A response to the @susannecraig @russbuettner
@mmcintire and their new argument which they say might debunk my stories on Trump and money laundering.

It's in part 2:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/28/us/donald-trump-taxes-apprentice.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

A thread about why I am skeptical of their skepticism:

1/

First off: they have, of course, done amazing work amassing these tax docs. As far as I can tell, they have done less work looking inside each deal. How could they examine hundreds of deal with the same level of scrutiny?

2/

Also, so far, they have not looked at these records through the eyes of money laundering. Any prosecutor will tell you that tax manipulation and money laundering are close cousins.

Lastly, they take his tax filings as accurate reflections of his income and spending.

3/

So, let's look at Scotland:

Solely looking at the public financials of these two deals, Aberdeen and Turnberry, many things are obvious:

- He is NOT spending as much money as he claims to be spending.
- He IS still spending absurd amounts of money on $-losing businesses.

4/

- He is spending money in a way he never has before in his career. It is--he says--his own cash and he never funds 100% of a project. And it is done with remarkable patience and no obvious path to profit, fame, glory, etc.

- Did he save his massive Apprentice earnings, ...

6/

Then invest much of it, plus additional assets into a series of businesses that did none of the things he looks for--no immediate glory, etc.

Maybe he did. that is a real possibility. He is stupid and impulsive and makes bad decisions.

7/

But let's just say he did the thing he always does: he used other people's money, he hid its sources and he blew it on wasteful businesses.

What would those tax returns look like?

I think they would look pretty much like these.

8/

But here's the real kicker--the thing that, I believe, argues in my favor over theirs?

The Scottish finances reveal not only overspending. They reveal a magic trick: money disappears. Money flows in and, poof, its gone.

9/

Where is that money? It adds up to a lot.

It doesn't disappear entirely in a tax-friendly way. Because it disappears into false valuations of property that don't allow for tax loss claims. It's just poof. Gone.

10/

We don't know how much, because of the way it's set up and the paucity of data. But we do know that a lot of money disappears.

Where is that money? Is it his? Is it someone else's? Why create this ornate structure--far more elaborate than needed for tax fraud?

11/

The nature of financial investigation is that you get whatever datapoints you get and you have to tell a story.

With Trump, the story can always be: he's stupid and impulsive, not criminal. Or, he's stupid and impulsive and only a tax cheat.

12/

That might be true.

But I have a hard time seeing that story in the data. I think the deal-level analysis shows that someone -- not Trump, himself -- went to enormous trouble to set up mechanisms for making money disappear in ways that don't seem tax-related.

Why?

13/

I'll try to re-write this in a shorter, easier to digest form later today.

Key question--I'd love accountants and prosecutors to weigh in--what would a $-launderers tax returns look like? How would we know if those returns were laundering or just tax avoidance?

14/end