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| John Shutkin |
Hundreds of people have seen Trump's taxes.
No leaks. Until just now. Amazing.
The hardest thing to notice are the things that don't happen.
This blog got an early warning by attorney John Shutkin.
Shutkin has a long career as both general counsel and outside counsel advising on risk management for law and accounting firms. Shutkin sent me a letter this morning saying that something amazing was going on: Trump's taxes had not been leaked.
It seemed improbable to him, and it turns out he was right. Today the dam began to break.
Shutkin understood and warned that temptations, provocations, and hackers--foreign and domestic--were making it less and less plausible that Trump's taxes could be kept secret. After all, he wrote, hundreds of people handle the tax returns at different stages in their creation, filing, and in Trump's case, audits. People leak. Copies get made and sent.
Attorney John Shutkin is a college classmate. He attended Columbia Law School and is now the General Counsel of a major accounting firm. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at accountants' risk management and legal ethics conferences. Shutkin understands how easily some enterprising and motivated employee might have thought to take matters into his or her own hands.
Guest Comment by John Shutkin
"I have been representing accounting firms for years. Client tax returns are, of course, confidential and cannot be disclosed absent appropriate consents or legal requirement/compulsion. That said, they are not exactly nuclear codes and are produced to third parties routinely in litigation and investigations. Indeed, I cannot recall a divorce matter in which they were not produced. And this is hardly surprisingly; they are an absolutely standard and necessary component of an individual's or entity's financial wherewithal (or lack thereof).
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| The first big leak |
With this as background, I am amazed that Trump's tax returns have not been -- somehow -- publicly disclosed by now. All sorts of people have them or have had access to them over the years: the IRS and the Treasury Department generally, the Trump Organization, Trump's tax lawyers, Mazars (his accountants), Deutsche Bank, and quite possibly Mueller's office and various Congressional committees. Melania may even have copies somewhere in the back of her closet at Mar-a-Lago.
I keep thinking that someone -- anyone -- is just going to drop a copy in an envelope and send it anonymously to the Post or the Times. And yet, nada. No Daniel Ellsbergs this time. I can't decide whether I think it is a good thing or a bad thing, but I do find it one of the greatest of ironies that Trump, whose ignorance of and disdain for the rule of law knows no bounds, has been protected so long because so many other people seem to respect it.
Other than certain people who are now legally required to produce the returns, that is. In this regard, here's a tip for all those journalists and headline writers who for years have clutched their pearls and retired to their fainting couches trying not to call Trump a liar.
The correct headline is not "Mnuchin rejects Democrats' Demands." It is "Mnuchin Breaks Law."
What next?
The leaks were for tax returns from 1985-1994. Everyone knows that was a time of trouble for Trump, in Atlantic City and elsewhere. Old news.
The real secrets are what money he borrowed from Russian oligarchs and others, and whether he shows money laundering transactions of properties bought and sold. And, of course, whether he cheated and underpaid.
1 comment:
10,000 falsehoods later, we now begin digging ourselves out of the avalanche of lies perpetrated by Trump and his enablers.
I happened to catch a few minutes of Regressive media having a conniption fit about "invasion of privacy". They seem quite beside themselves as if this revelation, hopefully the first of many, is a further example of the decline of civilization.
The facts of Trump's lies about his wealth are now coming to light, the exaggerations being what many of us suspected. But again, will it matter to his cult? They approve of lying to the immoral "mainstream media", and by inference the rest of America. We are such reprobates we don't deserve the truth, but more so these folks live in such a fog of delusion that even a hint of reality turns their world upside down. Secondly, so what if it's only a few million instead of billions...that's still rich isn't it?
Keep in mind Regressives worship wealth, and even if it's only the appearance of wealth, the illusion is sufficient for supplication.
Chris Cillizza writes on CNN:
"...sometime between February 2015 and February 2016, Trump decided that whatever was in his returns would be far worse for him if it got out than the negative press he would take for not releasing them. And he's not backing away from that decision. Not for anything."
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