Trump Org. and CFO Indicted

dirtywick said:
I think they’ve already done that. It wasn’t oversight or misinterpretation, it was deliberate fraud.

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Also, why would they have to prove that? Is other people have committed similar crimes and not been prosecuted a valid defense?
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They could make a case that the prosecution is politically motivated - which might get them more leeway with the judge.
And given the public statements by Letitia James, they might even have a point.
 
dirtywick said:
I think they’ve already done that. It wasn’t oversight or misinterpretation, it was deliberate fraud.
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Yes, and no. People can talk themselves into an awful lot, and tell themselves that they have a clever lawyer who found a perfectly legal loophole they can use to hide their income from taxation. That's why the IRS conducts audits. They know that people are claiming deductions and business expenses they aren't really entitled to. In the case of me and my 20+ colleagues, I would talk to them and when I counselled them to set money aside to pay taxes if the IRS caught up to them, they would, in all sincerity, insist that the payments made to us were all perfectly legal and not at all taxable. Before I went to a lawyer, I went to a tax preparer, and she insisted that none of it was taxable, even though I explained exactly my real situation.

It will be for the prosecutor to explain why this was more than just that sort of wishful thinking, and for a jury, and then an appeals court, to agree.


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Also, why would they have to prove that? Is other people have committed similar crimes and not been prosecuted a valid defense?
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It can be. Selective prosecution is grounds for throwing out charges or overturning convictions. If a judge can be convinced that this is not normally prosecuted, and that this prosecution is simply politically motivated, they are very likely to throw it out.

Again, for emphasis, I'm not saying that this is an example of selective prosecution, or that the tax cheating involved here is not the sort that shouldn't be prosecuted. I'm saying that the defense is going to try to make that argument, and if they convince the judge and/or jury that it's true, then they won't be convicted, or their conviction will be thrown out on appeal.

This subtopic started when I responded to a question about prosecution for tax fraud, and I was noting that a discovery of tax fraud does not always result in prosecution. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. In this case, the prosecution thought it should. The defense will try to argue that it should not.
 
I'm waiting for the slew of news reports on this to start regularly pointing out the organization had 2 sets of books.
 
carlitos said:
Yeah, but if the company really wanted to pay him more, they could just gross it up. Gross up the gross up even. I have worked for people like this before - worth millions and try to nickel and dime every expense they can. I really do not get it.
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I was trying to analyze my CEO, and his personality was more Trumpian. He seemed to be thrilled at getting away with cheating. It was not so much how much he made but "I got away with it, I'm smart!"
 
Probably worth pointing out that upping the gross would take money out of Trumps pocket, but cheating taxes takes money out of the government’s. And that they used the fringe benefits as tax deductions instead of taxable payroll.
 
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DJTJr. confesses.
Donald Trump Jr. has come right out and acknowledged that one of the counts in the 15-felony indictment against his dad’s Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, is true.

In a rambling 13-minute video posted to Facebook on Thursday, Junior said that, yes, his father, former President Donald Trump, paid the private school tuition for Weisselberg’s grandkids. “My dad did that,” he said, because he’s a “good guy.”
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https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/donald-trump-jr-concedes-felony-130003354.html
 
Former Trump executive Barbara Res tells the inside story.
"If I know the way Trump thinks, and I do, Trump never gave a serious thought about what was legal, only to whether it could be gotten away with. And as far as he was concerned, he could get away with anything. As he has proven so far," she wrote. "The man's M.O. was bending and breaking the rules for maximum profit and advantage."
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https://www.salon.com/2021/07/06/tr...-question-in-the-company-indictment_partner/
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion...0210703-jc3po5up5jdevhpgjoivxdc74e-story.html
 
Belz... said:
And ironically, he's always managed to lose all that money because he's a terrible businessman.
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He has a beach front mansion in Palm Beach and a private plane. I don't have that. In some sense, he has to be at least a fairly decent businessman.


Mostly, he loses other people's money.


We'll see though. So far, he hasn't been indicted. Maybe that will change.
 
Meadmaker said:
He has a beach front mansion in Palm Beach and a private plane. I don't have that. In some sense, he has to be at least a fairly decent businessman.
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No. Just because he spends the money he grifts from other people before losing his shirt and owing billions to banks and Russian thugs doesn't make him a good businessman.
 
Meadmaker said:
He has a beach front mansion in Palm Beach and a private plane. I don't have that. In some sense, he has to be at least a fairly decent businessman.
....
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He's a crook. He's always been a crook. He inherited a vast fortune from his father, who was also a crook. It's been noted that if he had put his inheritance into index funds, his fortune would be much bigger now than he even claims it is, and nobody believes his claims.
 
Bob001 said:
He's a crook. He's always been a crook. He inherited a vast fortune from his father, who was also a crook. It's been noted that if he had put his inheritance into index funds, his fortune would be much bigger now than he even claims it is, and nobody believes his claims.
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It's also important to note that he illegally inherited that money.
 
Bob001 said:
He's a crook. He's always been a crook. He inherited a vast fortune from his father, who was also a crook. It's been noted that if he had put his inheritance into index funds, his fortune would be much bigger now than he even claims it is, and nobody believes his claims.
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I definitely agree he's a crook, but he might be the sort of crook who manages to not do anything technically illegal, or at least not criminal. He's a fraud and a swindler, and has left a lot of poor people in his wake.


As an aside, the index fund analysis is somewhat misleading. I've seen it before. Basically, it takes the value of his inheritance, assumes that he invests it, and compares his net worth today with what it would have been if he had just put it in an index fund. That's a very misleading analysis, because it neglects the fact that during that whole period, he was spending lots and lots of money doing things like flying private jets and living in a Manhattan luxury penthouse. If you took his inheritance money, taken out enough every year to live the kind of lavish lifestyle he has led, and kept the rest in an index fund, he would have gone broke long ago.

So, in some sense, he is a good businessman. He has done quite well for himself.

What he hasn't done is actually create value.

So far, he has also avoided legal consequences. We will see if that continues.
 
Meadmaker said:
He has a beach front mansion in Palm Beach and a private plane. I don't have that. In some sense, he has to be at least a fairly decent businessman.
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Correction... he LIVES in a mansion, and FLIES on a private plane.

Whether he actually owns it is up for debate. (Given his love of debt, it may be that he has his name on the ownership papers, but owes more than either are worth.)
I definitely agree he's a crook, but he might be the sort of crook who manages to not do anything technically illegal, or at least not criminal. He's a fraud and a swindler, and has left a lot of poor people in his wake.
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Or, more likely, he actually does things that are "technically illegal", but just hasn't been caught, because the government is usually pretty poor at investigating and prosecuting financial crimes.
As an aside, the index fund analysis is somewhat misleading.....it takes the value of his inheritance, assumes that he invests it, and compares his net worth today with what it would have been if he had just put it in an index fund. ...it neglects the fact that during that whole period, he was spending lots and lots of money doing things like flying private jets and living in a Manhattan luxury penthouse. If you took his inheritance money, taken out enough every year to live the kind of lavish lifestyle he has led, and kept the rest in an index fund, he would have gone broke long ago.
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Errrr... not really.

The current estimate is that Trump is worth somewhere in the $3-4 billion range. (Of course, we don't know the real number, and much of the value is in his 'brand' rather than assets, so his net worth might be closer to 0 than $3 billion.) But lets be generous and say its $3 billion.

On the other hand, I have seen estimates that state that if he invested in index funds, he would have between $10 and $20 billion. Even if Trump held some of his money back to pay for his luxury penthouse and whatever, you are talking $billions. Even if he only invested HALF of the money he received in inheritance and blew the rest (you're still talking millions of dollars here) he would still be better off than if he just engaged in all the questionable business schemes that he did.

See: Yahoo
 
Darat said:
I really wouldn't hold out that any of the Trumps could be used as credible witnesses - neither for the prosecution nor the defence!
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Maybe not but I'd bet they know where a few skeletons are buried that could be used in a trial.
 
Segnosaur said:
The current estimate is that Trump is worth somewhere in the $3-4 billion range. (Of course, we don't know the real number, and much of the value is in his 'brand' rather than assets, so his net worth might be closer to 0 than $3 billion.) But lets be generous and say its $3 billion.
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I think that's grossly exaggerated. I don't think he was ever a billionaire. Plus, much of the stuff that has TRUMP on it isn't actually owned by him, so I'm not sure he really has much in terms of assets.
 
Belz... said:
The current estimate is that Trump is worth somewhere in the $3-4 billion range. (Of course, we don't know the real number, and much of the value is in his 'brand' rather than assets, so his net worth might be closer to 0 than $3 billion.) But lets be generous and say its $3 billion.
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I think that's grossly exaggerated. I don't think he was ever a billionaire. Plus, much of the stuff that has TRUMP on it isn't actually owned by him, so I'm not sure he really has much in terms of assets.
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Oh, I agree... the $3 billion estimate is likely greatly exaggerated, and Trump may never have had a net work anywhere close to $1 billion.

I just wanted to show that even IF you took an exaggerated value of Trump's net worth, it still falls below what his worth COULD have been had he simply used indexed funds.
 
A new development of sorts...

From: Yahoo News
Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, was terminated as the director and controller of one of former President Donald Trump's golf courses in Scotland...

(Note that there are also reports that he resigned, rather than was terminated.)

Hard to know what to make of this...a move to put some distance between Weisselberg and the Trump organization? A defense strategy to limit the ability of the U.K. government to investigate the golf course?
 
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