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.”
What about Trump Tower condominiums? Craig Unger, author of “House of Trump, House of Putin,” alleges there is a “35-year relationship between Trump and Russian organized crime” that involves selling condos to Russian mafia figures. The Russian underworld is “a de facto state actor,” Unger writes:
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.
What about Trump’s other U.S. real estate deals? BuzzFeed found more than one-fifth of Trump’s U.S. condominiums were sold through cash-only exchanges with shell companies, trades federal investigators believe may indicate money laundering. McClatchy found buyers tied to Russia, former Soviet republics paid $109 million cash for Trump properties.
What about the Trump Ocean Club project launched in Panama in 2011? In its November 2017 investigation, Global Witness found:
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.
What about Trump’s relentless attacks on Department of Justice officials? Natasha Bertrand’s reporting for The Atlantic found that Trump’s favorite targets at the D.O.J. — Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Andrew Weissmann, Andrew McCabe — possess “extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.”
Tuesday’s New York Times report on Trump’s ten years’ worth of massive financial losses bolsters its 2018 report that revealed Fred Trump, Donald’s father, repeatedly bailed out his son’s failed projects. It was a period when Donald Trump “appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer.”
What about now? Who is keeping Trump afloat now that Fred is gone? The sitting president’s taxes might reveal that among other things Trump is fighting to keep hidden.
The man is uniquely vulnerable to foreign leverage, Jonathan Chait observes:
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.
What about the foreign adversary whose agents committed crimes against the United States in 2018 and are poised to interfere again in the 2020 election?
What about Trump’s inexplicably fawning relationship with the Russian autocrat?
Russian President Vladimir Putin smiled over the phone about the Mueller investigation last week when Donald called Vlad to chat for an hour.
“We discussed, he sort of smiled when he said something to the effect that it started off as a mountain and it ended up being a mouse, but he knew that, because he knew there was no collusion whatsoever, so pretty much that’s what it was,” Trump told reporters.
What about meddling in next year’s election? Reporters asked, “Mr. President, did you tell him not to meddle in the next election?”
After evading the question once, Trump said, “We didn’t discuss that.”