Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes
as He Reaped Riches From His Father.

Trump was 'earning' $200,000 a year aged THREE and got $413 MILLION from his father, not the $1 million loan he claimed, reveals massive trove of family's secret tax and bank documents - which New York State says they will investigate.

Fred Trump undertook countless efforts to steer vast resources into Donald Trump's hands before his death, avoiding gift and estate taxes through under-valuations, according to a report. Trump was a millionaire by Age 8, according to a wealth of tax, loan, and corporation documents unearthed by the New York Times. He earned $1 million each year from father after graduating college and even got revenue from apartment laundry machines. Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns.

• Fred Trump wove a safety net that rescued his son from one bad bet after another:

• As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust — Trump Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, the Atlantic City casinos. But as he careened from one financial disaster to another, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased their payouts.

• Between 1989 and 1992, four of the entities that Fred Trump created paid his son today’s equivalent of $8.3 million. And when Donald Trump pleaded with bankers for an emergency line of credit, he used as collateral the stake his father had given him in a group of apartment buildings.

• Tax records also reveal that at the peak of Mr. Trump’s financial distress, in 1990, his father extracted an extraordinary sum — nearly $50 million — from his empire. While The Times could find no evidence that Fred Trump made any significant debt payments, charitable donations or personal expenditures, there are indications that he wanted plenty of cash on hand to bail out his son if need be.

  That was what happened at Trump’s Castle casino, where an $18.4 million bond payment was due in December 1990. Fred Trump dispatched a trusted bookkeeper to Atlantic City with checks to buy $3.5 million in casino chips without placing a bet. With this ruse — an illegal loan under New Jersey gaming laws, resulting in a $65,000 civil penalty — Donald Trump narrowly avoided defaulting on his bonds.

• 

• Father and son set out to create the myth of a self-made billionaire.
• All told, The Times documented 295 distinct streams of revenue Fred Trump created over five decades to channel wealth to his son.
  But the partnership between Donald Trump and his father was about more than the pursuit, and the preservation, of riches. They were also confederates in a more ambitious project: creating the myth of Donald J. Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. If Fred Trump was the silent partner, helping finance the accouterments of wealth, it was Donald Trump who spun them into a seductive narrative.
  Emblematic of this dynamic is Trump Tower, the talisman of privilege that established Donald Trump as a player in New York. Fred Trump’s money helped build it. His son recognized and exploited its iconic power as the primary stage for both “The Apprentice” and his presidential campaign.
• Donald Trump tried to change his ailing father’s will, setting off a family reckoning.

• In December 1990, Donald Trump sent his father a document that left him both angered and alarmed. It was a codicil seeking to make a variety of changes to Fred Trump’s will. Among them: strengthening provisions that made Donald Trump sole executor of his estate. But amid Mr. Trump’s financial shambles — it was the month of the $3.5 million Trump’s Castle rescue — Fred Trump feared that the document potentially put his life’s work at risk, that his son might use the empire as collateral to save his own failing businesses, according to depositions given years later during a family dispute.
• Fred Trump rebuffed the maneuver, refusing to sign the codicil. But the episode prompted a family reckoning: Fred Trump was aging and ailing. Without speedy intervention, he could die leaving a vast estate — not just his real estate empire, but also tens of millions of dollars in cash — vulnerable to the 55 percent inheritance tax.
  So with Donald Trump playing a central role, the family formulated a plan that included unorthodox tax strategies that experts told The Times were legally dubious and, in some cases, appeared to be fraudulent.
• The investigation focuses on All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a Trump company incorporated in 1992. The set-up allowed Fred Trump to make gifts to his children that were made to look like business transactions, thereby avoiding the 55 per cent estate tax at the time. 
• 
• Laundry revenue from apartment buildings
• The Trump parents dodged hundreds of millions in gift taxes by grossly undervaluing the assets they would pass on. 
• Earned $1 million each year from father after graduating college. That ‘small loan’ of $1 million was actually at least $60.7 million — much of it never repaid
• 'Grossly undervalued' property values, avoiding hundreds of millions in taxes during transfers before Fred Trump's death
• 295 revenue streams to Donald Trump:
• An appraisal by Robert Von Ancken put the empire's value at $94 million. But buildings in the same neighborhood sold for considerably more than Van Ancken said Trump's properties were worth.
• In one appraisal that appears to defy normal New York real estate logic, Von Ancken assessed the value of 886 Trump Village apartments on Coney Island as being worth negative $5.9 million.
  But local tax assessors valued them at $38 million, and in 2004, when the real estate market had risen, they were valued at $107 million by a bank. 
• 
• Transfer of eight buildings with 1,032 apartments to his children 
• Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns 
• Efforts to inflate cost of equipment to achieve rent increases.:
  The company spent millions on equipment to maintain Fred Trump's sprawling empire of apartment complexes. Invoices got 'padded,' and Trump's children split the profits. Sometimes invoices were marked up as much as 50 per cent.
  Trump confirms multimillion loss to avoid federal taxes in 2016
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• Got $177 million when Fred Trump's empire was sold off in 2004:
• In 2003, once again in financial trouble, Donald Trump began engineering the sale of the empire Fred Trump had hoped would never leave the family. The sale, completed in 2004, brought him his biggest payday ever from his father: His cut was $177.3 million, or $236.2 million in today’s dollars. But as it turned out, banks at the time valued the empire at hundreds of millions more than the sale price. Donald Trump, master dealmaker, had sold low.

Brett Kavanaugh was 'a frequent and heavy drinker' at Yale who was 'belligerent and aggressive' when drunk, says former classmate who is now demanding to speak to FBI investigators

Charles 'Chad' Ludington (left), who said he was Brett Kavanaugh's friend at Yale (pictured main at his graduation) and sometimes drank with him, has described him as 'a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker'. Ludington, who now teaches at North Carolina State University, said on Sunday that he is 'deeply troubled' by what he claims is a blatant mischaracterization by Kavanaugh of his drinking at Yale. He went on the record after hearing Kavanaugh's testimony (inset) during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. In addition to being a 'frequent' and 'heavy drinker', Ludington said Kavanaugh was often belligerent and aggressive when drunk. He added that on many occasions he heard Kavanaugh slur his words and saw him stagger from alcohol consumption. Ludington said he plans to speak to the FBI because he believes Kavanaugh downplayed the 'degree and frequency' of his drinking during the Senate hearing.

'On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man's face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.' FBI agents have asked him to meet at the bureau's Raleigh office on Monday, the New York Times reports.  While he admitted in his congressional testimony that there were probably occasions during his time at Georgetown Prep that he had consumed 'too many beers,' a combative Kavanaugh denied he had ever gotten out of control, blacked out or acted inappropriately toward women.

As Democrats tried to sound alarms that the White House may be constraining the F.B.I.’s work, one key member of the party indicated that if the Democrats won control of the House in November and Judge Kavanaugh made it through the Senate, he would have no choice but to more fully investigate the claims against him.

“If he is on the Supreme Court and the Senate hasn’t investigated, the House will have to,” the lawmaker, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said on “This Week.” “We would have to investigate any credible allegations, certainly of perjury and other things that haven’t been properly looked into before.”

At Times, Kavanaugh’s Defense Misleads, Evades or Veers Off Point

NY TIMES

On Thursday, the adolescent jottings of Brett M. Kavanaugh in his high school yearbook were being scrutinized under the searing lights of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, where he sat accused of committing a drunken sexual assault when he was 17.

The faded references to heavy drinking and sexual pursuits had taken on evidentiary significance, and he was pressed by senators to acknowledge their meaning. Judge Kavanaugh instead offered benign alternative explanations — an apparent reference to throwing up from drinking could have referred to spicy foods upsetting his stomach, he said.

So it went for hours, as Judge Kavanaugh mounted an emotional defense against allegations of sexual misconduct and excessive drinking. It was the second time he had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first being earlier in September when he was asked mostly about his legal career.

The allegations of sexual misconduct by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh from his time in high school, above, and college share a theme: heavy drinking.

It was a performance that evolved with the increasingly fraught tenor of the proceedings. At his first hearing, Judge Kavanaugh, a Yale Law School graduate, fielded questions on policy and political work in the bland, studiously noncontroversial tradition of nominees to the high court. Still, even then some answers raised flags, as when he claimed not to know or suspect that internal Democratic documents about judicial nominations, shared with him when he worked in the Bush administration, had been stolen from Democrats’ computers.

But Thursday’s hearing sharpened the focus on a nominee in a way not seen since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991. As in that earlier case, seemingly small details suddenly loomed large in importance.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, reminded Judge Kavanaugh that juries were routinely instructed that they can “disbelieve a witness if they find them to be false in one thing.”

“So the core of why we’re here today really is credibility,” he said.

Read the entire list of "disputed" and false statements made by Brett Kavanaugh at NY TIMES

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse discussing a copy of Judge Kavanaugh’s calendar from high school.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

Five myths about capitalism

WASHINGTON POST

Flake Demands &Trump Agrees to Open ‘Limited’ One Week F.B.I. Investigation Into Accusations Against Kavanaugh.

Without the votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, the Senate and the White House had little choice but to agree on the investigation.

The developments capped an extraordinary day, which began with a sense of momentum for Kavanaugh but left him in renewed jeopardy when Sen. Jeff Flake, who at first endorsed him, called for a renewed inquiry into misconduct allegations.The retiring Arizona senator was again in the position of spoiler and grandstander — defying the president and conservatives, sowing distrust among many Democrats and still unclear where he intends to land.

___________________________________________________________________________

‘I was demanding a connection’: Ana Maria Archila reflects on confronting Jeff Flake

Archila and Maria Gallagher blocked the doors of an elevator on Capitol Hill, making impassioned pleas for the Republican senator to reconsider his support for Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“What you are doing is allowing someone who ac­tu­al­ly violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court,” one woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted, shouted during a live CNN broadcast as Flake was making his way to a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. The Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy organization, later identified her as the group’s co-executive director, Ana Maria Archila.

“This is horrible,” she told Flake. “You have children in your family. Think about them.”

Another woman then chimed in, telling the senator that she had also been sex­u­al­ly assaulted and that no one believed her story.

“You’re telling all women that they don’t matter — that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them, you’re going to ignore them,” she said as the TV cameras rolled.

“You’re just going to help that man to power anyway,” she added, weeping. “That’s what you’re telling all of these women. That’s what you’re telling me right now.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you! You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter, that what happened to me doesn’t matter and that you’re going to let people who do these things into power! That’s what you’re telling me when you vote for him! Don’t look away from me! Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me — that you’ll let people like that go into the highest court in the land!”

Flake listened quietly, then told the women: “Thank you.”

“Saying ‘thank you’ is not an answer,” Archila responded. “This is about the future of our country, sir.”

A tweet from immigrant rights group Make the Road Action identified the second woman who confronted Flake as Maria Gallagher and showed a photo of her standing with Archila. A woman claiming to be Gallagher later published a tweet with the same image.

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At 9.30am Flake announced he would vote for Kavanaugh - then a minute later walked into a Senate elevator and was confronted by two protesters who told him they were sex abuse victims. They passionately pleaded with him to vote 'no'.

At 1.30pm Senate Judiciary Committee vote was delayed as Flake spent time with Democrats - and then a dramatic deal unfolded.

Flake voted Kavanaugh through the Senate Judiciary Committee in return for asking for the probe.

'The supplemental FBI background investigation would be limited to current credible allegations against the nominee and must be completed no later than one week from today,' according to the committee.

“We ought to do what we can to make sure we do all due diligence with a nomination this important,” Mr. Flake told his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee after extracting a promise from Republican leaders to delay the final vote on the nomination until after the F.B.I. investigation. “This country is being ripped apart here.”

Senators on the Judiciary Committee gathered Friday to discuss Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.Credit Erin Schaff for The New York Times

HOW JEFF FLAKE ROCKED THE SENATE 

Here is how Jeff Flake's day of drama unfolded: 

9.30a.m.: Jeff Flake's office releases a statement announcing he will 'vote to confirm' Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court

9.31 a.m.: Cameras capture Flake cornered in an elevator as two female protesters urges him to vote 'no' and tell him they are sex abuse victims. Ana Maria Anchilla tells him: 'You have children in your family. Think about them.' The lengthy confrontation goes on with the other woman, recent college graduate Maria Gallagher telling him: 'I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me. You're telling all women that they don't matter.'

9.50 a.m.: As senators gather, Flake appears downcast.

10 a.m.: Four Democratic senators walk out in protest when a motion to subpoena Mark Judge is voted down.

12.16 p.m.: Flake - who turned down the chance to speak - walks out of the committee room with Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat with whom he is close friend.

1.30 p.m.: The time of the scheduled vote, but it is clear something is happening behind the scenes, with Flake and most of the Democrats not present. 

1.49 p.m.:  The committee is seated in full.

1.51 p.m.: Committee chairman Charles Grassley says he will let Flake speak. Flake says he will vote yes, if there is to be an FBI investigation.

1.53 p.m.:  The committee votes 11-10 to send Kavanaugh to the floor for a full investigation.

2.10 p.m.: At the White House Trump says he will do whatever the Senate decide to do.

________________________________________________________________________

And Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's high school friend who Ford alleges took part in the attack, said that he would co-operate with any law enforcement agency that investigates 'confidentially.'

He had claimed this week that he had depression and anxiety so did not want to testify in public, and was then Friday morning revealed to be available for public speaking engagements, in one of the more farcical turns of the Kavanaugh saga.

The FBI will not conduct a criminal investigation because the charges against Kavanaugh do not relate to any federal crimes. Because of this, the bureau will not make a determination on Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence. The FBI will submit a report to the White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee when the examination is complete. Although the FBI will have just a week to investigate the allegations, this time frame is not out of step with prior similar investigations.