office. She and a group of other protesters had gone there to demand that Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination be withdrawn. After they refused to move, Capitol Hill police officers placed them in plastic handcuffs and did the moving for them.

Kristi, who refuses to give her last name lest she become targeted by Kavanaugh’s supporters, was held for three hours. Before she was taken away, she had the foresight to tell a fellow activist to call her daughter, who’d need to pick up her brother from school since mom would be, well, indisposed.

Such acts of civil disobedience are not part of Kristi’s normal routine. She’s 55 years old and can only recall ever attending two rallies in her life: one in the 1980s to support the pro-choice movement, and the women’s march last year in protest at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Kavanaugh changed her, she says. His nomination didn’t compel her to come to D.C. so much as it overwhelmed her into doing so. She is a survivor who remains, to this day, incapable of telling her story. She would only tell me how old she was when it happened and on condition that I didn’t print even that detail. She begs off organizers who ask if she will confront lawmakers by recounting that horror for them. But she knew, in a single moment, that she had to come to Washington to lobby lawmakers.

“Ford did not want to come forward. She did it because she had to. And I wasn’t going to let her do it alone.”
“It wasn’t even a decision,” she said. “I couldn’t not come. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I came and found the activists leaders and I said to them: What do you want me to do, I’ll do it?’”

By mid-afternoon Tuesday, Kristi had found her way to the basement of the Russell Senate office building, waiting to confront senators going through the tunnels to the Capitol building for caucus lunches. It’s the location she’d been assigned by the UltraViolet—the progressive women’s group organizing the bird-dogging of lawmakers. She was wearing New Balance shoes and a small satchel travel bag with pins on it that say “I believe Christine,” in reference to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s accuser. Her short-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses belie the notion that she’s some sort of hardened liberal activist. She doesn’t bother to play the part either. As lawmakers pass through, she yells from a distance.

When they’re not there, she nervously looks around the corner to see who might be coming down the hall. The anxiety oozes from her.

“I was so scared when my daughter was growing up,” Kristi tells me. “People told me it was because of my own history. But it wasn’t. I was scared because of this culture. Women are collateral damage. We are not believed. I’m here because this woman, Christine Ford, did not want to come forward… She did not want this. She did it because she had to. And I wasn’t going to let her do it alone.”

There is a remarkable paradox to the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. Women across the country have been moved to come forward with their own stories of sexual assault. They’ve called into CSPAN, confronted lawmakers in elevators, and shared moments with each other on the floors of Senate office atriums.

And yet, for these same women, the fight over Kavanaugh is a frightening case study of the perils of stepping forward in the first place. Dr. Ford, to them, is at once a hero and a cautionary tale. And how the Senate ultimately chooses to vote in the coming days will be seen not just as a referendum on Kavanaugh but on the notion that women will ever truly be believed in the first place; that their own stories actually matter.

That piece by Sam Stein goes on to report on all the political organizing these women are doing which is empowering and important.

Unfortunately, there’s also these conservative Aunt Lydias who are determined to preserve their second class status in the white patriarchy, come what may:

If you keep waiting for Republican women to break from supporting Kavanaugh then this chart is for you. Republican women score nearly as high in hostile sexism as Republican men. And their sexism has increased since Trump's election. pic.twitter.com/mORDAQM5wx— Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) October 1, 2018

Aaaaand this:

Inside Trumpworld, the reaction was one of near glee that Trump had gone aggressively at Kavanaugh’s primary accuser.

“What’s more fun than a Trump rally?” Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser on Trump’s re-election campaign, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday evening. When asked if she thought it was appropriate for the president to attack or mock the accuser, she replied, “He didn’t ‘go after her.’ He recapped her testimony.”

Indeed several White House officials reached by The Daily Beast quickly rejected even the mere characterization that President Trump had “mocked” or “attacked” Dr. Ford, in spite of the president’s open mocking of her.

“The president is pointing out factual inconsistencies. By Ford’s own testimony, there are gaps in her memory, there are facts that she cannot remember,” Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor to President Trump, spun on Fox News Wednesday morning. During a press briefing that afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters the president was just “stating the facts” with his monologue. (Trump, of course, had made several factual errors in his description of Ford’s account.)

“We’re pointing out the hypocrisy” of Democrats who “exploited Dr. Ford,” Sanders insisted.

sigh…

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Daddy’s boy

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

On his way out of town on Tuesday afternoon, President Trump took some questions from the press corps and defended embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking habits. Trump said that while he has never had a beer himself he knows lots of people who have and he doesn’t consider it a problem. This isn’t the story we’ve heard in the past, at least as it concerns his son Donald Jr.’s reported issues with alcohol in his youth, and especially when it came to his alcoholic older brother Freddy, whose history is said to have been the reason Trump has always abstained. All the stories about their relationship have Donald angry and impatient with his older brother, including an anecdote about one dinner where Donald told Freddy to grow up and “make something of himself in the family business.”

“Donald put Freddy down quite a bit,” said Annamaria Schifano, then the girlfriend of Freddy’s best friend, who was at the dinner and recalled Donald’s tendency to pick fights and storm out. “There was a lot of combustion.”

Since he’s been president, Trump has pretended that he isn’t as judgmental about his big brother’s drinking as he used to be. He now claims to understand that Freddy simply wasn’t cut out for the business. Nobody believes him. From his tone, Trump is actually not thrilled with the tales of Kavanaugh’s youthful boozing either but he undoubtedly believes has to defend his hand-picked judge from all the vicious women who are assaulting his good name. After all, Trump has walked at least 19 miles in those shoes.

After Trump’s comments on Tuesday, I was reminded of a famous illustration of his vengeful nature. When the patriarch Fred Trump Sr. passed on and the family heard the will, Freddy’s family was shocked to find out that they’d been written out and would receive nothing. Freddy’s kids sued, claiming that Donald had manipulated their grandfather, who had suffering from dementia, into making that decision. Donald retaliated by canceling an agreement to pay for the medical care of his infant nephew who had cerebral palsy. Apparently, the family came to an “amicable agreement” later, which probably meant that Donald agreed not to sue Freddy’s family back.

Given all this family lore, I think most people have assumed that Trump cut Freddy’s kids out of the will out of contempt for what Trump saw as his brother’s embarrassing weaknesses. But Tuesday’s New York Times exposé of Fred Trump Sr.’s real estate empire and how he bankrolled Donald’s entire career suggests another possibility: That maneuver could have been yet another desperate cash grab aimed at bailing out the repeated failures of Trump’s allegedly brilliant business career.

It’s obvious just from observing him that Trump’s supposed business acumen has always been 90 percent hype. He’s just not that sharp. It’s clear that he has always spent most of his days thinking of ways to make people think he’s richer, smarter and more successful than he really is. He created the celebrity image of himself as a genius businessman, even managing to parlay his name into a reality TV show and a reasonably successful consumer brand in recent years. But it turns out that the wealth itself was almost entirely due to his father’s business savvy, not his. In fact, according to Tuesday’s Times report, Fred Trump spent his life figuring out ways to fraudulently and unethically flow massive sums money to his children, especially his favorite son.

Trump’s origin story has always been that he received a “small” $1 million loan from his dad to start his real estate business, and had to pay it all back. Instead it turns out that Trump’s famously parsimonious daddy actually loaned him at least $60.7 million, which is more like $140 million in 2018 dollars. Even rich guys have to admit that’s real money. Of course, the subtext of that story was that his dad wasn’t really all that rich. His business was in middle-class neighborhoods of Queens, not the glamorous Manhattan that Trump later conquered. Part of the Donald Trump myth has always been the idea that he was much more successful than his father.

That too is BS. Fred Trump was massively rich, and his wealth is what supported Trump throughout his career. The Times procured hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, including 200 tax returns from Fred Trump’s business that show many years of shady business practices designed to hide all these transactions — which add up to Donald Trump receiving at least $413 million in today’s dollars.

Trump has always said he got “peanuts” from his father. That’s a lot of peanuts. And they started rolling in when he was a tiny boy. The Times found that even as a toddler, he was earning the equivalent of $200,000 a year in contemporary dollars. He and was a millionaire by the time he was eight years old. Year after year he received more money from his father’s various trusts, until he was getting $5 million a year all the way into his 50s. It’s always been unclear how Trump could maintain his luxurious lifestyle even when his businesses were all cratering in the ’80s and ’90s. Now we know. Fred Trump took very good care of his boy even after he found out that Donnie was fiddling with the will without telling anyone and had his daughter Maryanne (now a federal judge) find someone to draw up papers stripping his son of sole control over Fred’s estate.

The Times, in an unusual move, called itself out in noting that for years the media took the books and TV appearances and shameless promotion at face value. It’s not like they couldn’t have checked out the facts before this. The family wasn’t exactly low profile. But this massive piece of investigative journalism may provide a roadmap for an investigation into Donald Trump’s more recent finances, which he’s gone to great lengths to hide. If the Democrats take over the Congress next year they can subpoena Trump’s tax returns. And the state of New York may have some interest in the Trump family tax avoidance strategies as well (although the statutes for prosecuting any possible crimes have likely expired).

In fact, the Trump kids should probably take a good hard look at the books and make sure they have what they think they have. Donald Trump learned to cheat at this daddy’s knee but he’s probably lost most of what he inherited by now and anything he’s still got, he intends to keep. He’s not likely to have cheated to benefit his kids the way Fred did. Donald J. Trump cheats for the benefit of one person, and one person alone.

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.

“So far,” he boasted, “I’ve never made a bad deal.”

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:

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.

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.

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.

Tax experts the Times consulted believe the Trumps did more than exploit tax loopholes, but engaged in a pattern of deception and obfuscation.

Fred repeatedly propped up Donald’s failing, high-profile ventures with loans totaling $60.7 million, loans Donald never repaid.

Formally forgiving the loans would have incurred tax liability for the future president. In one case, Fred traded the some of the outstanding loans as part of a $15.5 million investment in a 7.5 percent share in Trump Palace, one of Donald’s high-rise condominium projects. Four years later, he sold the shares for $10,000. Records suggest Fred sold the shares back to his son (and no doubt wrote off the gift as a loss on his taxes).

In case after documented case, the Times reports, “father and son were of one mind about rules and regulations, viewing them as annoyances to be finessed or, when necessary, ignored.”

The report based on records of Fred Trump’s business provide little insight Donald’s and his children’s dealings. The Times notes that most of the questionable, if not illegal, tax avoidance schemes cannot be prosecuted. The statute of limitations has run out on criminal prosecution. The family could still face civil fines for tax fraud, the Times notes. The New York state tax department states it is “vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation.”

Daniel Goldman, a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told MSNBC Trump and his siblings could still face millions of dollars in back taxes:

“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.

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.

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.”

The Times’ epic reporting reveal Trump’s image as a real estate tycoon as the sham we already suspected it was. Worse, he and his family have successfully evaded the law for decades and cheated the government of hundreds of millions in taxes if the Times analysis is correct. “He is the crook who got away with it,” writes Chait. Trump may have believed as president, with law enforcement under his control, he might get away with more. With investigations now probing whether the alleged money laundering he learned from his father might underlie his current business dealings with Russia, that remains to be seen. For now, he is now the poster child for a two-tiered system of justice: one that punishes the commoners, and another that protects the wealthy by looking the other way.

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

He likes beer

by digby

In a 1983 letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, the young Judge Kavanaugh warned his friends of the danger of eviction from an Ocean City, Md., condo. In a neatly written postscript, he added: Whoever arrived first at the condo should “warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us. Advise them to go about 30 miles…”

Loud, obnoxious drunks and prolific pukers…

But whatever.

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Trump’s greatest moment of self-awareness



by digby

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”

From a 2017 article in the Washington Post:

He was Trump in miniature, an embryonic version of the bombastic, flamboyant candidate who has dominated the 2016 presidential race, more than three dozen of his childhood friends, classmates and neighbors said in interviews. Even Trump has acknowledged the similarities between himself as an adult and when he was the boy whom friends alternately referred to as “Donny,” “The Trumpet” and “Flat Top” (for his hair).

His face crowned by a striking blond pompadour, young Donald commanded attention with his playground taunts, classroom disruptions and distinctive countenance, even then his lips pursed in a way that would inspire future mimics. Taller than his classmates, he exuded an easy confidence and independence.

“Who could forget him?” said Ann Trees, 82, who taught at Kew-Forest School, where Trump was a student through seventh grade. “He was headstrong and determined. He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face — I use the word surly — almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn’t settle with him.”

A fierce competitor, Trump could erupt in anger, pummeling another boy or smashing a baseball bat if he made an out, two childhood neighbors said. In school, he misbehaved so often that his initials became his friends’ shorthand for detention.

They sent him to military school to beat the miscreant out of him. It didn’t work.

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The president and the presumption of innocence

by digby

… for white men. Everybody else is a lying criminal.

Trump: "My whole life, I've heard you're innocent until proven guilty. But now you're guilty until proven innocent….I say that it's a very scary time for young men in America" pic.twitter.com/tsbuECwmOF— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) October 2, 2018

My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it “the heist of the century.”

Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels. This case has not been dormant, and many people have asked why it took so long to settle? It is politics at its lowest and worst form.

What about the other people who were brutalized that night, in addition to the jogger?

One thing we know is that the amount of time, energy and money that has been spent on this case is unacceptable. The justice system has a lot to answer for, as does the City of New York regarding this very mishandled disaster. Information was being leaked to newspapers by someone on the case from the beginning, and the blunders were frequent and obvious.

As a long-time resident of New York City, I think it is ridiculous for this case to be settled — and I hope that has not yet taken place.

Forty million dollars is a lot of money for the taxpayers of New York to pay when we are already the highest taxed city and state in the country. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.

Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.

Needless to say, women aren’t presumed innocent. Because they are evil. That goes without saying.

In Clinton’s case, they don’t even know why she should be locked up. They just hate her.

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