Trump’s Tax Troubles

In just the few days since the New York Times published its latest groundbreaking report, Donald Trump has faced ongoing fallout from his “legally dubious” tax avoidance that even his own lawyers thought wouldn’t hold up to IRS scrutiny – as well as new reporting on his various efforts  to avoid paying millions in taxes. The ongoing reporting underscores the urgency of Trump releasing his tax returns before Election Day. While his campaign has objected to these stories, they refuse to release his tax returns – including just-filed returns that would not be under audit – to provide evidence of any untruths.

His behavior also raises important questions, including one that was posited by the New York Times Editorial Board: “Why would a man who has spent most of his professional life avoiding the shared responsibility of taxes all of a sudden care about helping others, especially those less fortunate?”

NEW Reporting

New York Times: Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes: “Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. ‘Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,’ said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.”

Wall Street Journal: Income Taxes Aside: Donald Trump’s Other Tax-Avoidance Moves: “The Journal has found several additional examples of state and local tax issues for Mr. Trump and his companies that are little known or not previously reported on.”

1. “A vendor said in a legal deposition in 2008 that Mr. Trump refused to pay $48,000 in sales taxes on draperies for a Las Vegas property.”

2. “At least five federal, state and local tax collection agencies took out at least 26 liens on Mr. Trump’s businesses and him personally since the late 1990s due to claims that Mr. Trump or his businesses didn’t pay sales taxes, withholding taxes, or other corporate taxes.”

3. “The biggest amount in liens and warrants, totaling about $11.8 million, were for corporate taxes imposed on his Indiana casino business in the early 2000s.”

Washington Post: This is the portrait of Donald Trump that his charity bought for $20,000: “Tax experts say that if Trump hung the painting at one of his homes or businesses, he may have violated laws against “self-dealing.” Those laws prohibit charity leaders from using money from their nonprofits to buy things for themselves, or for their businesses. In recent weeks, The Washington Post has reported other instances in which Trump may have violated those rules.”

Additional Fall-Out

New York Times Editorial Board: Avoiding Taxes, Trump-Style: “Indeed, even as Mr. Trump’s lawyers were advising him against this approach, one tax expert wrote that trying to find legal support for it was like trying to find evidence for ‘the existence of the Loch Ness monster.’”

Washington Post: A big, dirty secret from Donald Trump’s tax returns has been exposed: “Experts had missed Trump’s maneuver, Kleinbard said, because they did not think that it would have been allowed at the time… ‘The real surprise here is that he apparently got away with it’ … Kleinbard said that he would have enjoyed bringing Trump to court on behalf of the authorities in order to force him to pay up. ‘I would have been certain that I would have won.'”

Vox: Two experts say Donald Trump should be investigated for criminal tax evasion: “Various aspects of this almost certainly violate the laws governing charities (he’s already been sanctioned by the state of New York), but several experts are also raising the question of whether Trump is guilty of criminal tax evasion… But both Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney now working as a professor of tax law, and Adam Chodorow, a tax law professor at Arizona State University, have written that the elements exist to at least begin an investigation.”

New York Times: How Donald Trump Avoided Paying Taxes Using Other People’s Money: “The story of how Mr. Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill emerged from documents recently discovered by The Times during a search of casino bankruptcy filings. Mr. Trump structured his companies to allow him to have lucrative personal tax advantages, while limiting his personal liability should business go bad.”

Vanity Fair: How Donald Trump Used Other People’s Money to Avoid Paying Taxes: “Donald Trump is both unapologetic about using “other people’s money” whenever possible, and proud of the way he allegedly avoided paying income tax for years by writing off nearly a billion dollars in losses, as The New York Times first reported last month. Now, a new trove of documents obtained by the Times reveals how Trump combined both of those things to wipe out his liabilities, using investors’ money to avoid reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income in the form of canceled debt on his floundering casino empire—a maneuver that even his own lawyers warned would likely get him in trouble with the I.R.S.”

Mother Jones: NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System: “If I’m reading this right, the basic story is that Trump gave his banks “New Bonds” in place of their old bonds and classified the new bonds as equity shares in the casino partnership. Trump then valued the equity as equal to the old debt, thus showing no net loan forgiveness and therefore no COD income. This despite the fact that, in reality, the equity was close to worthless.”

Vox: Donald Trump used a dubious loophole to make millions in taxable income disappear: “He has previously boasted publicly of his extensive and detailed knowledge of the tax code, which seems like a good prima facie reason to at least look into it a little. And the New York Times’s latest revelations show a man who was deliberately and knowingly aggressive in his tax strategies in other realms of his personal finances, intentionally pushing forward with a strategy his lawyers said would likely be disallowed.”

MSNBC: Trump stretched tax loopholes ‘beyond any recognition’: “The fact that Donald Trump didn’t pay federal income taxes for many years is not in dispute – because the Republican presidential candidate admitted it during a nationally televised debate. There is some question, however, about whether or not Trump’s exploitation of tax loopholes was entirely legal…. Don’t try this at home. Trump has tried to get away with tax maneuvers the typical American should not attempt.”

Los Angeles Times: Clinton renews calls for Trump to release tax returns following report he skirted laws: “Trump’s attorneys advised him at the time that if he were audited, the Internal Revenue Service would not look favorably upon the tactic, according to the report. For months now, Trump has eschewed releasing his tax returns, claiming he was under audit by the IRS. However, even while being audited, Trump could still release his returns, experts have said.”

Slate: We Now Have an Even Clearer Picture of How Brazenly Trump Tried to Avoid Paying Taxes: “Now, thanks to the latest investigation of Trump’s taxes by the New York Times, our portrait of Trump as a taxpayer is a little bit clearer: He isn’t just a businessman who’s so brilliant he managed to lose, either outright or on paper, close to $1 billion. He’s also one who tried to push the law to its limits—and perhaps past them—to avoid paying the tax man.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Avoiding Taxes, Trump-Style

New York Times

Editorial Board

November 1, 2016

Donald Trump’s claim that he was smart for figuring out how not to pay federal income taxes was obnoxious when he said it, at least for the millions of Americans who pay their fair share. Now we learn that he was able to avoid some of those taxes decades ago with a tactic that is illegal now and was highly dubious even then.

In the 1990s, with his Atlantic City casinos and other businesses tottering on the verge of collapse, Mr. Trump negotiated a deal under which his creditors — investors and banks — would forgive part of the debt in exchange for equity in partnerships he controlled. Without such swaps, Mr. Trump would have had to report the forgiven debt as income, offsetting a big portion of the $916 million loss he claimed on his tax return in 1995. That loss allowed him to avoid paying taxes for up to 18 years.

It is impossible to know whether the Internal Revenue Service challenged Mr. Trump’s use of the swaps because, unlike every major party presidential nominee for nearly 40 years, he refuses to release his tax returns. But as The Times reported on Monday, the maneuver was so suspect that his lawyers advised against it.

And it’s clear that even then tax officials and federal lawmakers were hoping to end the practice because it allowed businesses and rich individuals to avoid taxes by swapping forgiven debt with equity that was worth little or nothing. Indeed, even as Mr. Trump’s lawyers were advising him against this approach, one tax expert wrote that trying to find legal support for it was like trying to find evidence for “the existence of the Loch Ness monster.”

Congress barred such swaps by corporations in 1993, and by partnerships, the business structure Mr. Trump uses, in 2004.

As is its habit, Mr. Trump’s campaign chose to regard these latest revelations as yet another display of his genius. But like any other effort to game the tax system, his tactics imposed real costs by shifting the burden to taxpayers who have no recourse to such strategies and must pay full freight, including people whose taxes are withheld and cannot shelter their income even if they want to.

It has become ever more difficult for the I.R.S. to police the kind of tax avoidance Mr. Trump has engaged in. The Republican-controlled Congress cut the I.R.S.’s budget by about $500 million in 2015, and last year the agency audited just 0.8 percent of individual taxpayers, down from 1.1 percent in 2010. Its enforcement staff has shrunk by 23 percent since 2010, to 39,000 people, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The latest disclosures about Mr. Trump’s taxes also further undercut the argument that he is uniquely qualified to fix what he has called a rigged system. Why would a man who has spent most of his professional life avoiding the shared responsibility of taxes all of a sudden care about helping others, especially those less fortunate? The truth is, of course, that he has no intention of doing so; according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Mr. Trump’s tax proposals would confer by far the greatest advantages on the wealthiest Americans.

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Statement on Trump’s “Legally Dubious” Tax Avoidance Scheme

Calls on Trump to Release at Least 2015 Tax Returns, Which Are Not Under Audit

Yesterday, the New York Times published new documents that showed Trump engaged in “legally dubious” schemes to avoid paying millions in federal income taxes, even as his own lawyers made clear they likely would not hold up to IRS scrutiny. Trump’s campaign claims the reporting is not true, yet they refuse to produce the only evidence that could prove the Times wrong: Trump’s tax returns.

In response to the new report, Hillary for America deputy communications director Christina Reynolds issued the following statement:

“In the wake of a blockbuster report showing that even Trump’s own lawyers thought the IRS would likely find the “legally dubious” scheme he used to avoid taxes was against the law, the Trump campaign still refuses to release his tax returns. While breaking a precedent running for 40 years, Trump has clung to the excuse that he is under audit, despite no proof that he is and no prohibition for releasing returns under audit. Given that Trump was required to file his 2015 taxes recently, he has no reason to withhold it since it is too soon for him to possibly be under audit for those year. There’s no excuse left for Trump—if he’s not still using these “dubious” schemes to avoid paying taxes, he needs to prove it with his most recent tax returns.”

Trump and his campaign continue to dodge disclosure of these critical documents that could shed light on important issues including his wealth, his questionable charitable giving, his foreign and domestic business entanglements, his personal tax rate and more. The Times’ reporting raising important new questions that underscore the urgency in releasing the tax returns before Election Day.

Key Point: “As he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.”

• “Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. ‘Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,’ said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.”
• “One letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters, the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers believe the I.R.S. can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly two-thirds of the time. In other words, Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers were telling him there were at least six different reasons the I.R.S. would likely cry foul if he were audited.”
• “Regardless of whether the I.R.S. objected, Trump’s tax avoidance in this case violated a central principle of American tax law, said Mr. Buckley, the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, who later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee. ‘He deducted somebody else’s losses,’ Mr. Buckley said.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

New York Times

By: David Barstow, Mike McIntire, Patricia Cohen, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner

October 31, 2016

Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver — which was later outlawed by Congress — Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits to Mr. Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City.

As that empire floundered in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump pressured his financial backers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt he could not repay. While the cancellation of so much debt gave new life to Mr. Trump’s casinos, it created a potentially crippling problem with the Internal Revenue Service. In the eyes of the I.R.S., a dollar of canceled debt is the same as a dollar of taxable income. This meant Mr. Trump faced the painful prospect of having to report the hundreds of millions of dollars of canceled debt as if it were hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income.

But Mr. Trump’s audacious tax-avoidance maneuver gave him a way to simply avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the I.R.S. “He’s getting something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, said in an interview

The new documents, which include correspondence from Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers and bond offering disclosure statements, might also help explain how Mr. Trump reported a staggering loss of $916 million in his 1995 tax returns — portions of which were first published by The Times last month.

United States tax laws allowed Mr. Trump to use that $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income. But tax experts have been debating how Mr. Trump could have legally declared a deduction of that magnitude at all. Among other things, they have noted that Mr. Trump’s huge casino losses should have been offset by the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income he surely must have reported to the I.R.S. in the form of canceled casino debt.

By avoiding reporting his canceled casino debt in the first place, however, Mr. Trump’s $916 million deduction would not have been reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars. He could have preserved the deduction and used it instead to avoid paying income taxes he might otherwise have owed on books, TV shows or branding deals. Under the rules in effect in 1995, the $916 million loss could have been used to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income for 18 years.

Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article.

“Your e-mail suggests either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law,” Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Your thesis is a criticism, not just of Mr. Trump, but of all taxpayers who take the time and spend the money to try to comply with the dizzyingly complex and ambiguous tax laws without paying more tax than they owe. Mr. Trump does not think that taxpayers should file returns that resolve all doubt in favor of the I.R.S. And any tax experts that you have consulted are engaged in pure speculation. There is no news here.”

Mr. Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1.3 billion in debt, most of it in the form of high interest junk bonds. By late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question.” By 1992, all three casinos had filed for bankruptcy and bondholders were ultimately forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least part of their investment.

The story of how Mr. Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill from that forgiven debt emerged from documents recently discovered by The Times during a search of the casino bankruptcy filings. The documents offer only a partial description of events, and none of Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers agreed to be interviewed for this article.

At the time, Mr. Trump would have been hard-pressed to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes. According to assessments of his financial stability by New Jersey casino regulators, there were times in the early 1990s when Mr. Trump had no more than a few million dollars in his various bank accounts. He was so strapped for cash that his creditors were apoplectic when they learned that Mr. Trump had bought Marla Maples an engagement ring estimated to be worth $250,000.

It is unclear who first glimpsed a way for Mr. Trump to dodge a huge tax bill. But the basic maneuver he used was essentially a new twist on a contentious strategy corporations had been using for years to avoid taxes created by canceled debt.

The strategy — known among tax practitioners as a “stock-for-debt swap” — relies on mathematical sleight of hand. Say a company can repay only $60 million of a $100 million bank loan. If the bank forgives the remaining $40 million, the company faces a large tax bill because it will have to report that canceled $40 million debt as taxable income.

Clever tax lawyers found a way around this inconvenience. The company would simply swap stock for the $40 million in debt it could not repay. This way, it would look as if the entire $100 million loan had been repaid, and presto: There would be no tax bill due for $40 million in canceled debt.

Best of all, it did not matter if the actual market value of the stock was considerably less than the $40 million in canceled debt. (Stock in an effectively insolvent company could easily be next to worthless.) Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations, this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.

Alarmed by the obvious potential for abuse, Congress and the I.R.S. made repeated efforts during the 1980s to curb this brand of tax wizardry before banning its use by corporations altogether in 1993. But while policy makers were busy trying to stop corporations from using this particular ploy, the endlessly creative club of elite tax advisers was inventing a new way to circumvent the ban, this time through the use of partnerships.

This was the twist that was especially beneficial to Mr. Trump. Wealthy families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through partnerships rather than corporations. Mr. Trump, for example, owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax returns when times were good.

But what if times were bad? What if Mr. Trump’s casino partnerships could not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t that force the partnerships — i.e., Mr. Trump — to report hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt?

Enter the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company stock for debt.

True enough, the I.R.S. and Congress had clearly signaled their disapproval of the basic concept. Fred T. Goldberg, who was the I.R.S. commissioner under George Bush, recalled in an interview that the I.R.S. frowned on partnership equity-for-debt swaps for the same reason it objected to corporate stock-for-debt swaps. “The fiction is that the partnership interest has the same value as the debt,” he said. Lee A. Sheppard, a contributing editor to Tax Notes, wrote in 1991 that trying to find a legal justification for this tactic was akin to proving “the existence of the Loch Ness monster.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump boasts of his mastery of tax loopholes and claims no other candidate for the White House has ever known more about the tax code. This background, he argues with evident disgust, gives him special insight into the way wealthy elites buy off politicians and hire high-priced lawyers and accountants to rig the tax system — just as, he claims, they rig elections.

That insight was on display in 1991 and 1992 when he was laying the groundwork to make a multimillion-dollar tax bill disappear.

Before proceeding with his plan, Mr. Trump did what most prudent taxpayers do — he sought a formal tax opinion letter. Such letters, typically written by highly-paid lawyers who spend entire careers mastering the roughly 10,000 pages of ever-changing statutes that make up the United States tax code, can provide important protection to taxpayers. As long as a tax adviser blesses a particular tax strategy in a formal opinion letter, the taxpayer most likely will not face penalties even if the I.R.S. ultimately rules the strategy was improper.

The language used in tax opinion letters has a specialized meaning understood by all tax professionals. So, for example, when a tax lawyer writes that a shelter is “more likely than not” going to be approved by the I.R.S., this means there is at least a 51 percent chance the shelter will withstand scrutiny. (This is known as an “M.L.T.N.” letter in the vernacular of tax lawyers.) A “should” letter means there is about a 75 percent chance the I.R.S. will not object. The gold standard, a “will” letter, means the I.R.S. is all but certain to bless the tax avoidance strategy.

But the opinion letters Mr. Trump received from his tax lawyers at Willkie Farr & Gallagher were far from the gold standard. The letters bluntly warned that there was no statute, regulation or judicial opinion that explicitly permitted Mr. Trump’s tax gambit. “Due to the lack of definitive judicial or administrative authority,” his lawyers wrote, “substantial uncertainties exist with respect to many of the tax consequences of the plan.”

One letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters, the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers believe the I.R.S. can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly two-thirds of the time. In other words, Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers were telling him there were at least six different reasons the I.R.S. would likely cry foul if he were audited. In anticipation of that possibility, the lawyers even laid out a fallback plan that would have allowed Mr. Trump to spread the pain of a large tax hit over many years if the I.R.S. ultimately balked.

It is unclear whether the I.R.S. ever challenged Mr. Trump’s use of this specific tax maneuver. According to a financial disclosure statement prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants, he was under audit by tax authorities as of 1993, only a year after he avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income because of this legally suspect tactic. But the results of that audit are unknown and the agency declined to comment on Monday.

Regardless of whether the I.R.S. objected, Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance in this case violated a central principle of American tax law, said Mr. Buckley, the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation who later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

“He deducted somebody else’s losses,” Mr. Buckley said. By that Mr. Buckley means that only the bondholders who forgave Mr. Trump’s unpaid casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset future income and reduce their taxes. That Mr. Trump used the same losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on everyone else, Mr. Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big time.”

In any event, Mr. Trump can no longer benefit from the same maneuver. Just as Congress acted in 1993 to ban stock-for-debt swaps by corporations, it acted in 2004 to ban equity-for-debt swaps by partnerships.

Among the members of Congress who voted to finally close the loophole: Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.

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NEW REPORT: Trump’s False Philanthropy Exposed

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published yet another explosive report revealing Trump’s lack of charitable giving, despite his history of making dramatic public promises of donations, and detailing Trump’s misuse of his foundation. Hillary Clinton highlighted the new report in her remarks today at Wilton Manors, saying it was “truly stunning.”

Washington Post: “For as long as he has been rich and famous, Donald Trump has also wanted people to believe he is generous … It was, in large part, a facade. A months-long investigation by The Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump’s boasts about his philanthropy.”

Slate: “The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has spent months going through records and talking to people to try to figure out whether Donald Trump is really as charitable as he claims to be. At this point in the campaign, it should surprise no one that the answer is no... Although Trump, particularly through his foundation, did give some money to charity over the years, much of it was self-serving and the dollar amounts of his contributions were often much less than what he made it seem.”

Today in Wilton Manors, Hillary Clinton highlights Trump’s “charitable giving, or lack thereof.”

“But yesterday the Washington Post published a report that was truly stunning. It starts with the story of a ribbon-cutting back in 1996 for a nursery school serving children living with HIV and AIDS in New York. Now, let me say, this is important in part to remember. This is a story about children with HIV and AIDS. So there was a big celebration honoring the donors who had supported the nursery school, and all the kids and their families, for whom this was the most important thing you can imagine. Because you know, back in the ‘90s, some of you remember.  Right? Children weren’t welcomed in school.

And then, unannounced and uninvited, guess who barges in? Donald Trump. He walks right up to the stage. He sat down in the seat that was being saved for a local developer who had made a generous donation. None of the people working for the charity knew why he was there. He wasn’t a donor at all. He had never given a single dollar to help build the school. He just wanted people to think he had. So he sat on the stage through the program, even posed for photographs, and when it was over, he got up and walked out. No explanation. No donation. Now really, who does that? What kind of person does that?  Really? I mean, who pretends to help kids with HIV and AIDS in order to make themselves look good? Well, I’ll tell you: The same kind of person who would pull a bait and switch on a high school chess team.

Back in 1997, he was principal for a day at a public school. That was a program we used to have in New York. The chess team was holding a bake sale to raise money to travel to a tournament. They were $5,000 short. He walked up to them and handed them a fake million dollar bill.  At first the kids and their parents were excited. Then they were devastated to learn it was a joke. So he gave them 200 bucks and drove away in his limousine. Now, this story does have a happy ending because a woman read the story about Donald Trump’s behavior, called the school, and donated the $5,000.  And the coach remembers this woman saying, “I am ashamed to be the same species as this man.”

Just this morning, Kellyanne Conway was pressed on Trump’s false philanthropy and was unable to provide any evidence that Fahrenthold’s reporting was anything other than spot-on.

WATCH: Kellyanne Conway Talks Tax Returns, Charity

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Tim Kaine mentioned a big story in the Washington Post that found Donald Trump’s personal giving has disappeared entirely in recent years after calling 420 plus charities with connection to trump. The post found one personal gift between 2008 and the spring of 2009. They call into question all of the promises he’s made about giving to charity. Will Trump release his tax returns and show what he’s given?

KELLYANNE CONWAY: Not until our accountants and lawyers say we should.

[…]

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Any contributions to charity over the last several years from the foundation? The Post couldn’t find any and you wouldn’t respond.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: I’m told by those in charge of the Clinton Foundation —

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Trump Foundation.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: Excuse me, yes, George. He’s been incredibly generous with his time and money over the years. He started that foundation with just his money and the only contributor for a number of years.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But nothing over the last five years.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: I don’t know that.

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Trump’s Self-Serving Business Agenda

Donald Trump has held 32 events at Trump properties in 16 months of running for President

Today, Hillary Clinton returned to Florida to layout what’s on the ballot this election — an economy that works for everyone not just those at the top. She shared her vision for more good jobs, economic fairness and how to bring Americans together. Meanwhile, Trump spent the morning promoting the opening of his new hotel, making this the 32nd event at Trump properties in 16 months of running for president.

From his using his presidential campaign to promote his business, to a decades-long practice of stiffing small businesses, to outsourcing jobs, to his proposal to cut taxes for billionaires like himself at the expense of everyone else, Trump’s self-serving agenda is clear. America deserves better than Trump – a candidate who would rather line his own pockets than prioritize our economy, businesses, and workers.

Donald Trump’s trickle-down economic tax plan would include cutting taxes for billionaires like himself and his family, at the expense of everyone else.

Trump has doubled down on his promise to repeal the estate tax, which would give his own family as much as a $4 billion windfall. Just think about what we could do instead with that one $4 billion windfall alone, which is just for Donald Trump’s family, if we invested it in America.

Trump’s plan includes a massive loophole that gives many millionaires and billionaires like himself a backdoor tax cut, letting them pay less than half the current tax rate on a substantial portion of their income.

Trump claims his tax cuts would be paid for by economic growth – but they come at the expense of hardworking Americans.  Far from growing the economy, experts on both sides of the aisle predict that Trump’s plans would risk a recession.

Trump’s tax plan is a bait and switch – he claims he’ll protect middle class families, but what he actually does is give huge tax breaks to the rich while raising taxes on at least 8 million middle-class families.

Trump called his tax avoidance “smart.”  Trump’s tax avoidance is not smart – it means $0 for first responders, $0 for education, $0 for veterans and $0 for our military.

New York Times: “Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.”

New York Times: “Donald J. Trump explicitly acknowledged for the first time during the first presidential debate that he used a $916 million loss that he reported on his 1995 income tax returns to avoid paying personal federal income taxes for years.” Trump’s business failures eventually led to multiple bankruptcies of his companies, which were devastating for his former employees and small contractors. Trump continued to earn millions.

Trump’s business failures eventually led to multiple bankruptcies of his companies, which were devastating for his former employees and small contractors. Trump continued to earn millions.

New York Times: “But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”

Wall Street Journal: “An analysis by Temple University law professor Jonathan Lipson ranked Trump-branded casinos ‘the worst’ among their peers when it came to jobs over a 14-year period. Mr. Lipson, a bankruptcy scholar, found that Trump casinos shed some 7,400 jobs between 1997 and 2010. That works out, on average, to job losses per casino of 900—37% higher than at other Atlantic City gambling venues in the same period.”

No business person or contractor has proven too small for Trump to stiff, no single parent or retiree too in-need to escape the target of Trump University’s scams. The truth is that Donald Trump’s business antics have spelled disaster for countless working people and small businesses.

Trump has repeatedly refused to make good on his obligations to pay small businesses and contractors for work – from Marty Rosenberg, whose family business was paid hundreds of thousands less than it was owed for its work at Trump’s casino, to Andrew Tesoro, the architect of one of Trump’s golf course clubhouse who was told by Trump’s lawyers to accept pennies on the dollar or he’d be tied up in court for years.

Trump doesn’t buy American-made and his own products are outsourced.

The products that are branded with Trump’s name are outsourced from at least 12 countries. That doesn’t include the products used in his hotels and casinos, from bed linens made in Italy to furniture made in China.

Trump has used his campaign to promote and funnel money into his businesses.

Politico: “Trump’s Campaign Paid His Businesses $8.2 Million”

Politico: “Trump has used the campaign itself as a marketing platform to promote everything from the difficult-to-find Trump Steaks to his golf courses and a new Washington hotel. Trump’s tangle of businesses has raised concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest should he win the presidency, while the Trump-branded campaign has drawn mockery and allegations of pocket-padding from Trump’s critics.’”

Huffington Post: “Donald Trump used small donors’ money to buy nearly $300,000 worth of books from the publisher of his Art of the Deal last month, continuing a pattern of plowing campaign money back into his own businesses.”

@KatyTurNBC: “After this morning’s ribbon cutting, Trump will have held 32 events at Trump properties in 16 months of running for President”

Today, Trump is Washington, DC to open a new luxury hotel where he unsurprisingly used undocumented workers to make his project cheaper.  He even sued the District of Columbia in an attempt to pay lower taxes for the property.

Washington Post: “[A] Trump company may be relying on some undocumented workers to finish the $200 million hotel, which will sit five blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, according to several who work there.”

Politico: “The city of Washington, D.C., is fighting Donald Trump’s legal drive to cut his tax bills for the luxury hotel he’s set to open in the Old Post Office Building next month … Attorneys for the Republican presidential nominee and real estate mogul contend that the roughly $1.7 million annual tax bills for the development for 2015 and 2016 were too high.”

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

Hillary Clinton Campaigns in Michigan and Ohio

Following last night’s debate, Hillary Clinton returned to the campaign trail with events in Michigan and Ohio. Clinton’s first event was on the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. While her speech covered a number of platform points, she also spoke about bipartisanship saying that she is “winning more and more support not just from independents but also Republicans.” She then went after Donald Trump for his divisive campaign, name calling, and refusal to release his income tax records. “I believe everyone in this room has paid more income tax than (Trump) has,” she said. Clinton concluded by talking about the importance of voting in the November election. A video of Clinton’s speech is below.

Clinton then spoke at a rally at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The event was by far the largest of the campaign with over 18,000 people filling the oval. During the event, Clinton spoke about a variety of her platform points including reigning in the costs of higher education. She also spoke about her opponent and criticized him for not buying steel made in the United States, but instead buying steel from China. Clinton also spoke about her time as a public servant saying, “When Donald Trump talks about what I have been doing for the last 30 years, I welcome that. Because in the 1970s, I was working to end discrimination and he was being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination. In the 1980s, I was working to improve the schools in Arkansas … while he was getting a loan for $14 million from his father to start a business. On the day that I was in the Situation Room watching the raid that brought Osama bin Laden to justice, he was hosting Celebrity Apprentice.” A full video of Clinton’s speech is below.

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

News Source: Patch, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland.com

Hillary Clinton Campaigns in Pennsylvania

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton hit the campaign trail in Pennsylvania with her first event being in Haverford. The event was a town hall on families that featured Chelsea Clinton and actress Elizabeth Banks. During the event, Clinton spoke about a number of her policies and how they will help American families. She spoke about the importance of early childhood education, health care, police policies, women’s rights, criminal justice reform, climate change, and the economy. She said, “I want to do everything possible to put kids and families front and center, to make sure that we provide the opportunities that families deserve to have to have good jobs with rising incomes, the ability to pay for the necessities of life, affordable child care, affordable college.” A video from the event is below.

Clinton then spoke at an organizing event in Harrisburg where she encouraged everyone to register to vote. She said that voting is important in our democracy because it gives everyone a voice. Clinton said that even supporters of her rival, Republican Donald Trump, should register and vote because it is their civic duty, but if she elected, she will be be their president too. Clinton then outlined about a number of key points to her platform saying that she wants to focus on “kitchen table issues” which are the issues that affect the everyday lives of Americans. She continued, “By creating more fairness, we’re going to give people a chance to have better jobs with rising income.” A video from the Harrisburg rally is below.

Following her rally in Harrisburg, Clinton held a press conference during which she continued to speak about recent revelations from Trump’s 1995 tax return and the money his businesses lost in the mid-1990s. She then answered questions from reporters about a range of topics including recent polling numbers, Tim Kaine’s debate later tonight, and health care. A full video of the press event is below.

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

News Source: The Trentonian, The New York Times, Reading Eagle

HFA Releases Trump Tax Calculator

Today, The Briefing released the following after it was revealed Donald Trump may not have paid taxes for eighteen years.

No time to read? Get the toplines here:

• Over the weekend, The New York Times published quite the story: Donald Trump, self-proclaimed tremendous businessman, lost $916 million (!) in a single year.
• That would have allowed him to take advantage of a loophole in our tax system — and potentially weasel out of paying federal income taxes for 18 years.
• But he still won’t release the rest of his tax returns. So who’s to say what else he’s hiding.
• Check out our Trump “Smart” Tax Calculator, to see how much you’d pay in taxes if you paid at the same rate as Trump.
• Read The New York Times’ original story here.

  This weekend, we got the clearest example yet why Donald Trump has been so reluctant to release his tax returns.

  Here’s the full story: A couple weeks ago, an anonymous source mailed The New York Times parts of Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The Paper of Record investigated further and published a piece on Saturday night detailing how the GOP’s presidential candidate could have taken advantage of our broken, billionaire-friendly tax system to avoid paying his fair share.

  This gets complicated, so let’s go through it point by point:

• It all started with Trump — the man with the “very good brain” — losing nearly a billion dollars in 1995 after making a series of really, really bad investments.
• But while those terrible business decisions no doubt led to workers getting laid off and small businesses getting stiffed, Trump himself stood to benefit from losing all those millions.
  • Our tax code would have allowed him subtract any business-related loss from his own personal taxes.
  • And because he lost so much money in 1995, he may have skirted paying any federal income tax for nearly two decades.
• So while the rest of us were chipping in to help fund our military and our public education system, Donald Trump probably weaseled out of paying a single cent.

We got all of this from just three pages of documents. Imagine what the rest of his tax returns would reveal — what other sketchy business practices he’s embraced and what other murky ethical decisions he’s made.

We can only hope that this new report will lead to more facts coming to light in the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, we put together a Trump “Smart” Tax Calculator, so you can see how much you’d pay in taxes if you paid at the same rate as Trump. (Hint: It’s almost certainly less than what you pay right now.)

With just 36 days to go, we need your help to guarantee that this failed businessman never gets to run the largest national economy in the world. Share this calculator with your friends and make sure they know the truth about Trump’s business “success”.

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

Former George H.W. Bush National Security Advisor Endorses Clinton

Statement by Donald P. Gregg, National Security Advisor to Vice President George H.W. Bush. The endorsement comes after 115 former Ambassadors – including 80 appointed by Republican Presidents – backed Hillary Clinton earlier this week and more than 50 national security officials urged Trump to disclose his financial conflicts of interests.

“I was in the Reagan administration for 8 years. I was Vice President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Advisor for over six years. I traveled with him to over 65 countries.

In my view the two great diplomatic overtures since World War II were carried out by Republicans — Nixon to China and President George H. W. Bush’s outreach to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

But we now have a person at the top of Republican ticket who I believe is dangerous, doesn’t understand the complex world we live in, doesn’t care to, and is without any moral or international philosophy.

I’ve met Hillary Clinton a number of times and followed her career in public service. I’m impressed with her knowledge and experience. She would make an extremely good President.”

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

Clinton Campaign Releases Series of Ads

This week, Hillary for America has released a series of new advertisement for television, radio, and the internet. The first is a radio ad urging African American millennials to register and vote for Hillary Clinton in November. The next three video ads highlight Clinton’s career and her work with everyday people. One of the videos includes a personal story of Clinton’s work with a girl named Anastasia. Next, is a video featuring Roxie, a woman in New York that Clinton helped as Senator. The final videos go after Donald Trump. The first criticizes Trump for the Trump Foundations’ use of donations to settle Trump’s legal problems. The second and third videos calls for Trump to release his tax returns. The final video calls out Trump’s lies before the debates. Listen to and watch each of the ads below.

 

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

HFA Response to Report that Trump Foundation Used Charity Money to Settle Legal Problems

Following a report that Donald Trump used money from the Trump Foundation to settle his legal issues, Hillary for America Deputy Communications Director Christina Reynolds responded with the following statement:

“Clearly the Trump Foundation is as much a charitable organization as Trump University is an institute of higher education. Trump’s version of charity is taking money from others to settle his own legal issues and buy at least two pictures of himself, which experts say is a clear violation of laws governing charitable organizations. Once again, Trump has proven himself a fraud who believes the rules don’t apply to him. It’s past time for him to release his tax returns to show whether his tax issues extend to his own personal finances.”

For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.

News Source: The Washington Post