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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#329351: Sep 27th 2020 at 1:57:09 PM

And if you go to the extent of criminalising saying the wrong thing anywhere, congratulations, you have created a police state.

CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#329352: Sep 27th 2020 at 1:57:52 PM

[up] So most of Europe is a police state? I already said it wasn't practical to enforce Thought Crime, but we can and should take steps to minimize the spread of such beliefs by limiting their expression in public places.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Sep 27th 2020 at 4:58:40 AM

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#329353: Sep 27th 2020 at 1:59:46 PM

You're editing one line posts right now, makes it a little awkward when you don't clarify until after I've already started responding. tongue

CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#329354: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:05:19 PM

[up] Sorry about that, it's a bad habit. I think there's been a misunderstanding in terms of what I'm suggesting here. I'm not suggesting using some sort of Orwellian mass surveillance system to catch people using the racial slurs in the privacy of their own house, I'm suggesting taking action against people doing it publicly, especially in a context where they're trying to spread said beliefs.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Sep 27th 2020 at 5:05:28 AM

Forenperser Foreign Troper from Germany Since: Mar, 2012
Foreign Troper
#329355: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:05:45 PM

[up][up][up] While Europe does have hate speech laws, racist thoughts in itself are not a crime.

In Germany f.e. the Volksverhetzung-Paragraph has some very specific asteriks. Publicly inciting hatred and violence or Holocaust Denial can get you in legal trouble.

Merely saying disparaging things about certain ethnicities however, won't.

Edited by Forenperser on Sep 27th 2020 at 11:06:15 AM

Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
AzurePaladin She/Her Pronouns from Forest of Magic Since: Apr, 2018 Relationship Status: Mu
She/Her Pronouns
#329356: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:06:08 PM

Er.

Maybe this weird religion argument would be better suited for another thread. Or, perhaps, none. Maybe we should just drop it.

Chances are, even if Irreligion continues to rise, is that many, many people are going to remain religious. So, this discussion is moot anyway.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Sep 27th 2020 at 5:08:08 AM

The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#329357: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:11:20 PM

[up][up] They aren't but expression of those sentiments are to the extent that it is practical to criminalize them, which as you said requires some very particular asterisks as far as prosecuting individuals. As far as trying to get social media platforms to ban users for expressions of hatred that fall below the level where the authorities would be looking to fine or arrest the person responsible, I understand that Germany has been far more proactive.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Sep 27th 2020 at 5:12:02 AM

SeptimusHeap MOD from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#329358: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:13:49 PM

Yeah, this is veering offtopic.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#329359: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:21:41 PM

So I've been looking at the recent polls, and what I find kind of concerning is that, while a solid electoral college victory seems likely, most of the tipping point contests look like they'll be down to within less than 1%. With how likely it is that some states won't be done counting by Midnight November 4th, I'm worried that we could have an outcome where Trump is generally ahead on election night due to delays in the counting of early/mail-in ballots, then Biden pulls ahead a day or more later. That could lead to a huge number of lawsuits about the validity of certain ballots.


According to 538, several of the tipping point states probably won't be called on election night.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Sep 27th 2020 at 5:24:17 AM

CharlesPhipps Since: Jan, 2001
#329360: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:35:55 PM

Moving topic to religious threads.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#329361: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:36:50 PM

Where are you getting the 1% for tipping point states from? If you're citing 538, the tipping point value is Biden up 4.5% to Trump in Pennsylvania.

3of4 Just a harmless giant from a foreign land. from Five Seconds in the Future. Since: Jan, 2010 Relationship Status: GAR for Archer
RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#329363: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:40:56 PM

Sounds interesting, but paywall. Is that millions in debt that's coming due now, or has in the past?

CharlesPhipps Since: Jan, 2001
#329364: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:45:58 PM

He's something like 500 million dollars in debt to China due this year.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-biden-china-debt-205475

200 million of it is directly to the state bank.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 27th 2020 at 2:46:37 AM

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
3of4 Just a harmless giant from a foreign land. from Five Seconds in the Future. Since: Jan, 2010 Relationship Status: GAR for Archer
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
#329365: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:48:50 PM

    First third or so 
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents on which they were based. After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

As the legal and political battles over access to his tax returns have intensified, Mr. Trump has often wondered aloud why anyone would even want to see them. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.

In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every business expense Mr. Trump claims to reduce his taxable income — for instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.

The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

The tax audit looms.

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Mr. Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. At his Doral golf resort near Miami, the roofing materials manufacturer GAF spent at least $1.5 million in 2018 even as its industry was lobbying the Trump administration to roll back “egregious” federal regulations. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.

The Times was also able to take the fullest measure to date of the president’s income from overseas, where he holds ultimate sway over American diplomacy. When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

Mr. Trump’s U.S. payment, after factoring in his losses, was roughly equivalent, in dollars not adjusted for inflation, to another presidential tax bill revealed nearly a half-century before. In 1973, The Providence Journal reported that, after a charitable deduction for donating his presidential papers, Richard M. Nixon had paid $792.81 in 1970 on income of about $200,000.

The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.

“I would love to do that,” Mr. Trump said in 2014 when asked whether he would release his taxes if he ran for president. He’s been backpedaling ever since.

When he ran, he said he might make his taxes public if Hillary Clinton did the same with the deleted emails from her private server — an echo of his taunt, while stoking the birther fiction, that he might release the returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate. He once boasted that his tax returns were “very big” and “beautiful.” But making them public? “It’s very complicated.” He often claims that he cannot do so while under audit — an argument refuted by his own I.R.S. commissioner. When prosecutors and congressional investigators issued subpoenas for his returns, he wielded not just his private lawyers but also the power of his Justice Department to stalemate them all the way to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump’s elaborate dance and defiance have only stoked suspicion about what secrets might lie hidden in his taxes. Is there a financial clue to his deference to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin? Did he write off as a business expense the hush-money payment to the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election? Did a covert source of money feed his frenzy of acquisition that began in the mid-2000s?

The Times examined and analyzed the data from thousands of individual and business tax returns for 2000 through 2017, along with additional tax information from other years. The trove included years of employee compensation information and records of cash payments between the president and his businesses, as well as information about ongoing federal audits of his taxes. This article also draws upon dozens of interviews and previously unreported material from other sources, both public and confidential.

All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it. While most of the tax data has not previously been made public, The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records previously obtained by The Times.

To delve into the records is to see up close the complex structure of the president’s business interests — and the depth of his entanglements. What is popularly known as the Trump Organization is in fact a collection of more than 500 entities, virtually all of them wholly owned by Mr. Trump, many carrying his name. For example, 105 of them are a variation of the name Trump Marks, which he uses for licensing deals.

Fragments of Mr. Trump’s tax returns have leaked out before.

Transcripts of his main federal tax form, the 1040, from 1985 to 1994, were obtained by The Times in 2019. They showed that, in many years, Mr. Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer. Three pages of his 1995 returns, mailed anonymously to The Times during the 2016 campaign, showed that Mr. Trump had declared losses of $915.7 million, giving him a tax deduction that could have allowed him to avoid federal income taxes for almost two decades. Five months later, the journalist David Cay Johnston obtained two pages of Mr. Trump’s returns from 2005; that year, his fortunes had rebounded to the point that he was paying taxes.

The vast new trove of information analyzed by The Times completes the recurring pattern of ascent and decline that has defined the president’s career. Even so, it has its limits.

Tax returns do not, for example, record net worth — in Mr. Trump’s case, a topic of much posturing and almost as much debate. The documents chart a great churn of money, but while returns report debts, they often do not identify lenders.

The data contains no new revelations about the $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress who performs as Stormy Daniels — the focus of the Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena for Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information. Mr. Trump has acknowledged reimbursing his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, who made the payoff, but the materials obtained by The Times did not include any itemized payments to Mr. Cohen. The amount, however, could have been improperly included in legal fees written off as a business expense, which are not required to be itemized on tax returns.

No subject has provoked more intense speculation about Mr. Trump’s finances than his connection to Russia. While the tax records revealed no previously unknown financial connection — and, for the most part, lack the specificity required to do so — they did shed new light on the money behind the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, a subject of enduring intrigue because of subsequent investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The records show that the pageant was the most profitable Miss Universe during Mr. Trump’s time as co-owner, and that it generated a personal payday of $2.3 million — made possible, at least in part, by the Agalarov family, who would later help set up the infamous 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials seeking “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

In August, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that looked extensively into the circumstances of the Moscow pageant, and revealed that as recently as February, investigators subpoenaed the Russian singer Emin Agalarov, who was involved in planning it. Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras, a billionaire who boasts of close ties to Mr. Putin, was Mr. Trump’s partner in the event.

The committee interviewed a top Miss Universe executive, Paula Shugart, who said the Agalarovs offered to underwrite the event; their family business, Crocus Group, paid a $6 million licensing fee and another $6 million in expenses. But while the pageant proved to be a financial loss for the Agalarovs — they recouped only $2 million — Ms. Shugart told investigators that it was “one of the most lucrative deals” the Miss Universe organization ever made, according to the report.

That is borne out by the tax records. They show that in 2013, the pageant reported $31.6 million in gross receipts — the highest since at least the 1990s — allowing Mr. Trump and his co-owner, NBC, to split profits of $4.7 million. By comparison, Mr. Trump and NBC shared losses of $2 million from the pageant the year before the Moscow event, and $3.8 million from the one the year after.

Its a really long article.

    Final part 
When Mr. Trump glided down a gilded Trump Tower escalator to kick off his presidential campaign in June 2015, his finances needed a jolt.

His core businesses were reporting mounting losses — more than $100 million over the previous two years. The river of celebrity-driven income that had long buoyed them was running dry.

If Mr. Trump hoped his unlikely candidacy might, at least, revitalize his brand, his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.

Now his tax records make clear that he is facing a battery of threats to his business and his own financial well-being.

Over the past decade, he appears to have filled the cash-flow gaps with a series of one-shots that may not be available again.

In 2012, he took out a $100 million mortgage on the commercial space in Trump Tower. He took nearly the entire amount as a payout, his tax records show. His company has paid more than $15 million in interest on the loan, but nothing on the principal. The full $100 million comes due in 2022.

In 2013, he withdrew $95.8 million from his Vornado partnership account.

And in January 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds, his biggest single month of sales in at least the last two decades. He sold $54 million more in stocks and bonds in 2015, and $68.2 million in 2016. His financial disclosure released in July showed that he had as little as $873,000 in securities left to sell.

Mr. Trump’s businesses reported cash on hand of $34.7 million in 2018, down 40 percent from five years earlier.

What’s more, the tax records show that Mr. Trump has once again done what he says he regrets, looking back on his early 1990s meltdown: personally guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a decision that led his lenders to threaten to force him into personal bankruptcy.

This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.

There is, however, a tax benefit for Mr. Trump. While business owners can use losses to avoid taxes, they can do so only up to the amount invested in the business. But by taking personal responsibility for that $421 million in debt, Mr. Trump would be able to declare that amount in losses in future years.

The balances on those loans had not been paid down by the end of 2018. And the businesses carrying the bulk of the debt — the Doral golf resort ($125 million) and the Washington hotel ($160 million) — are struggling, which could make it difficult to find a lender willing to refinance it.

The unresolved audit of his $72.9 million tax refund hangs over his head.

The broader economy promises little relief. Across the country, brick-and-mortar stores are in decline, and they have been very important to Trump Tower, which has in turn been very important to Mr. Trump. Nike, which rented the space for its flagship store in a building attached to Trump Tower and had paid $195.1 million in rent since the 1990s, left in 2018.

The president’s most recent financial disclosure reported modest gains in 2019. But that was before the pandemic hit. His already struggling properties were shut down for several months earlier this year. The Doral resort asked Deutsche Bank to allow a delay on its loan payments. Analysts have predicted that the hotel business will not fully recover until late 2023.

Edited by 3of4 on Sep 27th 2020 at 11:49:21 AM

"You can reply to this Message!"
SpookyMask Since: Jan, 2011
#329366: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:50:44 PM

I don't have time to read it completely, but I find the whole thing absurd that apparently he doesn't pay income taxes at all because he keeps buying up businesses he can site for losses?

CaptainCapsase from Orbiting Sagittarius A* Since: Jan, 2015
#329367: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:52:42 PM

@Ranieh: Florida, NC, and Ohio are all within 1%. There's a comfortable margin in PA right now, but Florida is the second most likely tipping point state after PA. If Trump somehow turns things around in PA, then the odds of an election where recounts or supreme court rulings on which mail in ballots are valid could swing the election becomes much higher. There's so many things that can go catastrophically wrong this election cycle, and I'm not comfortable with that.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Sep 27th 2020 at 5:56:36 AM

CharlesPhipps Since: Jan, 2001
#329368: Sep 27th 2020 at 2:54:57 PM

Trump's guilty of tax evasion and 4 years later and hundreds of court orders to produce his tax returns, he's still not released them.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 27th 2020 at 2:55:17 AM

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
3of4 Just a harmless giant from a foreign land. from Five Seconds in the Future. Since: Jan, 2010 Relationship Status: GAR for Archer
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
#329369: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:12:18 PM

With this article being basically blood in the water for the coming news cycles, I wonder if Trump will chicken out of the debate this week.

Trump at his press conference just now:

“It’s fake news,” he says. “It’s totally fake news. Made up, fake. We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, I had to litigate this and had to talk about it. Totally fake news. Actually, I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns – it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time, the IRS does not treat me well, they treat me like the Tea Party, like they treated the Tea Party, and they don’t treat me well. They treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS that treat me very, very badly. But they’re under audit. And when they’re not, I would be proud to show you. But that’s just fake news.”

Sounds more than a bit rattled.

Edited by 3of4 on Sep 27th 2020 at 12:18:15 PM

"You can reply to this Message!"
singularityshot Since: Dec, 2012
#329370: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:27:45 PM

I don't know - him not paying taxes and gaming the system is sort of on brand. Don't forget, when this came up four years ago Clinton pushed Trump on it and he responded "That's because I am smart". So tax avoidance / tax evasion - isn't a big deal.

Provided he is rich.

A more successful tactic might be able to pick on that little scab. If you only pay $750 worth of federal taxes, you are not rich. On that measure, Biden is almost certainly wealthier than Trump.

Ultimatum Disasturbator from the Amiga Forest (Old as dirt) Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Disasturbator
#329371: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:30:14 PM

Trying to work out why he's bringing up the Tea Party

have a listen and have a link to my discord server
RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#329372: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:32:00 PM

"The IRS does not treat me well" is also an odd defence. If it treats you badly then... you're breaking the law?

nova92 Since: Apr, 2020
#329373: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:32:44 PM

[up][up] IIRC there was a scandal a few years ago about the IRS possibly targeting conservative groups for audits (?)

Edited by nova92 on Sep 27th 2020 at 3:33:08 AM

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#329374: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:33:02 PM

I just read the whole NYT article. There is no obvious connection to Russia during his time in the Oval Office, but the Miss Universe pageant was financed by a Russian who took a big loss on the event while Trump made out with a substantial profit. The Apprentice was incredibly lucrative, with Trump collecting around $600 million from a combination of direct income and licensing/royalties. He spent all of it to prop up his failing businesses.

In the next four years he's got over $400 million of personally guaranteed loans coming due with no clear idea of where he's going to get the money.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#329375: Sep 27th 2020 at 3:34:23 PM

We can probably guess where he'll get out if he gets his second term.


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