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lk2fireone (0)
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| 11-13-18 07:33pm - 2231 days | #1332 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The truth is starting to be revealed: "Trump is reluctant to personally fire people and said dismissals are usually done by Kelly." That's why people leave the White House in such numbers: they are looking to get a job closer to home. It's not Trump's fault that people leave. They do it on their own. Even Jeff Sessions, our dearly departed Attorney General, was not fired: he was merely asked to resign, and then submitted his letter of resignation. Leaving many people to wonder what's the difference between being fired and resigning. ------- ------- Rumors of a major shakeup rock the White House Yahoo News Hunter Walker and Jenna McLaughlin Nov 13th 2018 8:54PM WASHINGTON — News that several senior officials in the Trump administration were set to be fired rocked the White House on Tuesday. However, in a West Wing that’s seen record turnover and a slew of rumors that didn’t pan out, it was hard for even some insiders to know what to expect next. President Trump is said to be considering replacing his chief of staff, John Kelly, according to a Wall Street Journal report published on Tuesday. The Journal reported the move would be part of a larger “shake-up” that would begin with the removal of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. The report also said Trump would be getting rid of Mira Ricardel, the top deputy for national security adviser John Bolton. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comments from Yahoo News about the reported shakeup. Kelly’s departure has been one of the longest-running rumors surrounding the Trump White House. The former Marine general became White House chief of staff, one of the most powerful positions in the West Wing, late last July. In the more than a year since then, there have been regular reports that Kelly was set to quit or be fired. The rumors were attributed to various factors, including Trump’s alleged dissatisfaction with Kelly’s attempts to impose order on the freewheeling West Wing or clashes between the chief of staff and members of the president’s family, including his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, who are both top White House advisers. This latest report included another element that has appeared in past Kelly speculation. According to the Journal, Trump “probably will replace” Kelly with Nick Ayers, who is Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff. Ayers, 36, has spent over a decade in Republican politics, where he’s earned a reputation as an aggressive and talented political wunderkind. He joined Pence’s gubernatorial reelection effort in Indiana in 2016 and went on to become national chairman of Pence’s vice presidential campaign. A source who has spoken to Ayers in recent days said Ayers dismissed the latest round of rumors as “the same story that comes up every two months.” Ayers did not respond to multiple requests for comment. While the persistent speculation surrounding Ayers and Kelly hasn’t panned out in the past, there are some notably different aspects to this latest report. Most importantly, during a press conference last Wednesday, Trump himself indicated that he was mulling high-level staff changes now that the midterm elections are over. “We’re looking at a lot of different things, including Cabinet. I’m very happy with most of my Cabinet. We’re looking at different people for different positions,” Trump said when asked about potential staff changes, adding, “You know, it’s very common after the midterms. I didn’t want to do anything before the midterms.” The dismissal of Ricardel, a lower-profile aide, was pushed by the first lady, Melania Trump, who clashed with Ricardel during a trip to Africa last month, the paper reported. Melania Trump, who has been frustrated by some of her press coverage, also reportedly believed Ricardel was behind some negative stories about her office. “It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that [Ricardel] no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House,” said Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, when contacted by Yahoo News. Ricardel did not respond to a request for comment. In an administration constantly plagued by warring factions and uncertainty, Ricardel entered the White House with preexisting public feuds on her scorecard, including with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It is unclear whether national security adviser John Bolton, Ricardel’s boss, who has a similar reputation for being sharp-elbowed and hawkish on foreign affairs, will step in to defend her and try to prevent the president from removing her. In spite of leaks from unnamed officials and public comments from Trump and his wife, it remains unclear whether anyone is about to be fired. One former White House staffer described the rumors to Yahoo News as “the same as usual.” The ex-staffer noted that Trump is reluctant to personally fire people and said dismissals are usually done by Kelly. “Long story short: I’ll believe the dismissals when they happen,” the former staffer said. | |
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| 11-13-18 01:38pm - 2231 days | #1331 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Melania Trump comes out fighting. Says a White House aide no longer deserves the honor of serving in the White House. This is about the honor of the White House, which has been strengthened by the presence of Donald Trump. Donald Trump, man of the people, fighting for the rights of the poor and middle class in the United States, while giving billions of dollars to the top 1%. The poor and middle class need to stand on their own two feet. While the top 1% need all the help they can get, in order to carry out their immense responsibilities. Also, President Trump loves the press. Many of his best friends are in the press. But he will no longer allow vicious, evil reporters to hide under the Constitution. The Constituition is only for good, white Americans. --- --- In a stunning move, Melania Trump calls for ouster of a top national security aide By Jeremy Diamond and Kate Bennett, CNN Updated 4:03 PM ET, Tue November 13, 2018 Melania calls for top WH aide to be fired (CNN)First lady Melania Trump, in a remarkable move carried out by her spokeswoman, publicly pushed for the ouster of deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel. "It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that (Ricardel) no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House," the first lady's communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement on Tuesday. The statement amounted to a stunning public rebuke by a first lady of a senior official serving in her husband's administration. It came after reports surfaced earlier Tuesday indicating Ricardel would be pushed out of her post after less than seven months on the job. Neither Ricardel nor spokespeople for the National Security Council responded to CNN requests for comment. Reflecting the fast-moving nature of the events, soon after a Wall Street Journal report surfaced Tuesday afternoon alleging Ricardel was fired and escorted off the White House grounds, a senior White House official denied the story to reporters. The official said Ricardel was still in her office Tuesday afternoon. The official declined to speculate further about Ricardel's future in the administration. New York Times: White House balances a complicated dynamic between Melania and Ivanka Trump New York Times: White House balances a complicated dynamic between Melania and Ivanka Trump Her potential departure would leave national security adviser John Bolton without one of his key allies in the administration, a deputy who has also shared his penchant for bureaucratic infighting. It was those sharp elbows that sources said led to the first lady's stinging statement, with Ricardel most recently feuding with members of the first lady's staff over her trip to Africa. One person familiar with the matter said Ricardel quarreled with the first lady's staff over seating on the plane and use of National Security Council resources. A White House official accused Ricardel of being dishonest about the feud and subsequently leaking stories to try to cover her behavior. And before her spat with the East Wing, Ricardel butted heads repeatedly with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a rivalry that was well-known within the Trump administration. Her disputes with Mattis preceded her time as deputy national security adviser, going back to the presidential transition when Ricardel sought to block Mattis from hiring certain people who had been critical of Trump or were viewed as insufficiently loyal to Trump. Tensions have also been rising between Ricardel and chief of staff John Kelly and his deputy Zach Fuentes in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Kelly and Fuentes believe Ricardel was leaking negative stories about them to the press, the people said. The dispute made it difficult for Ricardel to land in a top post in the Trump administration, though she was ultimately tapped for the position of undersecretary of commerce for export administration. Ricardel then joined the National Security Council as Bolton's deputy in April after he was named national security adviser. Ricardel has been key to Bolton's efforts to restructure the National Security Council and to help Bolton secure his place as an influential adviser to the President on all foreign policy matters. CNN's Pamela Brown, Sarah Westwood and Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report. | |
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| 11-13-18 11:24am - 2231 days | #1330 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump slam's France's wine industry. Accusing France of unfair trade practices. France makes excellent wine, Trump admits, but so does the United States. And France makes it very hard for the US to sell its wines in France. Unfair. Bad business. Are the French corrupt? Yes, you need to watch your wallet, when in France, because the French thieves will steal you blind. While Trump was in Paris, he told his secret service agents to keep an eye on not just his wallet, but also their own wallets. Also, the US helped France in World War 1 and World War 2. Are the French grateful? Never. The French President said France has to protect itself against China, Russia, and even the United States of America. Not fair. No gratitude. We should have let them burn. ------- ------- Trump slams France's wine industry, accusing it of unfair trade practices Business Insider Jonathan Garber Nov 13th 2018 1:29PM President Donald Trump on Tuesday took aim at France's trade practices surrounding its wine industry. He said the country charged "big tariffs" compared with the "very small tariffs" the US placed on French wine. Trump's relationship with French President Emmanuel Macron has been deteriorating in recent weeks. President Donald Trump on Tuesday railed against what he framed as unfair trade practices by France when it comes to wine. "On Trade, France makes excellent wine, but so does the U.S.," Trump tweeted. "The problem is that France makes it very hard for the U.S. to sell its wines into France, and charges big Tariffs, whereas the U.S. makes it easy for French wines, and charges very small Tariffs. Not fair, must change!" The European Union levies tariffs ranging from $0.11 to $0.29 a bottle on wine that is imported from the US, while bottles exported from the EU to the US are hit with a tax of $0.05 a bottle, the Wine Institute says. Data specific to France was not readily available. In 2017, the US imported $1.8 billion worth of French wine, while France bought just $71 million worth of US wine, according to data from the International Trade Centre. The US is the largest destination for French wine, making up 17% of the country's exports, according to the data. Trump's tweet comes amid a deteriorating relationship between him and French President Emmanuel Macron. Earlier Tuesday, Trump took aim at France's war record in response to Macron last week suggesting Europe needed an army to "protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the United States of America." Macron later clarified his comments to say they were directed at cybercrime and building domestic defense industries that didn't rely on US arms. "Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia," Trump tweeted Tuesday. "But it was Germany in World Wars One & Two - How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along. Pay for NATO or not!" | |
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| 11-13-18 05:05am - 2231 days | #1329 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump needs to call out the National Guard, and order them to shoot to kill any black African, brown immigrant, or obnoxious Muslim who voted illegally in the Florida election. We must fight to keep Democracy safe from all scummy Democrats and their criminal lowlife associates. Let us pray that Donald Trump will retain a strong majority in the Senate, so he can pack the judicial system with conservative lawyers and judges that will carry out the will of the people. And help Trump build a Wall, in the south, to keep out Mexicans, and in the north, to keep out illegal Canadians. America for Americans! PS: I read that Ryan Reynolds is a Canadian that snuck into the US at night, while no one was watching. He married Scarlett Johansson, a fine-looking woman, then dumped her for Blake Lively. Throw the Canadian bastard in prison for violating our fine American girls. Ryan Reynolds has no morals. | |
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| 11-13-18 04:54am - 2231 days | #1328 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
On the ground, both Republicans and Democrats are deeply involved in the recount effort, but the G.O.P. organizing muscle from Washington and elsewhere is particularly notable. Republican officials said more than 100 staff members from the Republican National Committee are in Florida, and thousands of trained volunteers. The party, along with Mr. Scott’s campaign, has also undertaken a new fund-raising effort to cover the mounting costs of lawyers, paid personnel and the mountain of logistics that accompany a recount with so many people involved. The party committee sent an email to its supporters late Monday that had the subject line “FW: STOLEN?” and included an image of the president’s tweet saying the Democrats were committing fraud. White House officials privately said that while Mr. Trump and the party continued to hammer the message of voter fraud, they anticipated that the vote tallies would not change drastically over the course of the recount, and that Mr. Scott would be certified as the winner. Other Republicans involved in the effort have expressed similar confidence in private, pointing to Mr. Scott’s margin of roughly 13,000 votes over Mr. Nelson as likely too large to change decisively in a recount. Mr. Bush’s lead over Mr. Gore after the polls closed on election night in 2000 was 1,784. After a recount that proceeded in fits and starts and took more than five weeks before being settled at the Supreme Court, Mr. Bush won by 537 votes. Jeremy W. Peters reported from Tallahassee and Maggie Haberman from Washington. Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Atlanta, Patricia Mazzei from Miami and Lisa Lerer from Washington. A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 12, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: G.O.P. Fears Over Senate Edge Drive Push to Discredit Recount. | |
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| 11-13-18 04:53am - 2231 days | #1327 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Sabotage, cheating, fraud, illegal votes: the scumbag Democrats have tarnished the voting process for years, and the Republican party is fighting back. Would you want corrupt politicians to be elected by fraudulent votes? Would you want to see black Africans stealing jobs from white Americans? Shame on the Democratic party. They have no morals. They are scum. -------- -------- Inside the Republican Strategy to Discredit the Florida Recount Image Protesters gathered outside of the Broward County supervisor of elections’ office in Lauderhill, Fla., on Friday. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times By Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman Nov. 12, 2018 TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The concerted effort by Republicans in Washington and Florida to discredit the state’s recount as illegitimate and potentially rife with fraud reflects a cold political calculation: Treat the recount as the next phase of a campaign to secure the party’s majority and agenda in the Senate. That imperative — described by Republican lawyers, strategists and advisers involved in the effort — reflects the G.O.P.’s determination to tighten its hold on power in the narrowly divided Senate. The outcome of the Florida race will decide whether the party controls as many as 53 seats and has a freer hand to confirm Republican-backed judges with the vote of the man at the center of the recount, Gov. Rick Scott, who is trying to oust a three-term Democrat, Bill Nelson. With the Democrats capturing a Republican-held Senate seat in Arizona on Monday night, the recount fight in Florida becomes even more consequential. Beyond the Senate majority, there is also the matter of morale. Any reversal of an election that Republicans believe they already won in a state as symbolically important as Florida — the country’s most competitive political battleground — would be a blow to a party that had a net loss of at least 32 House seats and six governorships. Everyone from donors to rank-and-file lawmakers is determined to keep Democrats from notching another victory. Mr. Scott and his allies have tried to portray the Senate election as a fait accompli — he is currently ahead by about 13,000 votes — and the recount as a futile attempt to prolong the inevitable. Indeed, between 2000 and 2016, there were 4,687 statewide general elections and just 26 statewide recounts. Only three — or 0.06 percent of all statewide elections — reversed the initial result, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan group FairVote. “This has been decisive,” Representative Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who represents parts of Palm Beach County, said on Monday. “I hope this can wrap up quickly.” But the Republicans’ posture on the recount — especially the party’s claims of fraud and cover-up and President Trump’s latest assertion on Monday of forgery, all presented without evidence — has been deeply divisive and even drew a stern rebuke Monday from the chief state judge in Broward County, Fla., Jack Tuter. He urged lawyers involved in the battle over the recount to “ramp down the rhetoric” and take any accusations of electoral fraud to the police. The Republicans’ strategy in Florida reflects their experience in the 2000 presidential recount in the state. Party strategists and lawyers say they prevailed largely because they approached it as they did the race itself, with legal, political and public relations components that allowed them to outmaneuver the Democrats, who were less strategic and consistent with their lawsuit targets and public remarks about the recount. The races for Senate and governor may head to a recount or a runoff. Nov. 10, 2018 This time around, though, Democrats are holding little back. The party’s candidate for governor, Andrew Gillum, retracted his concession once the recount in his race began, even though he will have to close a vote deficit that is about three times as large as Mr. Nelson’s. The effort that Mr. Scott and Republican allies are waging today is strikingly similar to that multifront war in 2000 led by the George W. Bush campaign and an army of party consultants. Lawyers are filing complaints in Tallahassee; surrogates for the Republican candidate are holding news conference calls with journalists and sitting for interviews on cable, blaming the Democrats for tarnishing the integrity of the electoral process; and party officials are encouraging demonstrators to gather at sites where the recounts are taking place. “The tactics are the same, the issues are the same, the problems are the same,” said Brad Blakeman, a Republican consultant who worked on the party’s messaging in 2000. “And quite frankly,” he added, “the solutions are going to be the same if no one concedes, because again you’re going to have a court determining the outcome.” There is one new variable, however: Mr. Trump. The president, who has long fanned unfounded claims of voter fraud, is especially concerned with the Florida outcome, according to people in touch with him about the recount. And he equates his political success with that of Ron DeSantis, the Republican nominee for governor whose campaign was taken over by Trump aides, as well as with that of Mr. Scott, whose victory he believes he ensured by campaigning across the state and pulling him over the finish line. Mr. Trump sees the recounts, one person close to him said, as akin to a personal attack. Mr. Trump has been more combative and unrestrained in slinging claims of fraud and unfairness than Mr. Scott or Mr. DeSantis. The recount story hits many of the president’s sore spots, including his frequent insistence that his political opponents cheat against him and his unproved belief that American elections are tainted with illegal voting, especially by undocumented immigrants. But with such aggressive, unyielding attacks on Democrats, Mr. Trump and his Republicans risk treading into territory that is a minefield of tension over race. Their repeated allegations of subterfuge and fraudulent ballots are a blunt appeal to a political base motivated by the notion that elections are often stolen by Democrats. And in this case, some of the central players are African-Americans, including Mr. Gillum and the Broward County supervisor of elections, Brenda C. Snipes, whom Republicans like Mr. Scott have called out by name for enabling “rampant fraud,” as the governor put it last week. In the face of the Republican cries of ballot fraud and political mischief, Judge Tuter in Broward County refused a request by Mr. Scott to order the county police to impound voting machines and ballots when they are not in use. The judge was also critical of comments made by Mr. Scott’s lawyers on television and social media perpetuating the unsubstantiated rumors of fraud. Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know. “We need to be careful what we say,” Judge Tuter said. “These words mean things these days, as everybody in the room knows.” Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000 and is one of the most prominent African-American women in the Democratic Party, decried what she described as obvious racial undertones in the Republican attacks on the recount process. “Democracy is often noisy, but it shouldn’t lead to politicians using dog-whistle politics to further divide people, as well as undermine confidence in our electoral process,” she said. Image In Florida’s recount, Republicans risk treading into territory that is a minefield of tension over race. Their unproved allegations of fraud are colliding with the campaign of Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor who is seeking to become Florida’s first black leader.CreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times And some Republicans warned that incendiary language, when used by either party during electoral disputes, was sometimes troubling. “Screaming fraud or unfairness is probably not a constructive first step,” said Marc Racicot, who was the Republican governor of Montana when he spoke regularly on Mr. Bush’s behalf during the recount in 2000. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be vigilant, and that you shouldn’t look for opportunities for there to be something that has gone awry. But I don’t think I would start there.” In recent days, unverified and sometimes wild claims of sabotage and deception have been circulating on Twitter and elsewhere on social media, spread with the help of far-right activists who have large internet followings and a history of embellishing and exaggerating claims of Democratic-led conspiracies. One that gained traction on Monday suggested that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had staged a bomb threat at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Sunday to cover up the discovery of a box of provisional ballots that were left in a rental car. It appears to have originated with Laura Loomer, a former associate of James O’Keefe, the activist famous for using hidden cameras to embarrass prominent liberal targets. Rush Limbaugh informed his readers of the story on his radio show on Monday afternoon. Roger Stone, a friend of the president’s who shares and encourages some of Mr. Trump’s own baseless claims, has also become an outspoken voice in the recount process. “I have never seen anything as brazen, as outrageous, as one-sided as the process that’s going on in Broward County,” Mr. Stone, a Floridian and veteran of the 2000 recount, said in a video posted to InfoWars, the site founded by Alex Jones, a promoter of various “false flag” theories. | |
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| 11-13-18 12:23am - 2232 days | #1326 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump is a wonderful man. Sincere. Loving. Compassionate. He loves the people of Puerto Rico. But not their politicians. So, it's time to stop giving money to Puerto Rico. Hundreds of thousands of people (in Puerto Rico) are still waiting for help, living in homes that are in desperate need of repair, according to The New York Times. The island’s leadership has said it needs billions more to rebuild, and in February said that it would cost at least $17 billion just to fix its beleaguered power grid. Swan reported Sunday that Trump has even proposed demanding some of the money already allocated to relief back. Let the people of Puerto Rico stand on their own two feet. American taxpayer money is for Americans. Not for brown-skinned people who are greedy for American dollars. Trump is an excellent businessman. He knows when it's time to stop giving our money away. Leave Puerto Rico for the Puerto Ricans. And make America great again. -------- -------- Trump Wants To End Hurricane Maria Relief Funding To Puerto Rico: Report [HuffPost] Nick Visser ,HuffPost•November 12, 2018 President Donald Trump wants to stop sending federal relief money to Puerto Rico, an American territory, following last year’s devastating Hurricane Maria, according to a report Sunday in Axios. Trump reportedly believes, without evidence, that the Puerto Rican government has been mishandling the relief funding and using it to pay off debt, according to the outlet’s Jonathan Swan. The president made that conclusion after misreading an article in The Wall Street Journal last month, Swan reports, and told Congressional leaders that he “doesn’t want to include additional Puerto Rico funding in further spending bills.” There is no evidence that the territory has been using any of its relief funds to pay off debt obligations, and the island’s leadership has actually argued against doing so, according to The Washington Post. Trump first alluded to his frustrations with the relief funds last month, saying “inept politicians” were attempting to use the “ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations.” The people of Puerto Rico are wonderful but the inept politicians are trying to use the massive and ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations. The U.S. will NOT bail out long outstanding & unpaid obligations with hurricane relief money! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2018 Puerto Rico is still recovering from the devastation left by Maria in late 2017. The island’s government revised death tolls from the storm up to 2,975 in August, numbers that Trump himself has denied multiple times on Twitter. More than $6 billion has been allocated to help aid storm recovery, but hundreds of thousands of people are still waiting for help, living in homes that are in desperate need of repair, according to The New York Times. The island’s leadership has said it needs billions more to rebuild, and in February said that it would cost at least $17 billion just to fix its beleaguered power grid. Swan reported Sunday that Trump has even proposed demanding some of the money already allocated to relief back. The president has regularly lashed out at the Puerto Rican government throughout the crisis, and even suggested that the storm’s impact wasn’t a “real catastrophe” like 2005′s Hurricane Katrina. After Trump’s latest attempts to downplay the death toll, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló lambasted the White House and said that the “victims and the people of Puerto Rico do not deserve to have their pain questioned.” “The people of Puerto Rico deserve a full accounting of the impact of the storm, and they deserve recognition of that impact by our president,” Rosselló wrote. “It is not time to deny what happened. It is time to make sure that it does not happen again.” This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 11-12-18 01:24am - 2233 days | #1324 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Variety.com November 11, 2018 10:24AM PT Ennio Morricone Denies Making ‘Hateful’ Quentin Tarantino Comments, Threatens to Sue Playboy Germany By Variety Staff Ennio Morricone has denied participating in an interview with Playboy Germany magazine in which he was quoted as saying Quentin Tarantino was a “cretin,” who made nothing but “trash” films. “This is totally false,” the 90 year-old composer said in a statement released Sunday. “I have not given an interview to Playboy Germany and even more, I have never called Tarantino a cretin and certainly do not consider his films garbage. I have given a mandate to my lawyer in Italy to take civil and penal action.” Morricone, who won an Oscar for composing Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” was quoted in the December issue of the German-language magazine as saying Tarantino was a “chaotic” director on set and lacked originality. But Morricone claims the remarks were a fabrication. “In London, during a press conference in front of Tarantino, i clearly stated that I consider Quentin one of the greatest directors of this time.” “I am forever grateful for the opportunity to compose music for his film.” Read the statement in full: It has come to my attention that Playboy Germany has come out with an article in which I have called Tarantino a cretin and consider his films garbage. This is totally false. I have not given an interview to Playboy Germany and even more, I have never called Tarantino a cretin and certainly do not consider his films garbage. I have given a mandate to my lawyer in Italy to take civil and penal action. I consider Tarantino a great director. I am very fond of my collaboration with him and the relationship we have developed during the time we have spent together. He is courageous and has an enormous personality. I credit Tarantino for being one of the people responsible for getting me an Oscar, which is for sure one of the greatest acknowledgments of my career, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to compose music for his film. In London, during a press conference in front of Tarantino, i clearly stated that I consider Quentin one of the greatest directors of this time. | |
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| 11-11-18 07:33am - 2233 days | #1322 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The truth is finally coming out. And we have Donald Trump to thank for it. Quentin Tarantino is a cretin. Tarantino's films are trash. And Hollywood is filled with “its self-inflated pomposities and embarrassments like the Oscars.” From the lips of Academy award winning composer Ennio Morricone, who is speaking his mind. Why do we have Donald Trump to thank? Because Trump has made America great by dumping shit on it. And now a famous Italian is joining in with this joyful theme. Personally, I think Tarantino has done some hugely enjoyable films. If you are in the mood for violence and some black humor. ----- ----- Variety: November 10, 2018 8:30PM PT Quentin Tarantino ‘A Cretin,’ Says ‘Hateful Eight’ Composer Ennio Morricone By Patrick Frater Legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who won an Oscar for the music to “The Hateful Eight,” has labeled the film’s director, Quentin Tarantino, “a cretin” and called his films “trash.” Morricone savaged Tarantino in an interview published this week in the December edition of the German-language version of Playboy. He criticized Tarantino on two main counts: his chaotic working style, and his lack of originality. “He is not a director,” the veteran musician alleged. Tarantino “is absolutely chaotic. He talks without thinking, he does everything at the last minute. He has no idea,” said Morricone, adding: “He calls up out of the blue and wants a complete score in just a few days. That’s not possible. It makes me so mad. I’m not going to put up with this. And I told him so last time.” Morricone, who has credits on more than 500 movies and has provided iconic scores for Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” Roland Joffe’s Cannes-winning “The Mission,” and Guiseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso,” said that Tarantino does not rank in the pantheon of great directors. “The man is a cretin. He only steals from others and puts stuff back together again. There’s nothing original about that. That doesn’t make him a director,” Morricone said. “He is nothing compared with the Hollywood greats, such as John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder. They had class. Tarantino simply recooks old dishes.” Morricone, who turned 90 this week, also did not spare the U.S. and the Oscars ceremony from criticism. He pushed back against suggestions that the 2016 Oscar ceremony left him emotionally disturbed. “Nonsense. Rather, I was in pain from sitting down for so long, on the plane and at the ceremony. If I looked happy, it was because I knew I would soon be getting away from that boring ceremony,” Morricone said. He added that he has no desire to return to the U.S. with “its self-inflated pomposities and embarrassments like the Oscars.” | |
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| 11-10-18 10:37pm - 2234 days | #8 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
One look at that sexy bald-headed face, and I know you've got a body to die for.  | |
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| 11-09-18 11:33am - 2235 days | #2 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
I never heard of inkasso before. Never had any emails from them. But there are all different kinds of scams on the internet and on cell phones and other places. I've read that if you are stupid enough to give or lose money to a scammer, that scammer will think you deserve being scammed for being stupid. The best advice to dealing with a scammer: ignore them. Don't reply to scam, because that will only encourage the scammer to keep trying to get your money. And why waste your time on them: you must have better things to do. If you are getting too many emails from inkasso, either block them with your email provider, or get a new email address. A new email address can be a hassle, but if you are being frustrated by inkasso, it might be worth the effort. Otherwise, ignore inkasso as best you can. | |
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| 11-09-18 12:54am - 2236 days | #1319 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
@Loki, White House news is more real than the Fake News that most newspapers or TV stations put out. Even when it's completely doctored, White House news, if approved by our Glorious Leader of the United States of Trumpland, is realer news than the "facts" put out by regular news sources. Trump über alles, my hero. | |
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| 11-08-18 01:20am - 2237 days | #1317 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The truth is starting to come out: Donald Trump is The Antichrist revealed: Although most followers have been told and even believed that Trump was sent by God to make America great again, the secret Illuminati has been dropping hints that Trump is really the Antichrist. Trump has even deceived God Himself with Trump's protestations of love for humanity. Satan is the ultimate trickster. I myself have not yet watched "American Horror Story", so I don't know all the details yet. But just reading what Variety says, I got chills down my spine and sweat broke out all over my body on reading how this show is based on Trump's inner sanctum. We need to pray that God and the angels will wake up before Trump can destroy America with nuclear missiles that he will falsely claim are from Russia and China and North Korea, his allies in Satan's plan. Democrats unite! Fight Trump and his evil plans before it's too late. -------- -------- Variety.com November 7, 2018 8:31PM PT ‘American Horror Story’ Recap: The Antichrist Decimates the Coven in ‘Fire and Reign’ By Andrea Reiher Andrea Reiher TV Contributor SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Fire and Reign,” the ninth episode of “American Horror Story: Apocalypse.” As “American Horror Story: Apocalypse” continued to work its way back to the actual apocalypse that kicked off the season, the penultimate episode, “Fire and Reign,” revealed why there only seemed to be six witches at the bunker in present day and also how the apocalypse came to be in the first place. The show picked right back up with the two billionaire twits, Mutt and Jeff (Billy Eichner and Evan Peters, respectively) — and yes, those really are their names. Jeff was so sick of how awful the world is that he wanted to just burn it all down and start over. As luck would have it, he and Mutt were meeting with the Cooperative shortly. Ms. Venable (Sarah Paulson) asked to play a more important role in their company by meeting with the Cooperative too, but was rudely rebuffed (at first) and told them she quit. Meanwhile, at the Coven in New Orleans, Mallory (Billie Lourd) was struggling with her powers and she started freaking out about Michael (Cody Fern) coming for them. Cordelia (Paulson) assured her that all witches would be safe under her aura shield, but Dinah (Adina Porter) broke the spell for Michael and Mir-bot (Kathy Bates), who then mercilessly gunned down all the witches with her shotgun arm. Cordelia, Mallory and Myrtle (Frances Conroy), who were upstairs at the time, survived, but Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) and Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) weren’t so lucky. Dinah surveyed the carnage, too, with a nauseated look on her face — but hey, Satan’s “thank you” for her helping his son was to give her a talk show, so she didn’t feel too badly. In a really fun twist, it turned out that Mutt and Jeff planted a camera in Mir-bot and were using it to spy on Michael. They also could control Miriam’s speech and suggested to him that he burn the world down and use Mutt and Jeff to help him. Michael called on the two coke fiends, who revealed the Cooperative to him and convinced him they could start a nuclear war — because the Cooperative was actually the Illuminati, a group that conspiracy theorists believe is a shadowy cabal that controls the entire world and has been around for centuries. In the “AHS” universe, members include Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton and General Kim of North Korea. Michael was intrigued by the idea of basically ending the world to usher in his reign, so he gave Mutt and Jeff a big thumbs up. As all this was happening, the surviving witches — which also included Madison (Emma Roberts) and Coco (Leslie Grossman), who maybe weren’t at the Academy when Michael attacked — all holed up in Misty’s cabin. Misty, incidentally, was off gallivanting around with Stevie Nicks, which was wonderful to learn. The remaining coven members wanted Mallory to execute a spell to go back in time to help set things right. No previous witch ever survived the spell, but Mallory was game anyway. Maple-Pumpkin Overnight Oats Ad by Quaker See More Cordelia and Myrtle wanted Mallory to take a dry run first, so they could test her power without alerting Michael to it. In doing so, the show pulled a page from Matt Weiner’s current playbook and dove into the Russian assassination of the imperial Romanov family in 1918. In Ryan Murphy’s version of that royal family, the youngest girl, Anastasia, was a witch, but her power wasn’t strong enough to save her family — hence why Mallory was sent back in time, to help. During the first attempt Mallory lost her focus, the family was killed, and Mallory almost died, too. Cordelia acknowledged that Mallory wouldn’t come into her full powers until she (Cordelia) was dead, but Myrtle wouldn’t let her do anything drastic, offering up an alternative idea — ask the warlocks for help. Which is drastic in its own way but hopefully wouldn’t prove fatal. Unfortunately, though, Michael got there first and literally tore the warlocks apart. Back at Mutt and Jeff HQ, Venable was serious about quitting, so the billionaire bros let her in on the plan to start World War III and kill most of the world’s population. They offered her a position as an outpost administrator for when the world ends and she immediately got pretty power hungry at the thought. Michael, meanwhile, revealed the apocalypse plan to the Cooperative (aka The Illuminati) and assured them of their and their families’ survival as he outlined the plan for building the outposts. Yet again, the episode felt like it ended rather abruptly. It seems insane that there is only one episode left because there is a lot of ground to cover in the season finale, from getting the outposts set up, to seeing what will become of the resurrected coven members in present day and, based on the preview for next week, getting even more flashbacks into Michael’s early life. “American Horror Story: Apocalypse” airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX. | |
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| 11-07-18 04:31pm - 2237 days | #1316 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump, the Whitest President we've ever had (take a look at his dyed blond hair), scolds a reporter who asks about Trump's goal to make America White again. "That's a racist question", Trump says, when a reporter asks Trump about his embrace of the "nationalist" label that is a rallying cry for white nationalists. How dare you ask me a question like that. I'm the most non-racist human who ever lived. I love everyone, even my critics and enemies. I stand with Jesus Christ himself. Actually, to be completely honest, I stand above Jesus Christ. God sent me to America to make our country great again. Free, white and 21 (to drink alcohol). I also support guns, because I'm a proud American. However, Trump admits that he loves not only America, but the entire world. Trump has a big heart. Trump is my hero. ------- ------- 'That's a racist question': Trump scolds reporter who asked about his embrace of 'nationalist' label Yahoo News Dylan Stableford Nov 7th 2018 4:15PM President Trump on Wednesday cut off a reporter who attempted to ask whether describing himself as a “nationalist” on the campaign trail had emboldened white nationalists. “I don’t know why you’d say that,” the president said in response to the question from PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor in the East Room of the White House. “That’s a racist question.” Alcindor noted that some critics saw Trump’s embrace of the “nationalist” label as a disguised appeal to white supremacists that damaged the standing of Republicans with minorities and moderates. “I don’t believe that,” Trump replied. “Why do I have my highest poll numbers ever with African-Americans? That’s such a racist question.” The White House and conservative media outlets pointed to an August Rasmussen Reports poll showing Trump’s support among African-Americans has nearly doubled (from 19 percent to 36 percent) since he took office. But most polls show Trump’s approval rating among black voters has hovered between 10 percent ad 15 percent throughout his presidency, while roughly 80 percent of African-Americans disapprove of his performance as president. “You know what the word is? I love our country,” he continued. “I do. You have nationalists, you have globalists. I also love the world. I don’t mind helping out the world. But we have to straighten out our country first. We have a lot of problems.” Trump added: “To say what you just said is so insulting to me. That’s a terrible thing you said.” During the press conference, which was convened for Trump to address the midterm election results, Trump sparred with several reporters, including CNN’s Jim Acosta, who pressed him about labeling the caravan of asylum-seeking migrants an “invasion.” Trump scolded Acosta and refused to allow CNN’s chief White House correspondent a follow-up question. “I tell you what, CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them,” he said. “You are are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN. You’re a very rude person.” Trump repeatedly ordered other reporters, including CNN’s April Ryan, who tried to ask about voter suppression, to “sit down.” Alcindor and Ryan are both black. The event was the president’s first scheduled open-ended press conference at the White House since February 2017. It is only the second one he has held with the White House press corps since taking office. Alcindor defended her line of questioning. “I’m simply asking the questions the public wants to know,” she tweeted. _____ | |
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| 11-07-18 01:56pm - 2237 days | #1315 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
We've lost Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. But not to worry: this gives Trump the chance to pick someone he likes better. So long, Jeff. Wishing you well, after trying to hint you should resign for many, many months. ----- ----- President Trump announces Jeff Sessions is no longer the attorney general Yahoo News Hunter Walker Nov 7th 2018 6:00PM WASHINGTON—President Trump abruptly announced that Jeff Sessions is no longer the attorney general in a pair of tweets on Wednesday, “We are pleased to announce that Matthew G. Whitaker, Chief of Staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, will become our new Acting Attorney General of the United States. He will serve our Country well,” Trump wrote, adding, “We thank Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his service, and wish him well! A permanent replacement will be nominated at a later date.” The tweets came within hours of a lengthy White House press conference where Trump suggested some major staff changes would be coming soon, When pressed, the president declined to say what those changes might be. He framed potential turnover as standard operating procedure in the wake of the end of an election cycle. AdChoices Trump’s White House has seen extensive turbulence with multiple high level departures. Sessions has long been seen as having a questionable future with the White House since Trump has repeatedly expressed disapproval with the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. Sessions recusal stems from the fact he was an active supporter of Trump’s 2016 campaign. The Mueller probe is examining whether Trump’s campaign team colluded with Russian efforts to interfere in that presidential race. Sessions’ recusal prevented him from stopping the probe, which Trump has attacked as an unfair “witch hunt” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News asking if Sessions resigned or was fired. | |
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| 11-07-18 02:34am - 2238 days | #1313 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Mulsim women elected to Congress for the first time in history. Donald Trump declares martial law. Says if the women show up in Congress, active US military personnel are authorized to fire live ammo rounds, with instructions from the President himself: shoot to kill these radical mother-fuckers, who are trying to bring our great country down, and letting in illegal immigrants. Trump, surrounded by the criminals and low-life slugs from the shithole countries he is defending the US citizens against, is asking for the US military to decide: give me liberty and a white America, or give me death!!! One nation under God, under Trump. In related news: John Conyers, who resigned last December after multiple charges of sexual harassment. Conyers had been the longest serving member of Congress before his resignation — a tenure of 52 years. President Trump is considering nominating John Conyers for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for standing up to women and defending the rights of Pussy-gropers. Conyers is black, and also a Democrat, so Trump is willing to listen to Republicans who oppose this nomination. -------- -------- Muslim women elected to Congress for the first time in history Yahoo News Lisa Belkin Nov 7th 2018 3:28AM There will be Muslim women in Congress for the first time in history, as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib easily won their House races. Omar was declared the winner in Minnesota’s left-learning Fifth Congressional District — which includes Minneapolis and its suburbs, and has elected Democrats since 1960. A Somali-American and a former refugee, she served as the first Somali-American legislator in the U.S. when she won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016. She campaigned in favor of single-payer health care, tighter gun control and more inclusive immigration policies. The seat had been held by Keith Ellison, who left it to run for state attorney general. Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, ran essentially unopposed in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, which includes Detroit. She is an attorney and served in the Michigan House of Representatives. Her election comes during a presidential administration seen as fanning anger against Muslims and enacting anti-Muslim policies. There was no Republican on the ballot in the overwhelmingly Democratic district. There was a Green Party candidate, D. Etta Wilcoxon, and a Working Party candidate, Sam Wilson. In addition, Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones declared herself a write-in candidate for the seat in late October. Tlaib had defeated Jones in the Democratic primary earlier in the year, by about 900 votes. Jones, in turn, had won a separate primary to fill the term of John Conyers, who resigned last December after multiple charges of sexual harassment. Conyers had been the longest serving member of Congress before his resignation — a tenure of 52 years. In a year when a record number of women are running for Congress and races across the country include more candidates of color and more gay, lesbian and transgender candidates, Tlaib and Omar add to the diversity of newcomers to the electoral process. | |
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| 11-04-18 10:06pm - 2240 days | #1312 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
@biker, I never paid much attention to politics until Trump. Hopefully, I will return to a better view of life. Happy days are here again? LOL. | |
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| 11-04-18 04:06pm - 2240 days | #1310 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Secret conversations between Trump and Kavanaugh: Trump: Can I send nuclear missiles to the the border in San Diego, CA? Kavanaugh: You are the President. Send the missiles. But don't use emails: emails can get you in trouble. Use a phone. Even the hacked iPhone that the Chinese and the Russians are taping. Because you can deny that. Say any recordings are Fake News. The public believes you. You are the President. You are the Man. Trump: Thanks, Brett. That's why I picked you for the Supreme Court. Can we pass a Constitutional law that makes me President for Life? Like the Chinese did? Like Putin did? Kavanaugh: We need to clear out the deadwood on the Supreme Court. Get me some new faces here, and you will be Dictators For Life. | |
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| 11-04-18 03:30pm - 2240 days | #1309 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Donald Trump stands behind Brett Kavanaugh. Says he was in the car with Kavanaugh, while Brett was humping the girl. And the girl was begging for more. Then Trump got on the girl, and she began to scream with pleasure. Trump and Kavanaugh both claim the girl was overjoyed with the sex. So, Trump has Kavanaugh's back, and Kavanaugh has Trump's back. If anyone wants to subpoena, Kavanaugh will turn them down. Kavanaugh wanted the Justice Department to ask President Clinton salacious questions about his sex with Monica. But now that a Republican is president, it's a different story: because Kavanaugh is a strong Republican, and even though the Supreme Court is supposed to be politically neutral, Kavanaugh is a staunch Republican who will stand up for the Republican party, while denying that politics has anything to do with his decisions. Trump and Kavanaugh, strong supporters of the right to fuck you over. -------- -------- Trump Tries To Revive Doubt Over Kavanaugh Claims After Little-Known Accuser Recants [HuffPost] Sara Boboltz ,HuffPost•November 3, 2018 President Donald Trump on Saturday attempted to cast renewed doubt on sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by pointing to the recantation of one little-known accuser. The woman, Judy Munro-Leighton, falsely claimed to have authored a “Jane Doe” letter stating that Kavanaugh and a friend raped her “several times” in the back seat of a car, which the judge denies. The true author of the letter remains unknown, and the claim was not widely reported on during the September confirmation hearings. “A vicious accuser of Justice Kavanaugh has just admitted that she was lying, her story was totally made up, or FAKE!” Trump said in a tweet after initially misspelling the judge’s name. “Can you imagine if he didn’t become a Justice of the Supreme Court because of her disgusting False Statements,” the president continued. He added: “What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?” The Senate approved the justice in an extremely tight vote Oct. 6, and Trump has leaned on Kavanaugh’s successful confirmation to win favor with his base, referencing the controversy at numerous campaign rallies ahead of Tuesday’s hotly contested midterm elections. Postmarked Sept. 19 from San Diego, the handwritten letter was mailed to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her story about Kavanaugh earlier that month. Kavanaugh called the letter’s contents a “crock” and a “farce” in sworn testimony during a Sept. 26 conference call with senators. Ford, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27, stands by her assertion that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school gathering in the 1980s. Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley referred Munro-Leighton to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray for investigation in a letter dated Friday. According to Grassley, committee staff received an email from Munro-Leighton on Oct. 3 in which she claimed to be the letter’s author but was “deathly afraid” of going public. When committee staff eventually spoke with Munro-Leighton, she recanted, saying she only sent the email “as a way to grab attention” because she felt angry. Investigators found that she lived in Kentucky, not California. She told them she had never met Kavanaugh. Munro-Leighton is the fourth person Grassley has referred to federal prosecutors for investigation over the Kavanaugh hearings. Julie Swetnick, who says Kavanaugh attended parties where women were gang-raped, and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, were referred in late October. A man who has not been publicly identified was referred in late September. Another woman, Deborah Ramirez, who maintains that Kavanaugh once thrust his penis in her face at a Yale party, never directly spoke with committee members. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 11-03-18 02:30pm - 2241 days | #1308 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Rolling Stone Issue 1321: November 2, 2018 Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer, reveals that President Trump has strong views about the world of color. Trump said to Michael Cohen, "Name me one country run by a black person that's not a shithole." And then Trump added, "Name one city." Cohen couldn't give an answer. Proof that cities, and even countries, need White Men to lead them to greatness. Trump, you are the Man. Why are some reporters in the Fake News calling you racist? Honest opinions will set us free. --------- --------- November 3, 2018 3:10PM ET Michael Cohen Confirms What We Already Know: Trump Is Racist “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,'” president’s former lawyer reveals By Peter Wade Michael Cohen accused Donald Trump of making racist remarks behind closed doors in a new interview with 'Vanity Fair.' Michael Cohen has signaled recently in tweets and random comments to the media that he is no longer President Donald Trump’s most loyal defender. This continued in an interview with Vanity Fair that published Friday where he accused Trump of making racist remarks behind closed doors. Cohen gave the interview Tuesday, the day of the first funerals for the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Explaining why Cohen came forward now, Vanity Fair noted “he knew that the president’s private comments were worse than his public rhetoric, and he wanted to offer potential voters what he believed was evidence of Trump’s character in advance of the midterm elections.” Cohen recalled four instances where he was offended by the president’s racism: Once, when speaking about one of Trump’s campaign rallies in 2016: “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.'” After Nelson Mandela’s death, Cohen remembered: “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,'” This language echoes a line from January when Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries. When traveling with Trump through Chicago in the late 2000s, Cohen said Trump remarked: “We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” Finally, Cohen said he and Trump were talking about Trump’s decision to fire Bill Rancic or Kwame Jackson on The Apprentice: “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson. He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black fag win.'” Regardless of what you think of Michael Cohen, many things Trump has done publicly in the past lend credibility to his accusations. The president has a long history of racism, as Rolling Stone has written about before. Rachel Maddow on Friday ran a segment on Cohen’s remarks and pointed out a pattern in the way Trump insults black Americans, noting that the president calls them either: dumb, low IQ, unintelligent, unqualified or criminal. “That’s basically everything that he says about prominent African Americans who he targets,” Maddow concluded. | |
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| 11-02-18 12:48pm - 2242 days | #18 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Have you looked at the Pure Taboo site? This is plot-driven porn. Not a huge site, currently 135 videos. Site started in late 2017. But some of the videos are hot. And fresh. The style is dark (slightly dark lighting, dark theme--girls abused or punished), but not heavily cruel or rough. More like a dark heartcore style. $14.95/month with PU discount. Was $9.95, but they raised the price. Maybe you can find a lower price. But it's definitely worth a look. | |
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| 11-02-18 08:28am - 2242 days | #16 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Be careful what you say. If President Trump hears this, he could have you locked up. On the other hand, maybe this will save America hundreds of billions of dollars: we can now built a Great Virtual Wall for less money, to keep all those immigrants out of the United States. One Wall at the South, one Wall at the North (for those pesky Canadians), one Wall at the East, one Wall at the West. Close those borders. We will be safe in our virtual homes. | |
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| 11-01-18 10:07pm - 2243 days | #1307 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump promises to crack down on illegal immigrants. Promises to grab all good-looking women by the pussy, until they scream with joy. But the skanks can go back to whatever shithole country they came from. Melania promises to stick by her man, as long as he continues to fund her fashion clothes, But Melania also has a wandering eye. She is looking at some well-hung secret service agents that can warm her bed, while her husband is making whoopie. We have to respect the office of the President. No matter what piece of shit may occupy it. ---------- ---------- Trump promises immigration crackdown ahead of US elections Thomson Reuters By Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton Nov 1st 2018 7:50PM WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Thursday his administration planned to require immigrants seeking asylum in the United States to come into the country through a legal port of entry, pushing a hard line on immigration ahead of elections next week. The president's remarks, five days before U.S. voters determine which party will control Congress and state governorships across the country, drew immediate criticism as an effort to generate fear and energize his political base. "Migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry," Trump told reporters at the White House, painting a caravan of migrants traveling from Central America toward the United States as a dangerous threat. "Those who choose to break our laws and enter illegally will no longer be able to use meritless claims to gain automatic admission into our country," he said. It was not clear whether the plan would pass legal muster, although Trump, who sought to use immigration as an issue to motivate Republican voters in the 2016 presidential race and now ahead of the Nov. 6 elections, said it would. He added that an executive order was in the process of being finalized, but provided few details. Federal law provides that any immigrant in the United States may apply for asylum, regardless of whether he or she enters the country through a designated port of entry. Trump has ramped up his tough stance on illegal immigration in recent days. He deemed the group of migrants from Central America a threat to Americans. It is made up of people who have left poverty and violence at home and are heading slowly through Mexico toward the U.S. border. Trump referred to the movement as an "invasion." Mexico on Wednesday put the size of the caravan that left Honduras in mid-October at 2,800 to 3,000 people. Other caravans have since followed. The president, who has ordered U.S. troops to the border with Mexico, also suggested rock-throwing by migrants would be treated as equivalent to gun usage. "They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. We're going to consider, and I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military police, I say: Consider it a rifle," Trump said. A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis, declined to discuss specifics on the military's potential use of force, but said that U.S. troops "always have the inherent right of self-defense." Critics said the president was stoking fear ahead of the elections, in which Trump's Republicans are battling to keep their congressional majorities. "President Trump’s attempt to paint peaceful families seeking asylum as a national security threat is as absurd as it is cruel," said advocacy group Human Rights First in a statement. "The president is fear mongering to score political points ahead of a contentious election at the expense of people’s lives." The American Civil Liberties Union said: "If he plans at some point to prohibit people from applying for asylum between the ports of entry, that plan is illegal." Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, an ally of the president and head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to the secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department that his office had received information that several members of the caravan had "significant criminal histories." Trump said on Wednesday the United States could send as many as 15,000 troops to the border to confront the migrant caravan, more than twice the number previously disclosed by defense officials. A U.S. defense official said about 100 active-duty troops arrived on the border at McAllen, Texas, on Thursday. Republican lawmakers and other Trump supporters have applauded the deployment. But critics argue Trump has manufactured a crisis for the U.S. military to address. Trump also said this week he would seek to scrap the constitutional right of citizenship for U.S.-born children of noncitizens and illegal immigrants. Such an action would face a likely legal challenge. (Reporting by Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton; Additional reporting by Makini Brice, Kristina Cooke, Lisa Lambert, Idrees Ali and Tom Hals; Editing by Peter Cooney) | |
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| 11-01-18 08:38am - 2243 days | #1306 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Obama, the illegitimate President of the United States. President Trump, after deep study, told America that Obama was a fraudulent President who was born in some shithole African country. Now Obama, out of the limelight since giving up the Presidency, is giving people an inside look at how the US government works. President Trump has ordered the FBI and CIA and other intelligence agencies to watch and study the proposed project, and to arrest both Barack Obama and his dark-skinned wife if the couple reveal any classified secrets. Trump is also reviewing the status of the Obamas, to see whether they deserve to hold security clearances. ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- Collider.com Obamas Set ‘The Fifth Risk’ Adaptation as First Netflix Project by Adam Chitwood October 31, 2018 Former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama have made their first acquisition under their deal to create content for Netflix. Per Deadline, the Obamas have picked up the rights to author Michael Lewis’ latest book The Fifth Risk, which was released on October 2nd and provides an inside look at the inner workings of the U.S. government. The idea is to create a possible series that helps people further understand how the government actually works. More details about the project are set to be revealed on the new episode of Katie Couric‘s podcast this Thursday. Specifically, The Fifth Risk follows the chaos that erupted at the departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce during the handoff between the Obama administration to the Trump administration. Lewis conducted interviews with a number of federal workers who revealed that those who took over at these departments were woefully under-prepared, and some even threw away the briefing books provided by the Obama administration folks who had previously held the jobs. As a result, this “willful ignorance” caused a breakdown in a governmental system that has widespread and long-lasting effects. Lewis is no stranger to adaptations of his work. The Blind Side scored a Best Picture nomination, as did Bennett Miller’s terrific adaptation of Moneyball. There’s also a TV series adaptation of Flash Boys in development at Netflix, starting from scratch after Aaron Sorkin attempted a feature film adaptation of that Wall Street tale at Sony a few years ago. There’s no guarantee The Fifth Risk will actually happen, but the book has been optioned by the Obamas with the intent to develop a potential series adaptation at Netflix. It’s unclear if that would be a narrative series or a docuseries, but either way this is an indication of the kind of content the former First Family intends to make at Netflix. Their stated intention was to further educate and enrich the populace, and who better to produce an inside look at the inner-workings of the federal government than folks who served as President and First Lady for eight years? “The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. “And then there was radio silence.” Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do. Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview. If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system—those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night. | |
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| 10-31-18 09:27pm - 2244 days | #312 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
adulttime.com This is not a regular paysite. I got it as a free add-on when I joined 21Sextury.com today. But the add-on is random: only some members will get it. It's also in beta testing, so it's probably not ready to be listed at PU. But: the adult time network (I'm calling it a network, because it gives you access to a large number of paysites) seems like a great deal: you seem to get full access to the paysites, with streaming and downloading privileges. Edited on Nov 01, 2018, 12:36am | |
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| 10-31-18 03:01am - 2245 days | #6 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Promotional Porn discounts for Halloween 2018. It would be better if the link brings up a page where the promoted sites are listed clearly, with the promotion prices. The link to the promotion discounts through the What's Hot link brings up a TBP page that does not show clearly the promoted sites, with the discounted prices. | |
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| 10-30-18 07:10pm - 2245 days | #1305 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Judge says President Trump has the right to call people liars and thieves because of free speech. But Trump's lawyer demands $341,000 from Stormy Daniels because she filed a lawsuit accusing the President of libel (calling Stormy Daniels a liar). Is the law fucked up, or what? ---- ---- Trump demands eye-popping sum from Stormy Daniels over her rejected defamation bid with his lawyer charging $841 per hour By NANCY DILLON Oct 30, 2018 | 11:55 AM President Trump wants to squeeze Stormy Daniels for $341,559.50 over her failed defamation claim. Trump’s lawyers say he spent the sky-high sum on filings for the claim before and after a judge rejected it two weeks ago. Daniels initially sued the president for defamation on April 30, two weeks after he took to Twitter and dismissed her sketch of an unidentified man who allegedly threatened her in a parking lot as a “con job.” “Plaintiff filed this action, not because it had any merit, but instead for the ulterior purposes of raising her media profile, engaging in political attacks against the President…and to depose Mr. Trump and take discovery,” Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder said in the motion for attorney’s fees filed Monday. Harder said the defamation claim was so expensive to defend against because Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti first filed it in New York, even though Daniels already had a related suit against Trump pending in federal court in California. The earlier underlying suit was filed in Los Angeles in March and remains ongoing. It seeks to break the $130,000 hush money agreement Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen brokered with Daniels in October 2016 related to her claims she had sex with Trump in 2006. After filing the March suit, Daniels and Avenatti went public with claims the adult actress was confronted in the Las Vegas parking lot in 2011 by a mystery man who threatened her to keep quiet over the alleged affair. She and Avenatti released a sketch on April 17 of the unidentified man they allege threatened her. Trump scoffed at the sketch a day later in a Twitter post. “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” the president tweeted. U.S. District Judge James Otero ultimately determined Trump had a right to respond with his tweet. “Mr. Trump's statement constituted ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ that is protected by the First Amendment,” Otero wrote in his opinion. “To allow (Daniels) to proceed with her defamation action would, in effect, permit her to make public allegations against the President without giving him the opportunity to respond. Such a holding would violate the First Amendment,” the judge ruled. Avenatti quickly filed a notice of appeal and tweeted that Trump’s “record before the Ninth Circuit has been anything but good.” But the president’s lawyer wasted no time going after Daniels for six figures. Harder claims it cost $34,707.97 for lawyers to analyze the defamation claim, $102,977.32 to write a motion to transfer the case back to California, $139,899.21 to file the motion to dismiss the claim and $63,975.00 to file the motion for attorney’s fees and sanctions. Harder said his hourly rate for the case was $841.64. Trump and Harder also want additional sanctions levied against Daniels, according to the filing. “The conduct of Plaintiff and her counsel suggest they will continue to bring similar claims and meritless lawsuits against Mr. Trump, if sufficient sanctions do not deter them from doing so,” Harder wrote. Daniels’ separate lawsuit seeking to prove her $130,000 hush-money agreement with Trump and Cohen was actually illegal remains ongoing. | |
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| 10-30-18 12:10pm - 2245 days | #1304 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump says Barack Obama was born in Africa. Obama has no birth certificate. Obama was a fake president. Obama belongs in jail. And so does Hillary Clinton. Why can't we clean the swamp in Washington, and put scummy Obama and scummy Hillary in jail? Get rid of the scum, and let President Trump do his job of making America great again. My country tis of thee, one nation under God, one nation under Trump. | |
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| 10-30-18 12:03pm - 2245 days | #1303 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Real news: President Trump claims he can break the US Constitution and make new laws. Says that his powers are stronger than the US Constitution. Bow down before the President, God's messenger on Earth, who has holy powers that are greater than other mortals. ----- ----- https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/30/politics/...tizenship/index.html Trump claims he can defy Constitution and end birthright citizenship By Kevin Liptak and Devan Cole, CNN Updated 2:07 PM ET, Tue October 30, 2018 Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump offered a dramatic, if legally dubious, promise in a new interview to unilaterally end birthright citizenship, ratcheting up his hardline immigration rhetoric with a week to go before critical midterm elections. Trump's vow to end the right to citizenship for the children of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on US soil came in an interview with Axios released Tuesday. Such a step would be regarded as an affront to the US Constitution, which was amended 150 years ago to include the words: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." Trump did not say when he would sign the order, and some of his past promises to use executive action have gone unfulfilled. But whether the President follows through on his threat or not, the issue joins a string of actions intended to thrust the matter of immigration into the front of voters' minds as they head to polls next week. A day earlier, the President vowed in an interview on Fox News to construct tent cities to house migrants traveling through Mexico to the US southern border. His administration announced the deployment of 5,200 troops to protect the frontier as the "caravan" continues to advance -- though it is still weeks, if not months, from reaching the US border. And the President has warned of an "invasion" of undocumented immigrants if the border isn't sealed with a wall. For Trump it's all about the 'white' part of white, working-class voters For Trump it's all about the 'white' part of white, working-class voters Still, the threat of ending birthright citizenship amounts to another escalation in Trump's hardline approach to immigration, which has become his signature issue. "We're the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits," Trump said in an interview for "Axios on HBO." Several other countries, including Canada, have a policy of birthright citizenship, according to an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reducing immigration. "It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And it has to end," he continued. Already, even some of the President's defenders downplayed the prospects of successfully ending birthright citizenship by executive order. "Well, you obviously cannot do that. You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order," House Speaker Paul Ryan told a Kentucky radio station. Ryan said it would involve a "very, very lengthy" constitutional process to change the 14th Amendment, which was adopted in 1868 to protect citizenship rights for freed slaves. The step would immediately be challenged in court. Some of Trump's previous immigration executive orders, including an attempt to bar entry to citizens from some Muslim-majority countries, came under legal scrutiny after a chaotic drafting process. At the same time, the President has derided his predecessor Barack Obama for taking executive actions to block some young undocumented immigrants from deportation, a step Trump said was a presidential overstep. The American Civil Liberties Union slammed Trump's proposal Tuesday morning. "The President cannot erase the Constitution with an executive order, and the 14th Amendment's citizenship guarantee is clear," said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. "This is a transparent and blatantly unconstitutional attempt to sow division and fan the flames of anti-immigrant hatred in the days ahead of the midterms." Cupp: Tweet is fear mongering at its most naked Cupp: Tweet is fear mongering at its most naked 01:16 Asked about Trump's promise on Tuesday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, said the President has the "right to raise that debate" if he wants but "this notion that he can simply violate the Constitution by executive order, let's face it, no serious legal scholar thinks that's real." "This is simply an attempt for Donald Trump, who wants to do anything possible to bring back fears around immigration, to use that as a political tool in this last week before the election," Warner said. "This is again, where a President's words matter. The Constitution is quite clear that no one, including the President of the United States, is above the law." The White House did not provide additional details of the planned executive order on Tuesday morning. "It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't," he said, adding that he has run it by his counsel. "You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they're saying I can do it just with an executive order," Trump said. The President didn't provide any details of his plan, but said that "it's in the process. It'll happen." The interview is a part of "Axios on HBO," a new four-part documentary series debuting on HBO this Sunday, according to the news site. CNN's Abby Phillip and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.  2018 Cable News Network | |
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| 10-30-18 11:35am - 2245 days | #1302 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Unbelievable news: Michael Cohen re-registers as a Democrat as he distances himself from Trump. Does Michael Cohen believe that as a registered Democrat, he will be a more believable witness than as a Republican? Many Republicans, like Trump, are famous for lying out of both sides of their mouth, as well as out of their ass: Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch Mcconnell, the list is endless. Do you believe Michael Cohen can tell the truth? Or that he will be a credible witness against his former boss, Donald Trump? --------- --------- The Guardian Michael Cohen re-registers as Democrat as he distances himself from Trump Lanny Davis said Cohen changed his registration to further ‘himself from the values of the current’ administration Associated Press in New York Thu 11 Oct 2018 17.45 EDT Last modified on Thu 11 Oct 2018 17.59 EDT Cohen had been a registered Democrat for years until changing his registration in March 2017. ‘It took a great man to get me to the make the switch,’ Cohen said at the time on Twitter, referring to Trump. Michael Cohen had been a registered Democrat for years until changing his registration in March 2017. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen returned to the Democratic party on Thursday, the latest in a series of steps he has taken to distance himself from the Republican president following a bitter falling-out. Cohen’s defense attorney, Lanny Davis, announced on Twitter that his client has changed his registration from Republican to Democrat. He described the move as an effort to distance “himself from the values of the current” administration. Cohen retweeted Davis’s post and a link to an Axios story that first reported the news. The switch came on the eve of Friday’s deadline for New Yorkers to register to vote in the November election. Cohen had been a registered Democrat for years until changing his registration in March 2017. “It took a great man to get me to the make the switch,” Cohen said at the time on Twitter, referring to Trump. Cohen had served as the Republican party’s deputy finance chairman but resigned that post this year amid a criminal investigation into his business dealings. Davis on Thursday described Cohen’s latest about-face as “another step” in Cohen’s promise to place “family and country first”, a pledge he made over the summer that signaled his willingness to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to eight federal charges, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. In pleading guilty, he said that Trump directed him to arrange payments before the 2016 election to buy the silence of the porn actor Stormy Daniels and a former Playboy model who alleged they had affairs with Trump. Cohen is scheduled to be sentenced 12 December. 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | |
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| 10-30-18 11:23am - 2245 days | #1301 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Real news: President Trump is cleaning up his past. Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston crime boss, was found dead in prison. It's well-known that Trump has extensive ties to the Mafia and other criminals. That's one reason Trump keeps talking about "bad men". Now Trump is using his powers and influence to dispose of people who might testify against him in return for reduced sentences. Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney who said he would take a bullet for Trump, has flipped and said he made illegal payoffs to Trump mistresses. But Trump wants to eliminate as many other possible witnesses against his illegal actions. The problem is that Trump's history is filled with illegal actions: murder, extortion, bribery, etc. Trump, the secret head of New York's mafia family, the Trump-Galliano family, has sent his most trusted assasins on secret assignments. Will Congress investigate Trump's illegal actions? Or will the Republicans bury their heads in the sand and deny they are working for a corrupt and evil crime boss? Enquiring minds want to know: when will Trump have to face the music for his crimes? -------- -------- Whitey Bulger, Boston Mob Moss Who Inspired ‘The Departed’ and ‘Black Mass,’ Found Dead in Prison at 89 Bulger was convicted in 2013 for his participation in 11 murders Trey Williams | October 30, 2018 @ 10:16 AM Last Updated: October 30, 2018 @ 11:07 AM James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston mob boss who was also the subject for Johnny Depp’s 2015 crime film “Black Mass,” was found dead in a West Virginia federal prison on Tuesday, according to U.S. Department of Justice. He was 89. NBC News, citing the Boston Herald, said that Bulger had recently arrived at the high-security penitentiary. According to the Justice Department, Bulger was found unresponsive at 8:20 a.m. ET at the U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. Officials said life-saving measures were initiated immediately by staff, but that Bulger was subsequently pronounced dead by the Preston County Medical Examiner. The Boston Globe reported that Bulger was killed by an inmate with Mafia ties. The Department of Justice said in a statement that the FBI has opened an investigation into Bulger’s death. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation was notified and an investigation has been initiated. No staff or other inmates were injured, and at no time was the public in danger,” the statement read. Bulger was the leader of the dangerous Boston-based Winter Hill Gang. He was convicted in 2013 of participating in 11 murders that stretched from Massachusetts to Florida to Oklahoma. Bulger was one of the nation’s most-wanted fugitives for 16 years before he was captured in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2011. He was serving a life sentence for racketeering, extortion conspiracy, money laundering, possession of unregistered machine guns, transfer and possession of machine guns, possession of firearms with obliterated serial numbers and possession of machine guns in furtherance of a violent crime. Along with Depp’s portrayal of Bulger in Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass,” the mob boss was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in Martin Scorsese’s 2007 Best Picture Oscar winner, “The Departed.” | |
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| 10-29-18 05:46pm - 2246 days | #1300 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: the only kind worth reading. Trump vows that he will destroy Amazon. Says that Bezos is a bare-faced liar. Says the Washington Post is fake news, and should stop spreading lies about our wonderful president, the greatest man who ever lived. Greater than Washington. Greater than Lincoln. Greater than Jesus. Donald Trump is God's messenger on earth. God sent Donald Trump to the United States, to save us from Mexican rapists and murderers. And from slime-ball Democrats. Please, people, vote for Donald Trump in the November elections. Donald Trump, leader of the Moral Majority for a white America. | |
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| 10-28-18 02:36pm - 2247 days | #7 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Amber Heard needs to make nice to Johnny Depp. If the ex-couple make a new film together, maybe it could help both their careers. Let's hope so. ----- ----- Amber Heard’s Big-Time Bomb: ‘London Fields’ Suffers 2nd Worst Wide Box Office Debut of All Time Drama limps into theaters with just $160,000 after years of legal wrangling Jeremy Fuster October 28, 2018 @ 12:00 PM Last Updated: October 28, 2018 @ 12:04 PM Three years after it debuted in Toronto, Amber Heard’s “London Fields” finally hit theaters this weekend — only to set a new record as the second worst wide-release opening in box office history. Released by GVN Releasing on 613 screens, the film only grossed around $160,000, for a per screen average of just $262. According to Box Office Mojo, which classifies a wide release as any film that plays on more than 600 screens, that’s the second worst wide opening of all-time behind “Proud American,” a 2008 film with major corporate sponsorship that retold the creation of Walmart and Coca-Cola. That film posted a wide opening of just over $96,000. Also Read: Amber Heard Resolves Lawsuit Over 'London Fields,' Clearing Path for Release The film, based on Martin Amis’ dystopian novel, has made headlines for generating multiple lawsuits on its slow path into theaters. Nicola Six Limited, the production label created to release the movie, sued Heard for $10 million in 2016 for breach of contract, claiming she refused to do nude scenes for the film despite reading the novel knowing that her role would require such scenes to be shot. The plaintiffs also accused Heard of violating her contract by refusing to show up at the film’s planned premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The dispute was settled last month, clearing the way for the film’s release. Also Read: Amber Heard Sued Over Alleged Refusal to Do Nudity, Publicity for 'London Fields' But the legal troubles aren’t over for Nicola Six Limited. The company was served with a lawsuit from director Matthew Cullen, who accused the producers of tampering with his final cut. The producers countered that Cullen did not deliver the film under budget and on time and accused Cullen of conspiring with Heard to interfere with the producers’ cut of the film. While Cullen’s cut was the one released this weekend, the lawsuit is still set to go to trial this February. The film is also noteworthy for also starring Heard’s ex-husband, Johnny Depp, whom she has accused of domestic violence. Heard and Depp, the latter of whom plays a minor role, had been a couple when production began on the film in 2013. They married in 2015 and divorced a year later. “London Fields” stars Heard as a femme fatale who becomes involved with three different men — a wealthy financier (Theo James), a petty criminal (Jim Sturgess) and a failing author (Billy Bob Thornton). All three intensely desire her, and by the end of the film, one of them murders her. | |
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| 10-27-18 03:56pm - 2248 days | #1299 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Donald Trump breaks down and cries. Admits he is a thief. Admits he breaks the law: admits his fortune comes from breaking the law and from theft. After the confession, he says his job, as President, means he can't be tried for past crimes. What he is doing is for the good of the country. So the country has to forgive him. And he will try to do better in the future. And now he can steal legally, by passing laws that favor his family. By making deals that favor his family. My family first, says Trump, as the crowds cheer him on. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:31pm - 2248 days | #1298 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Conclusion: The Trump family is a bunch of thieves. Their assets should be seized. President Donald Trump deserves to be put in prison for the rest of his life. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:29pm - 2248 days | #1297 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Related Coverage 11 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth Oct. 2, 2018 4 Ways Fred Trump Made Donald Trump and His Siblings Rich Oct. 2, 2018 How Times Journalists Uncovered the Original Source of the President’s Wealth Oct. 2, 2018 2018 The New York Times Company | |
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| 10-27-18 02:27pm - 2248 days | #1296 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The first season of “The Apprentice” was broadcast in 2004, just as Donald Trump was wrapping up the sale of his father’s empire. The show’s opening montage — quick cuts of a glittering Trump casino, then Trump Tower, then a Trump helicopter mid-flight, then a limousine depositing the man himself at the steps of his jet, all set to the song “For the Love of Money” — is a reminder that the story of Donald Trump is fundamentally a story of money. Money is at the core of the brand Mr. Trump has so successfully sold to the world. Yet essential to that mythmaking has been keeping the truth of his money — how much of it he actually has, where and whom it came from — hidden or obscured. Across the decades, aided and abetted by less-than-aggressive journalism, Mr. Trump has made sure his financial history would be sensationalized far more than seen. In the narrative Donald Trump has long put forth, money is central; absent has been the critical financial role played by his father, whose photograph sits alongside his mother’s in the Oval Office. Doug Mills/The New York Times Just this year, in a confessional essay for The Washington Post, Jonathan Greenberg, a former reporter for Forbes, described how Mr. Trump, identifying himself as John Barron, a spokesman for Donald Trump, repeatedly and flagrantly lied to get himself on the magazine’s first-ever list of wealthiest Americans in 1982. Because of Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, the public has been left to interpret contradictory glimpses of his income offered up by anonymous leaks. A few pages from one tax return, mailed to The Times in September 2016, showed that he declared a staggering loss of $916 million in 1995. A couple of pages from another return, disclosed on Rachel Maddow’s program, showed that he earned an impressive $150 million in 2005. In a statement to The Times, the president’s spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, reiterated what Mr. Trump has always claimed about the evolution of his fortune: “The president’s father gave him an initial $1 million loan, which he paid back. President Trump used this money to build an incredibly successful company as well as net worth of over $10 billion, including owning some of the world’s greatest real estate.” Today, the chasm between that claim of being worth more than $10 billion and a Bloomberg estimate of $2.8 billion reflects the depth of uncertainty that remains about one of the most chronicled public figures in American history. Questions about newer money sources are rapidly accumulating because of the Russia investigation and lawsuits alleging that Mr. Trump is violating the Constitution by continuing to do business with foreign governments. But the more than 100,000 pages of records obtained during this investigation make it possible to sweep away decades of misinformation and arrive at a clear understanding about the original source of Mr. Trump’s wealth — his father. Here is what can be said with certainty: Had Mr. Trump done nothing but invest the money his father gave him in an index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500, he would be worth $1.96 billion today. As for that $1 million loan, Fred Trump actually lent him at least $60.7 million, or $140 million in today’s dollars, The Times found. And there is one more Fred Trump windfall coming Donald Trump’s way. Starrett City, the Brooklyn housing complex that the Trumps invested in back in the 1970s, sold this year for $905 million. Donald Trump’s share of the proceeds is expected to exceed $16 million, records show. It was an investment made with Fred Trump’s money and connections. But in Donald Trump’s version of his life, Starrett City is always and forever “one of the best investments I ever made.” | |
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| 10-27-18 02:26pm - 2248 days | #1295 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
A Good Time to Sell Donald Trump, in financial trouble again, pitched the idea of selling the still-profitable empire that his father had wanted to keep in the family. In 2003, the Trump siblings gathered at Trump Tower for one of their periodic updates on their inherited empire. As always, Robert Trump drove into Manhattan with several of his lieutenants. Donald Trump appeared with Allen H. Weisselberg, who had worked for Fred Trump for two decades before becoming his son’s chief financial officer. The sisters, Maryanne Trump Barry and Elizabeth Trump Grau, were there as well. The meeting followed the usual routine: a financial report, a rundown of operational issues and then the real business — distributing profits to each Trump. The task of handing out the checks fell to Steve Gurien, the empire’s finance chief. A moment later, Donald Trump abruptly changed the course of his family’s history: He said it was a good time to sell. Fred Trump’s empire, in fact, was continuing to produce healthy profits, and selling contradicted his stated wish to keep his legacy in the family. But Donald Trump insisted that the real estate market had peaked and that the time was right, according to a person familiar with the meeting. He was also, once again, in financial trouble. His Atlantic City casinos were veering toward another bankruptcy. His creditors would soon threaten to oust him unless he committed to invest $55 million of his own money. Yet if Donald Trump’s sudden push to sell stunned the room, it met with no apparent resistance from his siblings. He directed his brother to solicit private bids, saying he wanted the sale handled quickly and quietly. Donald Trump’s signature skill — drumming up publicity for the Trump brand — would sit this one out. Three potential bidders were given access to the finances of Fred Trump’s empire — 37 apartment complexes and several shopping centers. Ruby Schron, a major New York City landlord, quickly emerged as the favorite. In December 2003, Mr. Schron called Donald Trump and they came to an agreement; Mr. Schron paid $705.6 million for most of the empire, which included paying off the Trumps’ mortgages. A few remaining properties were sold to other buyers, bringing the total sales price to $737.9 million. On May 4, 2004, the Trump children spent most of the day signing away ownership of what their father had doggedly built over 70 years. The sale received little news coverage, and an article in The Staten Island Advance included the rarest of phrases: “Trump did not return a phone call seeking comment.” Even more extraordinary was this unreported fact: The banks financing Mr. Schron’s purchase valued Fred Trump’s empire at nearly $1 billion. In other words, Donald Trump, master dealmaker, sold his father’s empire for hundreds of millions less than it was worth. Within a year of the sale, Mr. Trump spent $149 million in cash on a rapid series of transactions that bolstered his billionaire bona fides. In June 2004 he agreed to pay $73 million to buy out his partner in the planned Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. (“I’m just buying it with my own cash,” he told reporters.) He paid $55 million in cash to make peace with his casino creditors. Then he put up $21 million more in cash to help finance his purchase of Maison de l’Amitié, a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., that he later sold to a Russian oligarch. ***** | |
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| 10-27-18 02:26pm - 2248 days | #1294 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The most improbable of these valuations was for Tysens Park Apartments, a complex of eight buildings with 1,019 units on Staten Island. On the portion of the estate tax return where they were required to list Tysens Park’s value, the Trumps simply left a blank space and claimed they owed no estate taxes on it at all. As with the Trump Village appraisal, the Trumps appear to have hidden key facts from the I.R.S. Tysens Park, like Trump Village, had operated for years under an affordable housing program that by law capped Fred Trump’s profits. This cap drastically reduced the property’s market value. Leaving a blank space on Fred Trump’s estate tax return, the Trumps indicated that they owed no estate taxes on the Tysens Park complex on Staten Island. Dave Sanders for The New York Times Except for one thing: The Trumps had removed Tysens Park from the affordable housing program the year before Fred Trump died, The Times found. When Donald Trump and his siblings filed Fred Trump’s estate tax return, there were no limits on their profits. In fact, they had already begun raising rents. As their father’s executors, Donald, Maryanne and Robert were legally responsible for the accuracy of his estate tax return. They were obligated not only to give the I.R.S. a complete accounting of the value of his estate’s assets, but also to disclose all the taxable gifts he made during his lifetime, including, for example, the $15.5 million Trump Palace gift to Donald Trump and the millions of dollars he gave his children via All County’s padded invoices. “If they knew anything was wrong they could be in violation of tax law,” Mr. Tritt, the University of Florida law professor, said. “They can’t just stick their heads in the sand.” In addition to drastically understating the value of apartment complexes and shopping centers, Fred Trump’s estate tax return made no mention of either Trump Palace or All County. It wasn’t until after Fred Trump’s wife, Mary, died at 88 on Aug. 7, 2000, that the I.R.S. completed its audit of their combined estates. The audit concluded that their estates were worth $51.8 million, 23 percent more than Donald Trump and his siblings had claimed. That meant an additional $5.2 million in estate taxes. Even so, the Trumps’ tax bill was a fraction of what they would have owed had they reported the market value of what Fred and Mary Trump owned at the time of their deaths. Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, defended the tax returns filed by the Trumps. “The returns and tax positions that The Times now attacks were examined in real time by the relevant taxing authorities,” he said. “The taxing authorities requested a few minor adjustments, which were made, and then fully approved all of the tax filings. These matters have now been closed for more than a decade.” | |
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| 10-27-18 02:25pm - 2248 days | #1293 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
In the end, the transfer of the Trump empire cost Fred and Mary Trump $20.5 million in gift taxes and their children $21 million in annuity payments. That is hundreds of millions of dollars less than they would have paid based on the empire’s market value, The Times found. Better still for the Trump children, they did not have to pay out a penny of their own. They simply used their father’s empire as collateral to secure a line of credit from M&T Bank. They used the line of credit to make the $21 million in annuity payments, then used the revenue from their father’s empire to repay the money they had borrowed. On the day the Trump children finally took ownership of Fred Trump’s empire, Donald Trump’s net worth instantly increased by many tens of millions of dollars. And from then on, the profits from his father’s empire would flow directly to him and his siblings. The next year, 1998, Donald Trump’s share amounted to today’s equivalent of $9.6 million, The Times found. This sudden influx of wealth came only weeks after he had published “The Art of the Comeback.” “I learned a lot about myself during these hard times,” he wrote. “I learned about handling pressure. I was able to home in, buckle down, get back to the basics, and make things work. I worked much harder, I focused, and I got myself out of a box.” Over 244 pages he did not mention that he was being handed nearly 25 percent of his father’s empire. Remnants of Empire After Fred Trump’s death, his children used familiar methods to devalue what little of his life’s work was still in his name. Fred Trump’s portrait hangs at Trump Grill inside Trump Tower. Dave Sanders for The New York Times During Fred Trump’s final years, dementia stole most of his memories. When family visited, there was one name he could reliably put to a face. Donald. On June 7, 1999, Fred Trump was admitted to Long Island Jewish Medical Center, not far from the house in Jamaica Estates, for treatment of pneumonia. He died there on June 25, at the age of 93. Fifteen months later, Fred Trump’s executors — Donald, Maryanne and Robert — filed his estate tax return. The return, obtained by The Times, vividly illustrates the effectiveness of the tax strategies devised by the Trumps in the early 1990s. Fred Trump, one of the most prolific New York developers of his time, owned just five apartment complexes, two small strip malls and a scattering of co-ops in the city upon his death. The man who paid himself $50 million in 1990 died with just $1.9 million in the bank. He owned not a single stock, bond or Treasury bill. According to his estate tax return, his most valuable asset was a $10.3 million I.O.U. from Donald Trump, money his son appears to have borrowed the year before Fred Trump died. The bulk of Fred Trump’s empire was nowhere to be found on his estate tax return. And yet Donald Trump and his siblings were not done. Recycling the legally dubious techniques they had mastered with the GRATs, they dodged tens of millions of dollars in estate taxes on the remnants of empire that Fred Trump still owned when he died, The Times found. As with the GRATs, they obtained appraisals from Mr. Von Ancken that grossly understated the actual market value of those remnants. And as with the GRATs, they aggressively discounted Mr. Von Ancken’s appraisals. The result: They claimed that the five apartment complexes and two strip malls were worth $15 million. In 2004, records show, bankers would put a value of $176.2 million on the exact same properties. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:24pm - 2248 days | #1292 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Armed with Mr. Von Ancken’s $93.9 million appraisal, the Trumps focused on slashing even this valuation by changing the ownership structure of Fred Trump’s empire. The I.R.S. has long accepted the idea that ownership with control is more valuable than ownership without control. Someone with a controlling interest in a building can decide if and when the building is sold, how it is marketed and what price to accept. However, since someone who owns, say, 10 percent of a $100 million building lacks control over any of those decisions, the I.R.S. will let him claim that his stake should be taxed as if it were worth only $7 million or $8 million. But Fred Trump had exercised total control over his empire for more than seven decades. With rare exceptions, he owned 100 percent of his buildings. So the Trumps set out to create the fiction that Fred Trump was a minority owner. All it took was splitting the ownership structure of his empire. Fred and Mary Trump each ended up with 49.8 percent of the corporate entities that owned his buildings. The other 0.4 percent was split among their four children. Splitting ownership into minority interests is a widely used method of tax avoidance. There is one circumstance, however, where it has at times been found to be illegal. It involves what is known in tax law as the step transaction doctrine — where it can be shown that the corporate restructuring was part of a rapid sequence of seemingly separate maneuvers actually conceived and executed to dodge taxes. A key issue, according to tax experts, is timing — in the Trumps’ case, whether they split up Fred Trump’s empire just before they set up the GRATs. In all, the Trumps broke up 12 corporate entities to create the appearance of minority ownership. The Times could not determine when five of the 12 companies were divided. But records reveal that the other seven were split up just before the GRATs were established. The pattern was clear. For decades, the companies had been owned solely by Fred Trump, each operating a different apartment complex or shopping center. In September 1995, the Trumps formed seven new limited liability companies. Between Oct. 31 and Nov. 8, they transferred the deeds to the seven properties into their respective L.L.C.’s. On Nov. 21, they recorded six of the deed transfers in public property records. (The seventh was recorded on Nov. 24.) And on Nov. 22, 49.8 percent of the shares in these seven L.L.C.’s was transferred into Fred Trump’s GRAT and 49.8 percent into Mary Trump’s GRAT. That enabled the Trumps to slash Mr. Von Ancken’s valuation in a way that was legally dubious. They claimed that Fred and Mary Trump’s status as minority owners, plus the fact that a building couldn’t be sold as easily as a share of stock, entitled them to lop 45 percent off Mr. Von Ancken’s $93.9 million valuation. This claim, combined with $18.3 million more in standard deductions, completed the alchemy of turning real estate that would soon be valued at nearly $900 million into $41.4 million. According to tax experts, claiming a 45 percent discount was questionable even back then, and far higher than the 20 to 30 percent discount the I.R.S. would allow today. As it happened, the Trumps’ GRATs did not completely elude I.R.S. scrutiny. Documents obtained by The Times reveal that the I.R.S. audited Fred Trump’s 1995 gift tax return and concluded that Fred Trump and his wife had significantly undervalued the assets being transferred through their GRATs. The I.R.S. determined that the Trumps’ assets were worth $57.1 million, 38 percent more than the couple had claimed. From the perspective of an I.R.S. auditor, pulling in nearly $5 million in additional revenue could be considered a good day’s work. For the Trumps, getting the I.R.S. to agree that Fred Trump’s properties were worth only $57.1 million was a triumph. “All estate matters were handled by licensed attorneys, licensed C.P.A.s and licensed real estate appraisers who followed all laws and rules strictly,” Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, said in his statement. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:23pm - 2248 days | #1291 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
In an interview, Mr. Von Ancken said that because neither he nor The Times had the working papers that described how he arrived at his valuations, there was simply no way to evaluate the methodologies behind his numbers. “There would be explanations within the appraisals to justify all the values,” he said, adding, “Basically, when we prepare these things, we feel that these are going to be presented to the Internal Revenue Service for their review, and they better be right.” Of all the GRAT appraisals Mr. Von Ancken did for the Trumps, the most startling was for 886 rental apartments in two buildings at Trump Village, a complex in Coney Island. Mr. Von Ancken claimed that they were worth less than nothing — negative $5.9 million, to be exact. These were the same 886 units that city tax assessors valued that same year at $38.1 million, and that a bank would value at $106.6 million in 2004. The Trumps’ appraiser used two Trump Village buildings’ temporary dip into the red to claim they were worth negative $5.9 million. Dave Sanders for The New York Times It appears Mr. Von Ancken arrived at his negative valuation by departing from the methodology that he has repeatedly testified is most appropriate for properties like Trump Village, where past years’ profits are a poor gauge of future value. In 1992, the Trumps had removed the two Trump Village buildings from an affordable housing program so they could raise rents and increase their profits. But doing so cost them a property tax exemption, which temporarily put the buildings in the red. The methodology described by Mr. Von Ancken would have disregarded this blip into the red and valued the buildings based on the higher rents the Trumps would be charging. Mr. Von Ancken, however, appears to have based his valuation on the blip, producing an appraisal that, taken at face value, meant Fred Trump would have had to pay someone millions of dollars to take the property off his hands. Mr. Von Ancken told The Times that he did not recall which appraisal method he used on the two Trump Village buildings. “I can only say that we value the properties based on market information, and based on the expected income and expenses of the building and what they would sell for,” he said. As for the enormous gaps between his valuation and the 1995 city property tax appraisal and the 2004 bank valuation, he argued that such comparisons were pointless. “I can’t say what happened afterwards,” he said. “Maybe they increased the income tremendously.” The Minority Owner To further whittle the empire’s valuation, the family created the appearance that Fred Trump held only 49.8 percent. Donald Trump with his mother, Mary, and his father. The empire was split up among the parents and children to create the impression that Fred Trump was a minority owner, decreasing its value on paper and minimizing taxes. RTalensick/MediaPunch, via Alamy | |
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| 10-27-18 02:23pm - 2248 days | #1290 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The Trumps used Robert Von Ancken, a favorite of New York City’s big real estate families. Over a 45-year career, Mr. Von Ancken has appraised many of the city’s landmarks, including Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Donald Trump recruited him after Fred Trump Jr. died and the family needed friendly appraisals to help shield the estate from taxes. Mr. Von Ancken appraised the 25 apartment complexes and other properties in the Trumps’ GRATs and concluded that their total value was $93.9 million, tax records show. To assess the accuracy of those valuations, The Times examined the prices paid for comparable apartment buildings that sold within a year of Mr. Von Ancken’s appraisals. A pattern quickly emerged. Again and again, buildings in the same neighborhood as Trump buildings sold for two to four times as much per square foot as Mr. Von Ancken’s appraisals, even when the buildings were decades older, had fewer amenities and smaller apartments, and were deemed less valuable by city property tax appraisers. Mr. Von Ancken valued Argyle Hall, a six-story brick Trump building in Brooklyn, at $9.04 per square foot. Six blocks away, another six-story brick building, two decades older, had sold a few months earlier for nearly $30 per square foot. He valued Belcrest Hall, a Trump building in Queens, at $8.57 per square foot. A few blocks away, another six-story brick building, four decades older with apartments a third smaller, sold for $25.18 per square foot. Fred Trump’s 1995 gift tax return valued the Fiesta Apartments, left, in Brooklyn, at $18.30 per square foot. A similar building a few minutes away sold the next year for nearly four times as much: $67.08 per square foot. New York City Municipal Archives The pattern persisted with Fred Trump’s higher-end buildings. Mr. Von Ancken appraised Lawrence Towers, a Trump building in Brooklyn with spacious balcony apartments, at $24.54 per square foot. A few months earlier, an apartment building abutting car repair shops a mile away, with units 20 percent smaller, had sold for $48.23 per square foot. The Times found even starker discrepancies when comparing the GRAT appraisals against appraisals commissioned by the Trumps when they had an incentive to show the highest possible valuations. Such was the case with Patio Gardens, a complex of nearly 500 apartments in Brooklyn. Of all Fred Trump’s properties, Patio Gardens was one of the least profitable, which may be why he decided to use it as a tax deduction. In 1992, he donated Patio Gardens to the National Kidney Foundation of New York/New Jersey, one of the largest charitable donations he ever made. The greater the value of Patio Gardens, the bigger his deduction. The appraisal cited in Fred Trump’s 1992 tax return valued Patio Gardens at $34 million, or $61.90 a square foot. By contrast, Mr. Von Ancken’s GRAT appraisals found that the crown jewels of Fred Trump’s empire, Beach Haven and Shore Haven, with five times as many apartments as Patio Gardens, were together worth just $23 million, or $11.01 per square foot. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:22pm - 2248 days | #1289 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The entire transaction turned on one number: the market value of Fred Trump’s empire. This determined the amount of gift taxes Fred and Mary Trump owed for the portion of the empire they gave to their children. It also determined the amount of annuity payments their children owed for the rest. The I.R.S. recognizes that GRATs create powerful incentives to greatly undervalue assets, especially when those assets are not publicly traded stocks with transparent prices. Indeed, every $10 million reduction in the valuation of Fred Trump’s empire would save the Trumps either $10 million in annuity payments or $5.5 million in gift taxes. This is why the I.R.S. requires families taking advantage of GRATs to submit independent appraisals and threatens penalties for those who lowball valuations. In practice, though, gift tax returns get little scrutiny from the I.R.S. It is an open secret among tax practitioners that evasion of gift taxes is rampant and rarely prosecuted. Punishment, such as it is, usually consists of an auditor’s requiring a tax payment closer to what should have been paid in the first place. “GRATs are typically structured so that no tax is due, which means the I.R.S. has reduced incentive to audit them,” said Mitchell Gans, a professor of tax law at Hofstra University. “So if a gift is in fact undervalued, it may very well go unnoticed.” This appears to be precisely what the Trumps were counting on. The Times found evidence that the Trumps dodged hundreds of millions of dollars in gift taxes by submitting tax returns that grossly undervalued the real estate assets they placed in Fred and Mary Trump’s GRATs. According to Fred Trump’s 1995 gift tax return, obtained by The Times, the Trumps claimed that properties including 25 apartment complexes with 6,988 apartments — and twice the floor space of the Empire State Building — were worth just $41.4 million. The implausibility of this claim would be made plain in 2004, when banks put a valuation of nearly $900 million on that same real estate. The methods the Trumps used to pull off this incredible shrinking act were hatched in the strategy sessions Donald Trump participated in during the early 1990s, documents and interviews show. Their basic strategy had two components: Get what is widely known as a “friendly” appraisal of the empire’s worth, then drive that number even lower by changing the ownership structure to make the empire look less valuable to the I.R.S. A crucial step was finding a property appraiser attuned to their needs. As anyone who has ever bought or sold a home knows, appraisers can arrive at sharply different valuations depending on their methods and assumptions. And like stock analysts, property appraisers have been known to massage those methods and assumptions in ways that coincide with their clients’ interests. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:21pm - 2248 days | #1288 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
All County was not the only company the Trumps set up to drain cash from Fred Trump’s empire. A lucrative income source for Fred Trump was the management fees he charged his buildings. His primary management company, Trump Management, earned $6.8 million in 1993 alone. The Trumps found a way to redirect those fees to the children, too. On Jan. 21, 1994, they created a company called Apartment Management Associates Inc., with a mailing address at Mr. Walter’s Manhasset home. Two months later, records show, Apartment Management started collecting fees that had previously gone to Trump Management. The only difference was that Donald Trump and his siblings owned Apartment Management. Between All County and Apartment Management, Fred Trump’s mountain of cash was rapidly dwindling. By 1998, records show, All County and Apartment Management were generating today’s equivalent of $2.2 million a year for each of the Trump children. Whatever income tax they owed on this money, it was considerably less than the 55 percent tax Fred Trump would have owed had he simply given each of them $2.2 million a year. But these savings were trivial compared with those that would come when Fred Trump transferred his empire — the actual bricks and mortar — to his children. The Alchemy of Value The transfer of most of Fred Trump’s empire to his children began with a ‘friendly’ appraisal and an incredible shrinking act. Father and son in the 1980s. Together, they crafted a narrative around Donald Trump’s wealth. “Everything he touches seems to turn to gold,” Fred Trump told The Times in 1976. Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images In his 90th year, Fred Trump still showed up at work a few days a week, ever dapper in suit and tie. But he had trouble remembering names — his dementia was getting worse — and he could get confused. In May 1995, with an unsteady hand, he signed documents granting Robert Trump power of attorney to act “in my name, place and stead.” Six months later, on Nov. 22, the Trumps began transferring ownership of most of Fred Trump’s empire. (A few properties were excluded.) The instrument they used to do this was a special type of trust with a clunky acronym only a tax lawyer could love: GRAT, short for grantor-retained annuity trust. GRATs are one of the tax code’s great gifts to the ultrawealthy. They let dynastic families like the Trumps pass wealth from one generation to the next — be it stocks, real estate, even art collections — without paying a dime of estate taxes. The details are numbingly complex, but the mechanics are straightforward. For the Trumps, it meant putting half the properties to be transferred into a GRAT in Fred Trump’s name and the other half into a GRAT in his wife’s name. Then Fred and Mary Trump gave their children roughly two-thirds of the assets in their GRATs. The children bought the remaining third by making annuity payments to their parents over the next two years. By Nov. 22, 1997, it was done; the Trump children owned nearly all of Fred Trump’s empire free and clear of estate taxes. As for gift taxes, the Trumps found a way around those, too. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:20pm - 2248 days | #1287 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
But as All County paid Mr. Eastmond the price negotiated by Fred Trump, its invoices to Fred Trump were padded by 20 to 25 percent, records obtained by The Times show. This added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of the 60 boilers, money that then flowed through All County to Fred Trump’s children without incurring any gift tax. All County’s owners devised another ruse to profit off Mr. Eastmond’s boilers. To win Fred Trump’s business, Mr. Eastmond had also agreed to provide mobile boilers for Fred Trump’s buildings free of charge while new boilers were being installed. Yet All County charged Fred Trump rent on the same mobile boilers Mr. Eastmond was providing free, along with hookup fees, disconnection fees, transportation fees and operating and maintenance fees, records show. These charges siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars more from Fred Trump’s empire. Mr. Walter, asked during a deposition why Fred Trump chose not to make himself one of All County’s owners, replied, “He said because he would have to pay a death tax on it.” After being briefed on All County by The Times, Mr. Tritt, the University of Florida law professor, said the Trumps’ use of the company was “highly suspicious” and could constitute criminal tax fraud. “It certainly looks like a disguised gift,” he said. While All County was all upside for Donald Trump and his siblings, it had an insidious downside for Fred Trump’s tenants. As an owner of rent-stabilized buildings in New York, Fred Trump needed state approval to raise rents beyond the annual increases set by a government board. One way to justify a rent increase was to make a major capital improvement. It did not take much to get approval; an invoice or canceled check would do if the expense seemed reasonable. The Trumps used the padded All County invoices to justify higher rent increases in Fred Trump’s rent-regulated buildings. Fred Trump, according to Mr. Walter, saw All County as a way to have his cake and eat it, too. If he used his “expert negotiating ability” to buy a $350 refrigerator for $200, he could raise the rent based only on that $200, not on the $350 sticker price “a normal person” would pay, Mr. Walter explained. All County was the way around this problem. “You have to understand the thinking that went behind this,” he said. As Robert Trump acknowledged in his deposition, “The higher the markup would be, the higher the rent that might be charged.” State records show that after All County’s creation, the Trumps got approval to raise rents on thousands of apartments by claiming more than $30 million in major capital improvements. Tenants repeatedly protested the increases, almost always to no avail, the records show. One of the improvements most often cited by the Trumps: new boilers. “All of this smells like a crime,” said Adam S. Kaufmann, a former chief of investigations for the Manhattan district attorney’s office who is now a partner at the law firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss. While the statute of limitations has long since lapsed, Mr. Kaufmann said the Trumps’ use of All County would have warranted investigation for defrauding tenants, tax fraud and filing false documents. Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, disputed The Times’s reporting: “Should The Times state or imply that President Trump participated in fraud, tax evasion or any other crime, it will be exposing itself to substantial liability and damages for defamation.” | |
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| 10-27-18 02:20pm - 2248 days | #1286 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
All County had no corporate offices. Its address was the Manhasset, N.Y., home of John Walter, a favorite nephew of Fred Trump’s. Mr. Walter, who died in January, spent decades working for Fred Trump, primarily helping computerize his payroll and billing systems. He also was the unofficial keeper of Fred Trump’s personal and business papers, his basement crowded with boxes of old Trump financial records. John Walter and the four Trump children each owned 20 percent of All County, records show. All County’s main purpose, The Times found, was to enable Fred Trump to make large cash gifts to his children and disguise them as legitimate business transactions, thus evading the 55 percent tax. The way it worked was remarkably simple. Each year Fred Trump spent millions of dollars maintaining and improving his properties. Some of the vendors who supplied his building superintendents and maintenance crews had been cashing Fred Trump’s checks for decades. Starting in August 1992, though, a different name began to appear on their checks — All County Building Supply & Maintenance. Mr. Walter’s computer systems, meanwhile, churned out All County invoices that billed Fred Trump’s empire for those same services and supplies, with one difference: All County’s invoices were padded, marked up by 20 percent, or 50 percent, or even more, records show. The Trump siblings split the markup, along with Mr. Walter. The self-dealing at the heart of this arrangement was best illustrated by Robert Trump, whose father paid him a $500,000 annual salary. He approved many of the payments Fred Trump’s empire made to All County; he was also All County’s chief executive, as well as a co-owner. As for the work of All County — generating invoices — that fell to Mr. Walter, also on Fred Trump’s payroll, along with a personal assistant Mr. Walter paid to work on his side businesses. Years later, in his deposition during the dispute over Fred Trump’s estate, Robert Trump would say that All County actually saved Fred Trump money by negotiating better deals. Given Fred Trump’s long experience expertly squeezing better prices out of contractors, it was a surprising claim. It was also not true. The Times’s examination of thousands of pages of financial documents from Fred Trump’s buildings shows that his costs shot up once All County entered the picture. A Trump company, formed ostensibly to help maintain Beach Haven Apartments in Brooklyn and other properties, siphoned cash from the empire free of gift taxes. Dave Sanders for The New York Times Beach Haven Apartments illustrates how this happened: In 1991 and 1992, Fred Trump bought 78 refrigerator-stove combinations for Beach Haven from Long Island Appliance Wholesalers. The average price was $642.69. But in 1993, when he began paying All County for refrigerator-stove combinations, the price jumped by 46 percent. Likewise, the price he paid for trash-compacting services at Beach Haven increased 64 percent. Janitorial supplies went up more than 100 percent. Plumbing repairs and supplies rose 122 percent. And on it went in building after building. The more Fred Trump paid, the more All County made, which was precisely the plan. While All County systematically overcharged Fred Trump for thousands of items, the job of negotiating with vendors fell, as it always had, to Fred Trump and his staff. Leon Eastmond can attest to this. Mr. Eastmond is the owner of A. L. Eastmond & Sons, a Bronx company that makes industrial boilers. In 1993, he and Fred Trump met at Gargiulo’s, an old-school Italian restaurant in Coney Island that was one of Fred Trump’s favorites, to hash out the price of 60 boilers. Fred Trump, accompanied by his secretary and Robert Trump, drove a hard bargain. After negotiating a 10 percent discount, he made one last demand: “I had to pay the tab,” Mr. Eastmond recalled with a chuckle. There was no mention of All County. Mr. Eastmond first heard of the company when its checks started rolling in. “I remember opening my mail one day and out came a check for $100,000,” he recalled. “I didn’t recognize the company. I didn’t know who the hell they were.” | |
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| 10-27-18 02:19pm - 2248 days | #1285 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
What happened next was described years later in sworn depositions by members of the Trump family during a dispute, later settled, over the inheritance Fred Trump left to Fred Jr.’s children. These depositions, obtained by The Times, reveal something startling: Fred Trump believed that the document potentially put his life’s work at risk. The document, known as a codicil, did many things. It protected Donald Trump’s portion of the inheritance from his creditors and from his impending divorce settlement with his first wife, Ivana Trump. It strengthened provisions in the existing will making him the sole executor of his father’s estate. But more than any of the particulars, it was the entirety of the codicil and its presentation as a fait accompli that alarmed Fred Trump, the depositions show. He confided to family members that he viewed the codicil as an attempt to go behind his back and give his son total control over his affairs. He said he feared that it could let Donald Trump denude his empire, even using it as collateral to rescue his failing businesses. (It was, in fact, the very month of the $3.5 million casino rescue.) As close as they were — or perhaps because they were so close — Fred Trump did not immediately confront his son. Instead he turned to his daughter Maryanne Trump Barry, then a federal judge whom he often consulted on legal matters. “This doesn’t pass the smell test,” he told her, she recalled during her deposition. When Judge Barry read the codicil, she reached the same conclusion. “Donald was in precarious financial straits by his own admission,” she said, “and Dad was very concerned as a man who worked hard for his money and never wanted any of it to leave the family.” (In a brief telephone interview, Judge Barry declined to comment.) Fred Trump took prompt action to thwart his son. He dispatched his daughter to find new estate lawyers. One of them took notes on the instructions she passed on from her father: “Protect assets from DJT, Donald’s creditors.” The lawyers quickly drafted a new codicil stripping Donald Trump of sole control over his father’s estate. Fred Trump signed it immediately. Clumsy as it was, Donald Trump’s failed attempt to change his father’s will brought a family reckoning about two related issues: Fred Trump’s declining health and his reluctance to relinquish ownership of his empire. Surgeons had removed a neck tumor a few years earlier, and he would soon endure hip replacement surgery and be found to have mild senile dementia. Yet for all the financial support he had lavished on his children, for all his abhorrence of taxes, Fred Trump had stubbornly resisted his advisers’ recommendations to transfer ownership of his empire to the children to minimize estate taxes. With every passing year, the actuarial odds increased that Fred Trump would die owning apartment buildings worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, all of it exposed to the 55 percent estate tax. Just as exposed was the mountain of cash he was sitting on. His buildings, well maintained and carrying little debt, consistently produced millions of dollars a year in profits. Even after he paid himself $109.7 million from 1988 through 1993, his companies were holding $50 million in cash and investments, financial records show. Tens of millions of dollars more passed each month through a maze of personal accounts at Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, UBS, Bowery Savings and United Mizrahi, an Israeli bank. Simply put, without immediate action, Fred Trump’s heirs faced the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars to estate taxes. Whatever their differences, the Trumps formulated a plan to avoid this fate. How they did it is a story never before told. It is also a story in which Donald Trump played a central role. He took the lead in strategy sessions where the plan was devised with the consent and participation of his father and his father’s closest advisers, people who attended the meetings told The Times. Robert Trump, the youngest sibling and the beta to Donald’s alpha, was given the task of overseeing day-to-day details. After years of working for his brother, Robert Trump went to work for his father in late 1991. The Trumps’ plan, executed over the next decade, blended traditional techniques — such as rewriting Fred Trump’s will to maximize tax avoidance — with unorthodox strategies that tax experts told The Times were legally dubious and, in some cases, appeared to be fraudulent. As a result, the Trump children would gain ownership of virtually all of their father’s buildings without having to pay a penny of their own. They would turn the mountain of cash into a molehill of cash. And hundreds of millions of dollars that otherwise would have gone to the United States Treasury would instead go to Fred Trump’s children. ‘A Disguised Gift’ A family company let Fred Trump funnel money to his children by effectively overcharging himself for repairs and improvements on his properties. Donald Trump in 1985. Neal Boenzi/The New York Times One of the first steps came on Aug. 13, 1992, when the Trumps incorporated a company named All County Building Supply & Maintenance. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:12pm - 2248 days | #1284 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Under state law, developers must file “offering plans” that identify to any potential condo buyer the project’s sponsors — in other words, its owners. The Trump Palace offering plan, submitted in November 1989, identified two owners: Donald Trump and his father. But under the same law, if Fred Trump had sold his stake to a third party, Donald Trump would have been required to identify the new owner in an amended offering plan filed with the state attorney general’s office. He did not do that, records show. He did, however, sign a sworn affidavit a month after his father sold his stake. In the affidavit, submitted in a lawsuit over a Trump Palace contractor’s unpaid bill, Donald Trump identified himself as “the” owner of Trump Palace. Under I.R.S. rules, selling shares worth $15.5 million to your son for $10,000 is tantamount to giving him a $15.49 million taxable gift. Fred Trump reported no such gift. According to tax experts, the only circumstance that would not have required Fred Trump to report a gift was if Trump Palace had been effectively bankrupt when he unloaded his shares. Yet Trump Palace was far from bankrupt. Property records show that condo sales there were brisk in 1991. Trump Palace sold 57 condos for $52.5 million — 94 percent of the total asking price for those units. Donald Trump himself proclaimed Trump Palace “the most financially secure condominium on the market today” in advertisements he placed in 1991 to rebut criticism from buyers who complained that his business travails could drag down Trump Palace, too. In December, 17 days before his father sold his shares, he placed an ad vouching for the wisdom of investing in Trump Palace: “Smart money says there has never been a better time.” By failing to tell the I.R.S. about his $15.49 million gift to his son, Fred Trump evaded the 55 percent tax on gifts, saving about $8 million. At the same time, he declared to the I.R.S. that Trump Palace was almost a complete loss — that he had walked away from a $15.5 million investment with just $10,000 to show for it. Federal tax law prohibits deducting any loss from the sale of property between members of the same family, because of the potential for abuse. Yet Fred Trump appears to have done exactly that, dodging roughly $5 million more in income taxes. In 1991, as Fred Trump was declaring his investment in his son’s Trump Palace project almost a complete loss, Donald Trump was telling the public there had never been a better time to buy in. Dave Sanders for The New York Times The partnership between Fred and Donald Trump was not simply about the pursuit of riches. At its heart lay a more ambitious project, executed to perfection over decades — to create that origin story, the myth of Donald J. Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. Donald Trump built the foundation for the myth in the 1970s by appropriating his father’s empire as his own. By the late 1980s, instead of appropriating the empire, he was diminishing it. “It wasn’t a great business, it was a good business,” he said, as if Fred Trump ran a chain of laundromats. Yes, he told interviewers, his father was a wonderful mentor, but given the limits of his business, the most he could manage was a $1 million loan, and even that had to be repaid with interest. Through it all, Fred Trump played along. Never once did he publicly question his son’s claim about the $1 million loan. “Everything he touches seems to turn to gold,” he told The Times for that first profile in 1976. “He’s gone way beyond me, absolutely,” he said when The Times profiled his son again in 1983. But for all Fred Trump had done to build the myth of Donald Trump, Self-Made Billionaire, there was, it turned out, one line he would not allow his son to cross. A Family Reckoning Donald Trump tried to change his ailing father’s will, prompting a backlash — but also a recognition that plans had to be set in motion before Fred Trump died. The Trump siblings: from left, Robert, Elizabeth, Fred Jr., Donald and Maryanne. via Donald Trump campaign Fred Trump had given careful thought to what would become of his empire after he died, and had hired one of the nation’s top estate lawyers to draft his will. But in December 1990, Donald Trump sent his father a document, drafted by one of his own lawyers, that sought to make significant changes to that will. Fred Trump, then 85, had never before set eyes on the document, 12 pages of dense legalese. Nor had he authorized its preparation. Nor had he met the lawyer who drafted it. Yet his son sent instructions that he needed to sign it immediately. | |
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| 10-27-18 02:10pm - 2248 days | #1283 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Bailouts, collateral, cash on hand — Fred Trump was prepared, and was not about to let bad bets sink his son. Donald Trump at the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. As the 1980s came to a close, many of his businesses, overloaded with debt, began to lose money. Ángel Franco/The New York Times As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust. Trump Shuttle was failing to make loan payments within 15 months. The Plaza, drowning in debt, was bankrupt in four years. His Atlantic City casinos, also drowning in debt, tumbled one by one into bankruptcy. What didn’t fail was the Trump safety net. Just as Donald Trump’s finances were crumbling, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased distributions to him and his siblings. Between 1989 and 1992, tax records show, four entities created by Fred Trump to support his children paid Donald Trump today’s equivalent of $8.3 million. Fred Trump’s generosity also provided a crucial backstop when his son pleaded with bankers in 1990 for an emergency line of credit. With so many of his projects losing money, Donald Trump had few viable assets of his own making to pledge as collateral. What has never been publicly known is that he used his stakes in the mini-empire and the high-rise for the elderly in East Orange as collateral to help secure a $65 million loan. Tax records also reveal that at the peak of Mr. Trump’s financial distress, his father extracted extraordinary sums from his empire. In 1990, Fred Trump’s income exploded to $49,638,928 — several times what he paid himself in other years in that era. Fred Trump, former employees say, detested taking unnecessary distributions from his companies because he would have to pay income taxes on them. So why would a penny-pinching, tax-hating 85-year-old in the twilight of his career abruptly pull so much money out of his cherished properties, incurring a tax bill of $12.2 million? The Times found no evidence that Fred Trump made any significant debt payments or charitable donations. The frugality he brought to business carried over to the rest of his life. According to ledgers of his personal spending, he spent a grand total of $8,562 in 1991 and 1992 on travel and entertainment. His extravagances, such as they were, consisted of buying his wife the odd gift from Antonovich Furs or hosting family celebrations at the Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn. His home on Midland Parkway in Jamaica Estates, Queens, built with unfussy brick like so many of his apartment buildings, had little to distinguish it from neighboring houses beyond the white columns and crest framing the front door. There are, however, indications that he wanted plenty of cash on hand to bail out his son if need be. Such was the case with the rescue mission at his son’s Trump’s Castle casino. Donald Trump had wildly overspent on renovations, leaving the property dangerously low on operating cash. Sure enough, neither Trump’s Castle nor its owner had the necessary funds to make an $18.4 million bond payment due in December 1990. On Dec. 17, 1990, Fred Trump dispatched Howard Snyder, a trusted bookkeeper, to Atlantic City with a $3.35 million check. Mr. Snyder bought $3.35 million worth of casino chips and left without placing a bet. Apparently, even this infusion wasn’t sufficient, because that same day Fred Trump wrote a second check to Trump’s Castle, for $150,000, bank records show. With this ruse — it was an illegal $3.5 million loan under New Jersey gaming laws, resulting in a $65,000 civil penalty — Donald Trump narrowly avoided defaulting on his bonds. Birds of a Feather Both the son and the father were masters of manipulating the value of their assets, making them appear worth a lot or a little depending on their needs. Donald and Fred Trump, photographed for a 1980s advertisement. Bill Truran/Alamy As the chip episode demonstrated, father and son were of one mind about rules and regulations, viewing them as annoyances to be finessed or, when necessary, ignored. As described by family members and associates in interviews and sworn testimony, theirs was an intimate, endless confederacy sealed by blood, shared secrets and a Hobbesian view of what it took to dominate and win. They talked almost daily and saw each other most weekends. Donald Trump sat at his father’s right hand at family meals and participated in his father’s monthly strategy sessions with his closest advisers. Fred Trump was a silent, watchful presence at many of Donald Trump’s news conferences. “I probably knew my father as well or better than anybody,” Donald Trump said in a 2000 deposition. They were both fluent in the language of half-truths and lies, interviews and records show. They both delighted in transgressing without getting caught. They were both wizards at manipulating the value of their assets, making them appear worth a lot or a little depending on their needs. Those talents came in handy when Fred Trump Jr. died, on Sept. 26, 1981, at age 42 from complications of alcoholism, leaving a son and a daughter. The executors of his estate were his father and his brother Donald. Fred Trump Jr.’s largest asset was his stake in seven of the eight buildings his father had transferred to his children. The Trumps would claim that those properties were worth $90.4 million when they finished converting them to cooperatives within a few years of his death. At that value, his stake could have generated an estate tax bill of nearly $10 million. But the tax return signed by Donald Trump and his father claimed that Fred Trump Jr.’s estate owed just $737,861. This result was achieved by lowballing all seven buildings. Instead of valuing them at $90.4 million, Fred and Donald Trump submitted appraisals putting them at $13.2 million. Emblematic of their audacity was Park Briar, a 150-unit building in Queens. As it happened, 18 days before Fred Trump Jr.’s death, the Trump siblings had submitted Park Briar’s co-op conversion plan, stating under oath that the building was worth $17.1 million. Yet as Fred Trump Jr.’s executors, Donald Trump and his father claimed on the tax return that Park Briar was worth $2.9 million when Fred Trump Jr. died. The Trump siblings put the value of the Park Briar complex in Queens at over $17 million before their brother Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981. But as the executors of his estate, Donald Trump and his father claimed on a tax return that it was worth only $2.9 million. Dave Sanders for The New York Times This fantastical claim — that Park Briar should be taxed as if its value had fallen 83 percent in 18 days — slid past the I.R.S. with barely a protest. An auditor insisted the value should be increased by $100,000, to $3 million. During the 1980s, Donald Trump became notorious for leaking word that he was taking positions in stocks, hinting of a possible takeover, and then either selling on the run-up or trying to extract lucrative concessions from the target company to make him go away. It was a form of stock manipulation with an unsavory label: “greenmailing.” The Times unearthed evidence that Mr. Trump enlisted his father as his greenmailing wingman. On Jan. 26, 1989, Fred Trump bought 8,600 shares of Time Inc. for $934,854, his tax returns show. Seven days later, Dan Dorfman, a financial columnist known to be chatty with Donald Trump, broke the news that the younger Trump had “taken a sizable stake” in Time. Sure enough, Time’s shares jumped, allowing Fred Trump to make a $41,614 profit in two weeks. Later that year, Fred Trump bought $5 million worth of American Airlines stock. Based on the share price — $81.74 — it appears he made the purchase shortly before Mr. Dorfman reported that Donald Trump was taking a stake in the company. Within weeks, the stock was over $100 a share. Had Fred Trump sold then, he would have made a quick $1.3 million. But he didn’t, and the stock sank amid skepticism about his son’s history of hyped takeover attempts that fizzled. Fred Trump sold his shares for a $1.7 million loss in January 1990. A week later, Mr. Dorfman reported that Donald Trump had sold, too. With other family members, Fred Trump could be cantankerous and cruel, according to sworn testimony by his relatives. “This is the stupidest thing I ever heard of,” he’d snap when someone disappointed him. He was different with his son Donald. He might chide him — “Finish this job before you start that job,” he’d counsel — but more often, he looked for ways to forgive and accommodate. By 1987, for example, Donald Trump’s loan debt to his father had grown to at least $11 million. Yet canceling the debt would have required Donald Trump to pay millions in taxes on the amount forgiven. Father and son found another solution, one never before disclosed, that appears to constitute both an unreported multimillion-dollar gift and a potentially illegal tax write-off. In December 1987, records show, Fred Trump bought a 7.5 percent stake in Trump Palace, a 55-story condominium building his son was erecting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Most, if not all, of his investment, which totaled $15.5 million, was made by exchanging his son’s unpaid debts for Trump Palace shares, records show. Four years later, in December 1991, Fred Trump sold his entire stake in Trump Palace for just $10,000, his tax returns and financial statements reveal. Those documents do not identify who bought his stake. But other records indicate that he sold it back to his son. | |
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