The Morning News Mysterious assets are a growing problem for the Trump White House.
Foggy Trump Tower. Credit: Dithie.

“There may or may not be much more leverage than we know about."

The Wall Street Journal breaks down how President-elect Trump uses shell companies to avoid taxes. For instance, 15 of his entities own five aircraft.

Dec 13, 2016

We do not understand how GSA or its inspector general failed to anticipate the possibility of this eventuality or devise an exit strategy.… None of this happened quickly. 

The General Services Administration needs to end its lease agreement with the Trump Organization, which controls Trump's fancy new hotel down the street from the White House.
↩︎ Government Executive
Dec 7, 2016

The president-elect would prefer you not to read this

Behind Trump's clearly-unprovable tweets that "millions of people" voted illegally during the election—giving Hillary the popular vote—is his desire for you not to read this extensive look by the New York Times at how Trump has started to mess with American diplomacy and foreign policy by not immediately, and legally, distancing himself from his company.

Nov 29, 2016

Though why should he care at this point?

Copies of the Trump Foundation's 2015 filings posted to GuideStar show the "charity" admitting to self-dealing—that is, using charity money to directly benefit now-President-elect Trump and his family.

Nov 23, 2016

Maybe he's the one who should go to jail?

The Trump Organization is, not particularly surprisingly, notorious for destroying documents relevant to ongoing court cases, and for not responding to standard discovery requests from opposing lawyers.

Nov 4, 2016

It suggests that his principles are pretty flexible when it comes to him getting paid.

The Trump Organization leased office space to a state-owned Iranian bank that has funneled purchases for the nuclear program and has links to terrorist acts.
↩︎ The Center for Public Integrity
Oct 24, 2016

Trump not only stiffed many contractors, he also created a tax benefit off the backs of the tradesmen who built his casinos and skyscrapers.

Nearly $50 million of Trump's $916 million loss was unpaid bills to small contractors; he was able to use their losses to his gain.
↩︎ Fortune
Oct 10, 2016

A More Complete Picture of His Finances

BuzzFeed News obtains copies of three of Trump's bankruptcy filings and the court depositions that came with them.

Oct 6, 2016

What Filings Suggest

Between 2011 and 2014, Trump spent nearly $300,000 from his Foundation's coffers to lay the infrastructure for his presidential run, sometimes—obviously—breaking FEC rules.

Related: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has issued a cease and desist letter to the Foundation to force it to stop fundraising, after the Washington Post reported that it does not have the proper credentials to solicit money from the public.

Oct 6, 2016

The Castro Connection

The Trump Organization spent thousands unsuccessfully trying to break into the Cuban market in the late '90s, violating the trade embargo and potentially alienating Cuban-Americans in Florida, a huge bloc whose older voters are strongly pro-embargo.

Sep 30, 2016

Trump v. Women

Employees at Trump's golf courses in Southern California now know to only staff hot hostesses when Trump comes to visit. Otherwise, Trump will take restaurant managers aside and say the women working there "aren't pretty enough."

Sep 29, 2016

Trump Foundation Makes Trump University Seem Swell

The Trump Foundation has used over $250,000 of other people's money to pay off settlements from lawsuits against Trump's other assets.

This amount joins some $120,000 the Foundation spent on a dinner with Salma Hayek for Trump that he never attended—not to mention the $8 million-plus the Trump campaign has paid out to various Trump-owned for-profit businesses.

Sep 23, 2016

No possible subsidy was left untapped. After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Mr. Trump lined up a $150,000 grant for one of his buildings near ground zero, taking advantage of a program to help small businesses in the area recover, even though he had acknowledged on the day of the attacks that his building was undamaged.

Trump has received nearly $900 million in tax breaks on his New York properties, often obtained by the means you'd expect from him.
↩︎ The New York Times
Sep 19, 2016

The Money of Others

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who previously filed a pending lawsuit against Trump University in 2013, began "making inquiries" into the Trump Foundation, Trump's nonprofit "charity," this week.

The Foundation has been at the center of a long-brewing controversy surrounding a solicited $25,000 check it wrote to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi just after she began making inquiries about joining Schneiderman's suit against Trump U, which she eventually "nixed." The Foundation, as a nonprofit, is forbidden to make political donations, and paid a $2,500 penalty to the IRS for breaking tax law. However, a copy of the check released by Schneiderman to the Times appears to undercut allegations that Trump paid Bondi explicitly to not investigate Trump U, as it was signed by Trump four days before a report in the Orlando Sentinel revealed Bondi was considering looking into joining Schneiderman's suit, though she received it four days after the article was published.

It's questionable, though, whether the Foundation, which Trump claims is the conduit through which he's donated millions of dollars, even conducts charitable work. A Washington Post review of 250 charities and organizations Trump has publicly promised donations to found few of them ever received the money. Since 2008, all of the money that it has received has come from other people (mostly WWE chairman Vince McMahon, who has a fascinating history with Trump), allowing him to take credit for the few donations it has made without contributing any of his own money and was used to pay for a $12,000 football helmet signed by Tim Tebow and a $20,000 portrait of…Trump.

Sep 15, 2016

Clinton Gets a Pass

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has sued Trump University and is "making inquiries" into the nonprofit Trump Foundation, has declined to require the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Health Access Initiative, both nonprofits based in New York, to name the foreign governments it has accepted donations from, in violation of New York tax law. A review of New York charity tax disclosure forms found lax compliance with the law, which Schneiderman, who has donated the maximum personal amount to Clinton's campaign and sits on its New York state "leadership council," cited to Scripps News as the reason why it is declining to force the Clinton nonprofits to disclose foreign donations.

The Clinton Foundation now lists foreign donors on its website, but the Health Access Initiative does not and has not, as the Foundation has, promised to stop accepting money from foreign governments if Clinton is elected president.

Sep 15, 2016

Further Scenarios to be Considered in the Case of a Trump White House

The Trump Organization's business dealings (and failings) with politically-connected figures in India, Turkey, Russia, South Korea, the UAE, Libya, Azerbaijan, and other countries would, upon Trump taking office, immediately force President Trump to make decisions that could hurt his wallet in one way and American interests in the other.

Related: Apparently the Trump campaign repeatedly solicits donations from politicians and residents of foreign nations, in clear violation of Federal Election Commission rules.

Sep 14, 2016

Maternity Leave Not "Owned" by Trump

While promoting Trump's newly-released childcare reform plan—at the time, the eighth "position" he has listed on his website, compared to Clinton's 39, Gary Johnson's 14, and Jill Stein's 14—Ivanka Trump claimed that the Trump Organization provided all of its employees, which number in thousands, with paid maternity leave. Employees at various Trump Organization-owned hotels say that this is not true.

Sep 15, 2016
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