TWO DAYS BEFORE the first presidential debate between President DONALD TRUMP and JOE BIDEN, and just 37 days ahead of Election Day, The New York Times dropped what it promises is the first of several stories detailing TRUMP’S tax returns -- a prize journalists, congressional committees and prosecutors have been seeking for years.

THE REVELATION seems to have caught the White House flat-footed, with the president left claiming that the paper hadn’t contacted him -- though his company’s lawyer is quoted in the story -- and that the article was “fake news.” The BIDEN campaign has already cut an online ad in response.
Courtesy the Playbook

NYT’S RUSS BUETTNER, SUSANNE CRAIG and MIKE MCINTIRE: “Long-concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance”: “Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

“As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million. …

“Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image. Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life. …

“The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise. Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

“His revenue from ‘The Apprentice’ and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties. The tax audit looms. And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.”


Did you pay more than $750 in taxes?

#thirtysixdays #oursoldiersarenotlosers&sucker