Trump Broke Tax Laws To Shield Dad's Millions
Trump engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father. NYT: "President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found. Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help. But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day. Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings. These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances. The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show."
CA White Supremacists Arrested For Charlottesville Violence
White supremacist artested for Charlottesville attacks, incitement. LA Times: "Four California men who allegedly shared white supremacist views and trained together on boxing and street-fighting techniques were arrested by federal authorities Tuesday on charges that they traveled to Virginia with the intent to incite a riot and commit violence at last year’s deadly far-right rallies in Charlottesville. Benjamin Drake Daley, 25, and Thomas Walter Gillen, 34, both of Redondo Beach, and Michael Paul Miselis, 29, of Lawndale were charged and appeared in federal court in Los Angeles, where they were ordered held without bail. Cole Evan White, 24, of Clayton, a city in the Bay Area, appeared in federal court in San Francisco. His status was not clear. The four are all members of the so-called Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist group based in Southern California that espouses anti-Semitism, promotes 'clean living' and meets regularly in public parks to train in physical fitness, including boxing and other street-fighting techniques, according to an affidavit. Last August, the four traveled to Charlottesville, the affidavit says, to join hundreds of other white nationalists at a rally organized by Richard Spencer, the high-profile leader of a white supremacist think tank, to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The defendants came to the rally prepared to engage in physical violence, having taped their fists 'in the manner of boxers or MMA-style fighters,' the affidavit says. Photographic and video evidence, the affidavit alleges, shows Daley and other white nationalists from California punching, kicking and head-butting counterprotesters, including an African American man, two women and a minister wearing a clerical collar. “'They were essentially serial rioters,' said Thomas Cullen, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. 'This wasn’t in our view the lawful exercise of 1st Amendment rights. These guys came to Charlottesville to commit violent acts.'"
800k Register To Vote On One Day
Record-setting 800K participated in this year's National Voter Registration Day. The Hill: "More than 800,000 people registered to vote last week on National Voter Registration Day, setting a new record for the annual event. This year's drive took place on Sept. 25, and it exceeded the previous high of 771,321 set in 2016. The event began in 2012. The group's only registration drive during a previous midterm election year, 2014, led to 154,500 people registering to vote, according to Time. Brian Miller, executive director of Nonprofit VOTE, the group that runs the registration drive, told Time that the final tally is a sign of heightened interest in this year's midterms. 'I think people are realizing that midterms do matter and that it's vital for people to get engaged,' Miller said, adding that the group had 'better coordination' and more partners, including Facebook and Twitter, allowing them to recruit more potential voters."
MI Candidate Tlaib Arrested In Minimum Wage Protest
Congressional candidate arrested during minimum wage protest in Detroit. Time: "A U.S. House candidate was arrested Tuesday in Detroit during a protest for higher pay and the right to form unions. Democrat Rashida Tlaib and more than a dozen other demonstrators sat at — and banged on — a long table that took up a lane of traffic in Detroit’s Midtown. They were part of a group of several hundred people who marched along the street before gathering outside a McDonalds. Management inside locked the doors as marchers approached. The protest followed one Tuesday morning in Flint where eight people were injured after being struck by a pickup truck as they marched outside another fast-food restaurant. Flint Police Chief Tim Johnson said he doesn’t believe the crash was intentional and that the driver “seemed pretty shaken up” afterward. Both protests were organized by Fight for $15, a national movement seeking to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour for fast food, child care, airlines and other workers. The group also wants the right to start unions or join existing ones. Walkouts are planned in Milwaukee on Wednesday and Chicago on Thursday. On Thursday, higher education workers are expected to join fast-food workers in a protest in Miami. 'I don’t know about you all, but something happens to the soul when you say ‘shut it down,'' Tlaib, 42, told the crowd in Detroit. 'Because you don’t deserve anything less than better worker conditions, to not having to live in poverty. You deserve $15. These corporations are making billions off of our backs. Don’t you ever think that you’re not allowed to ask for more.'"
Why Kavanaugh Must Not Be Confirmed
I know Brett Kavanaugh, but I wouldn’t confirm him. The Atlantic: "Faced with credible allegations of serious misconduct against him, Kavanaugh behaved in a fashion unacceptable in a justice, it seems preponderantly likely he was not candid with the Senate Judiciary Committee on important matters, and the risk of Ford’s allegations being closer to the truth than his denial of them is simply too high to place him on the Supreme Court. We are in a political environment in which there are no rules, no norms anymore to violate. There is only power, and the individual judgments of individual senators—facing whatever political pressures they face, calculating political gain however they do it, and consulting their consciences to the extent they have them.
My conscience would not permit me to vote for him.
