Posts Tagged ‘US Supreme Court’
getting wee Donny 2: tax stuff etc
this goes back to 2016, but still no sign of justice
Canto: So there’s the more general matter of tax evasion, tax fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud and so forth – we’re no tax or finance experts, but we’re prepared to learn, for the fun of finding out how bad things might be for wee Donny.
Jacinta: Or should be, given effective white-collar crime legislation, and limitations to these endless appeals processes. By the way, I heard there was more news on the attempt, or desire, to evict him from Mar-a-Largo. Can that be included as a legal problem?
Canto: Why not? And what is this ‘largo’ thing? I’ve seen Key Largo – some thing to to with the Florida Keys…
Jacinta: That’s an archipelago, nothing to do with the keys to Mar-a-Lago (spelt without the ‘r’). Largo’s a coastal town in Florida, so I don’t know if it’s worth connecting the dots. As to tax matters, I heard a while back that ‘forensic accounting experts’ have been hired re investigations into wee Donny’s taxes, which reporters say is a big deal.
Canto: Okay so we’re leaving Mar-a-Lago for now (unlike Donny). Yes The Washington Post reported on this in late December. It concerns the DA’s office for Manhattan, headed by Cyrus Vance. They’ve been investigating Donny since 2018, initially in regard to alleged hush money payments made in 2016. But the investigation has since expanded to include insurance fraud as well as bank and tax fraud.
Jacinta: Stuff that appears to have been overlooked for decades. In fact they admit as much, since ‘the probe is believed to encompass transactions spanning several years’, according to the paper. All of this comes ‘from sources close to the case’ – Vance and his hirelings are naturally keeping mum about it all.
Canto: It’s explosive stuff, but heartening. Anyway, the forensics company they’ve allegedly hired is FTC consulting, and it’s a bonafide ‘global business advisory firm’. The paper mentions an ‘ongoing grand jury investigation’, so that’s a thing. We don’t do grand juries in Australia, so we might have to learn about that.
Jacinta: Vance’s office is battling to obtain years of tax returns and such from Mazars USA, the accounting firm Donny uses. It’s described as ‘an independent member firm of Mazars Group, an international audit, tax and advisory organization with operations in over 90 countries’. It sounds legit – but everything wee Donny touches dies, according to Rick Wilson – so I suspect Mazars USA is feeling the breath of death on its nape right now. The tax records are described as the final piece in an already well-advanced investigation. We shall see.
Canto: So this is a big one. Donny’s lawyers, such as they are, have been fighting all this, and the Supreme Court has already rejected the idea that he was immune from state court proceedings as Prez, which he ain’t no more. But of course the litigation has continued, with Donny’s lawyers claiming the subpoena for this financial stuff was ‘overbroad’ and issued ‘in bad faith’, and now it’s before the Supreme Court again, though Donny is no longer able to hide behind the presidency – which of course he should never be able to do. But in a banana republic…
Jacinta: Apparently he’s been granted a stay by the Supreme Court, and the technicalities of this are unclear to me, and I’ve been finding it hard to get free info about the length of this stay, so it’s frustrating.
Canto: It’s a ridiculous ongoing situation, hopefully an only in the USA situation – I pity any other country that allows such legal horrors. But with Donny now being unemployed, there should be an easier path to justice – it’s much easier to charge unemployed people there than anyone else.
Jacinta: Hmmm. I found reporting from early October that a federal appeals court then ruled against Donny’s lawyers, who tried to block the handover of tax documents to the Manhattan DA. Presumably that’s when the lawyers took it to the Supreme Court, and they granted a stay, presumably in mid-October.
Canto: Mein gott, so what exactly is a stay, for what reasons can it be given, and surely there’s a time limit on them?
Jacinta: Good questions, but I’ve found a very interesting article by Richard Lempert on the Brookings Institution website from October 19, when an appeal was on its way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Supreme Court should end things now – meaning then. In its first para, I learn that the New York Times already has Donny’s tax returns – the stuff Vance is filing for – and is sharing them with the public. Whether that’s the whole kit and caboodle, I don’t know. And of course Donny claims the docs are false. Anyway the article points out that Vance is asking for more than tax returns – supporting docs are needed to prove criminality. The article then goes into a lot of legal detail about subpoenas, Article 2 powers, precedent and how courts deliver their rulings, but Lempert’s essential view is that Donny’s legal arguments in the initial case were weak, and they’ve come up with nothing new in the interim. So the Supreme Court shouldn’t take up the case.
Canto: But they have taken it up?
Jacinta: It does seem as if they have. Or maybe not. An article from Bloomberg, dated January 20, so quite recently, said the case was ‘now before the Supreme Court’, but that they hadn’t acted on it for three months, without providing reasons. The pay wall descended before I could work out whether that meant they’d deferred looking at the case or they’d deferred a decision to look at the case. But their decision may not matter, as apparently Vance may have sufficient material for his case already. I suppose only he and his legal team would know.
Canto: Michael Cohen was on cable news recently, arguing for SDNY to swiftly move on the matter of campaign finance violations, for which he was jailed, and also expressing an expectation that the new head of the DOJ, Merrick Garland, once approved – which may ultimately take another month – would look into Donny’s financial affairs as president, which will be interesting. Biden seems to want the DOJ to keep out of politics, but have Donny’s financial shenanigans ever really been political?
Jacinta: We can only await events. Meanwhile, there seems to be a real concern about the dangers of neo-fascism in the country. Those right-wingers who’ve gone against wee Donny recently seem to be running scared. Could the fear of reprisals be inhibiting legal action against wee Donny? That’s another thing to look into, as well as the situation in Georgia, where they have pretty strong evidence of serious attempts to overturn a fair election. Still a lot to get to…
References
Trump’s tax returns: Why the Supreme Court should end things now