David Kay Johnson, LA Times - Americans were confronted Tuesday with a profound problem, one that challenges our commitment to accountable democratic government and justice. It is an awful truth that we must face now that the New York Times has published a richly documented, 14,000-word expose alleging decades of deeply corrupt Trump family finances.
... Leaked financial records reveal decades of calculated tax cheating, according to the New York Times. Father Fred Trump created 295 revenue streams to transfer money to his children, many of which appear to have broken laws. A lawyer for the president claims the published allegations are false and the reporting “extremely inaccurate,” but the reporters cite bank statements, canceled checks, invoices and tax filings that reveal the apparent evasion of close to half a billion dollars of taxes in today’s money.
.... As that paper’s former tax reporter and a journalist who has covered Donald Trump for more than 30 years, this was no surprise. In 1990 I broke the story that Trump was no billionaire. He called me a liar for months, until he had to put documents in the public record showing he was worth negative-$295 million.
Not a scintilla of verifiable evidence shows that Donald is anything like as rich as he claims. Candidate Trump said he was worth more than $10 billion, but his 2017 presidential disclosure statement shows just $1.4 billion.
Yet millions of Americans believe Trump is a modern Midas. They believe the president will lift them out of hard times, after a half-century during which the super-rich flourished and their incomes were mostly flat. The awful truth is that the man in the Oval Office is not a wealth-building entrepreneur, but a financial vampire who extracts cash from enterprises, leaving behind unpaid workers, vendors and governments.
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