The New York state court system has, in fact, emerged as a vital force in the pushback against the president and his financial shenanigans. As Zephyr Teachout, recent Democratic candidate for New York attorney general, pointed out, it is "one of the most important legal offices in the entire country to both resist and present an alternative to what is happening at the federal level." And indeed it had begun fulfilling that responsibility with The Donald long before the Mueller investigation was even launched.
In 2013, Schneiderman filed a civil suit against Trump University, calling it a sham institution that engaged in repeated fraudulent behavior. In 2016, Trump finally settled that case in court, agreeing to a $25 million payment to its former students -- something that (though we don't, of course, have the tax returns to confirm this) probably also proved to be a tax write-off for him.
These days, the New York attorney general's office could essentially create a branch only for matters Trumpian. So far, it has brought more than 100 legal or administrative actions against the president and congressional Republicans since he took office.
Still, don't sell the foundation short. It did, in the end, find a way to work for the greater good -- of Donald Trump. He and his wife, Melania, for instance, used the "charity" to purchase a now infamous six-foot portrait of himself for $20,000 -- and true to form, according to the Washington Post, even that purchase could turn out to be a tax violation. Such "self-dealing" is considered illegal. Of course, we're talking about someone who "used $258,000 from the foundation to pay off legal settlements that involved his for-profit businesses." That seems like the definition of self-dealing.
The Trump Team
The president swears that he has an uncanny ability to size someone up in a few seconds, based on attitude, confidence, and a handshake -- that, in other words, just as there's the art of the deal, so, too, there's the art of choosing those who will represent him, stand by him, and take bullets for him, his White House, and his business enterprises. And for a while, he did indeed seem to be a champion when it came to surrounding himself with people who had a special knack for hiding money, tax documents, and secret payoffs from public view.
These days -- think of them as the era of attrition for Donald Trump -- that landscape looks a lot emptier and less inviting.
On August 21st, his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was convicted in Virginia of "five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account." (On September 14th, he would make a deal with Robert Mueller and plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy.) On that same August day, Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, also pled guilty to eight different federal crimes in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, including -- yep -- tax evasion.
Three days later, prosecutors in the Cohen investigation granted immunity to the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. A loyal employee of the Trump family for more than four decades, he had also served as treasurer for the Donald J. Trump Foundation. If anyone other than the president and his children knows the financial and tax secrets of the Trump empire, it's him. And now, he may be ready to talk. Lurking in his future testimony could be yet another catalyst in a coming Trump tax debacle.
And don't forget David Pecker, CEO of American Media, the company that publishes the National Enquirer. Pecker bought and buried stories for The Donald for what seems like forever. He, too, now has an immunity deal in the federal investigation of Cohen (and so Trump), evidently in return for providing information on the president's hush-money deals to bury various exploits that he came to find unpalatable.
The question is this: Did Trump know of Cohen's hush-money payments? Cohen has certainly indicated that he did and Pecker seems to have told federal prosecutors a similar story. As Cohen said in court of Pecker, "I and the CEO of a media company, at the request of the candidate, worked together" to keep the public in the dark about such payments and Trump's involvement in them.
The president's former lawyer faces up to 65 years in prison. That's enough time to make him consider what other tales he might be able to tell in return for a lighter sentence, including possibly exposing various tax avoidance techniques he and his former client cooked up.
And don't think that Cohen, Pecker, and Weisselberg are going to be the last figures to come forward with such stories as the Trump team begins to come unglued.
In the cases of Enron and Lehman Brothers, both companies unraveled after multiple shell games imploded. Enron's losses were being hidden in multiple offshore entities. In the case of Lehman Brothers, staggeringly over-valued assets were being pledged to borrow yet more money to buy similar assets. In both cases, rigged games were being played in the shadows, while vital information went undisclosed to the public -- until it was way too late.
Donald Trump's equivalent shell games still largely remain to be revealed. They may simply involve hiding money trails to evade taxes or to secretly buy political power and business influence. There is, as yet, no way of knowing. One thing is clear, however: the only way to begin to get answers is to see the president's tax returns, audited or not. Isn't it time to open that safe?
Nomi Prins is a TomDispatch regular. Her latest book is Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (Nation Books). Of her six other books, the most recent is All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power. She is a former Wall Street executive. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb work on this piece.
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