Daddy’s little girl and her big brother are refusing to comply with subpoenas. Junior is still an executive with the trump organization although there’s no evidence that he ever works at that job. And Ivanka was also a former executive and was intimately involved in Trump’s scams:
The Trump family was supposed to turn over records and testimony to the New York Attorney General surrounding the Trump family’s alleged tax dodging. Predictably, they didn’t. So now, investigators are turning up the heat on former President Donald Trump himself, Don Jr., and Ivanka.
The three Trump family members are being added as “respondents” in an ongoing legal fight with New York Attorney General Leticia James, according to a document filed in New York state court Monday morning.
In the court filing, the AG’s office said it recently issued subpoenas for the former president and two of his adult kids “for testimony and documents ‘in connection with an investigation into the valuation of properties,’” but that “a dispute has arisen.” Now the state’s top prosecutor wants to force them to cooperate.
In a statement, the law enforcement agency said: “Despite numerous attempts to delay our investigation by the Trump Organization, we are confident that our questions will be answered and the truth will be uncovered because no one is above the law.”
We saw this coming, didn’t we? I wrote about this last year.
Vanity Fair on Ivanka’s little temper tantrum:
Among the many consequences of Donald Trump losing the election to Joe Biden is the fact that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will likely do everything they can to reenter polite society, which will likely slam the door in their faces. Oh, sure, as a source put it to my colleague Emily Jane Fox, they’ll “probably be welcomed by real estate types and that group of Upper East Side and Palm Beach families that read about themselves in Quest magazine but don’t matter,” but the people whose opinions the couple actually care about will presumably have lost their numbers. Also probably at the top of Javanka’s mind are the billboards circling Trump Tower reminding passersby about their role in the COVID-19 crisis, which they really, really don‘t appreciate. But seemingly the most pressing issue keeping the first daughter up at night is the prospect of her father going to prison, if her unusually huffy response to the news that he’s being investigated for tax fraud is any indication.
Commenting on a New York Times report that both Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance and New York state attorney general Letitia James have expanded their probes of Trump and his businesses to include suspicious tax write-offs on millions of dollars of consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to his favorite child, Ivanka fumed on Twitter that this whole thing is apparently a witch hunt designed to take her extremely innocent father down:
She added: “This fishing expedition is very clearly part of a continued political vendetta.”
According to the Times, both Vance and James’s office issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks relating to the consulting fees, following an investigation by the paper that revealed the president paid little to no income tax in the last two decades. That report also showed that Trump was able to reduce his taxable income by deducting approximately $26 million in fees to “consultants” as business expenses between 2010 and 2018. While the consultants’ identities were not shown on tax records, some of the fees definitely seem like the were paid to Princess Purses, which might explain her testy reaction:
On a 2017 disclosure she filed when joining the White House as a presidential adviser, she reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia.
The subpoenas were focused on fees paid to the firm on her disclosures, TTT Consulting LLC, and represented just a portion of the $26 million, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The name of the firm appears to be a reference to Ms. Trump and other members of her family. Ms. Trump was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant while also working for the company. While companies can deduct professional fees, the Internal Revenue Service requires that consulting arrangements be market-based and reasonable, as well as “ordinary and necessary” to running a business.
The examination of fees apparently paid to his older daughter is likely to arouse even more vitriol from the outgoing president. And it raises questions about whether the payments were a tax-deductible way for him to compensate his children, or avoid gift taxes he might incur from transferring wealth to them, something Mr. Trump’s father had done through legally questionable schemes uncovered by the Times in 2018.
Also this:
The Trumps’ propensity to overstate sales led them, as ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker reported last year, to be investigated on potential felony fraud charges in one case. Ivanka had announced in June 2008 that 60 percent of the units at the SoHo tower had been bought when in fact 15 percent had, according to an affidavit filed by a Trump partner. The Manhattan district attorney’s office considered charging the Trumps but backed off after a visit from a donor — Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz . (The DA, Cyrus Vance , denied he was influenced by the donation but later changed his policy and now refuses donations from lawyers with cases before him.)
That’s from the great WNYC/Pro-Publica podcast called Trump Inc. Read the whole thing to understand just what a gigantic grift they had going. Check this out:
Trump arranged financing — his promised commission: $2.2 million or more — by bringing in investment bank Bear Stearns , which issued the bonds that paid for the Panama project’s construction.
Trump touted himself as a “partner” of the developer. His daughter Ivanka briefly boasted that she had personally sold 40 units. (A broker on the project said he couldn’t remember her selling even one.) Meanwhile, Ivanka told a journalist at the time that “over 90 percent” of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.
Not only were the Panama sales figures inflated, but many “purchases” turned out to be an illusion. That was no coincidence. The building’s financing depended on obtaining advance commitments from buyers, often before concrete had started pouring. But in between the sale of the bonds in 2007 and 2013, the year the building went bankrupt, buyers of 458 units in the 1,000-unit building abandoned their purchase contracts. Those buyers forfeited more than $50 million in deposits, and they never took possession of finished units. Given that the “buyers” were often shadowy shell companies or other paper entities, it was nearly impossible to discern who the actual purchasers were, let alone why they backed out.
Trump licensed his name for an initial fee of $1 million. But that was just the beginning of the revenue streams, a lengthy and varied assortment that granted him a piece of everything from sales of apartment units to a cut of minibar sales, and was notable for the myriad ways in which both success and failure triggered payments to him.
Consider the final accounting: In the wake of the project’s bankruptcy, a 50 percent default rate and his company’s expulsion from managing the hotel, Donald Trump walked away with between $30 million and $55 million.
Somehow, I doubt that was the last time they pulled that con. Bears Stern is no longer but his arrangements with all financial institutions are just as shady. How much did he lie to Deutsche Bank?
Ivanka was up to her neck in these scams, even more than Don Jr. He had her outfront lying to everyone. No wonder she’s worried.