Hurry up every chance you get
by Tom Sullivan
Among the things Donald Trump fears are such diverse elements as being exposed as a career criminal, not as rich as his claims, and not a self-made “winner.” But it doesn’t take a mock-Spanish cardinal to know that. Or a police psychologist. Being president of the United States is just a temp gig. Defending the facade of success he has spent a lifetime constructing around himself is his full-time job.
Last fall’s massive New York Times examination of Fred Trump and the Trump Organization’s tax and business history did more than knock large chunks off the Trump frieze. It exposed the Trump children and the family business to intense legal scrutiny and civil sanctions for possible tax fraud.
The family’s dubious tax practices have outrun New York’s statute of limitations for criminal penalties, but the expose nonetheless opened Trump’s older sister, federal appeals court judge Maryanne Trump Barry, to an ethics investigation. Judge Barry, 82, filed for retirement 10 days after a February 1 letter notified four people who filed ethics complaints that the matter was “receiving the full attention” of an official conduct review.
Barry’s retirement ended an investigation that might not only have exposed her involvement in tax fraud, but implicated her brother as well:
A lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, said last fall, “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory.”
But the famously litigious younger Trump, sworn enemy of “fake news” and the New York Times in particular, has yet to file suit against the Times over its expose. The Times based its reporting on 100,000 pages of documents, including “tens of thousands of pages of confidential records — bank statements, financial audits, accounting ledgers, cash disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks,” plus “more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts.” The sitting president dare not open the Trump Organization’s more recent business dealings in the U.S. and abroad to discovery by bringing a lawsuit against the Times or its reporters.
Nor does he want House Democrats getting their hands on his personal tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, federal law or no federal law. Like T-party irregulars and his newly rule-of-law-blind Republican allies, the imperious Mr. Trump believes the law is whatever he says it is.
Everything Trump is about money. He measures his manhood by it. Whatever secrets he so zealously guards about the real size of his wealth, his financial liabilities, business associations, and tax-avoidance strategies, his sister just protected by foreclosing an investigation into her own tax history. The last thing brother Scrooge wants is a visit from the Ghost of Tax Years Past.
Donald Trump may before leaving office issue himself a pardon for any federal crimes awaiting his departure from the White House. But his reach will not extend to investigations by the city, county, and state of New York. The same questions the Times investigation raised about Trump family’s federal tax filings — the ones subject to scrutiny in the erstwhile ethics probe into Maryanne Trump Barry — will apply to the Trumps’ state returns. Whatever happens with the demand for Trump’s taxes by House Democrats, New York’s state Department of Taxation and Finance presumably has copies of Trump’s federal taxes he filed with his state returns. We wish their investigators Godspeed.
Update: Replaced a dropped phrase in final paragraph.