Replies to post #332680 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Trump Tax Records Reveal New Inconsistencies — This Time for Trump Tower

Documents show the president’s company reported different numbers — higher ones to lenders, lower ones to tax officials — for Trump’s signature building. Last month, ProPublica revealed a similar pattern in two other Trump buildings.

by Heather Vogell Nov. 27, 4 a.m. EST

Donald Trump’s business reported conflicting information about a key metric to New York City property tax officials and a lender who arranged financing for his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to tax and loan documents obtained by ProPublica. The findings add a third major Trump property to two for which ProPublica revealed similar discrepancies last month. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-never-before-seen-trump-tax-documents-show-major-inconsistencies

In the latest case, the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials, records show.

For example, as of December 2011 and June 2012, respectively, Trump’s business told the lender that 99% and 98.7% of the tower’s commercial space was occupied, according to a prospectus for the loan. The figures were taken from “borrower financials,” the prospectus stated.

In tax filings, however, Trump’s business said the building’s occupancy was 83% in January 2012 and the same a year later. The 16 percentage point gap between the loan and tax filings is a “very significant difference,” said Susan Mancuso, an attorney who specializes in New York property tax.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization said that “comparing the various reports is comparing apples to oranges” because reporting requirements differ.

Trump had much to gain by showing a high occupancy rate to lenders in 2012: He refinanced his share of Trump Tower that year and obtained a $100 million loan on favorable terms.

The vast majority of the gap between occupancy figures could be explained by diverging reports on how much space the Trump Organization used in Trump Tower. In loan documents, the company said it and its affiliates occupied 74,900 square feet in mid-2012, or 31% of the building. But tax reports from the January before and after listed the company and related parties as occupying 41,600 square feet — or about 18% of the tower.

“I cannot give you an explanation,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert, former accountant and real estate professor at Montclair State University who reviewed the tax and loan records for Trump Tower at ProPublica’s request.

More than a dozen tax and finance experts, presented with ProPublica’s earlier findings, also said they could not decipher a reason for the differences. As with Trump Tower, the discrepancies made the two properties — a skyscraper located at 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower near Columbus Circle — appear more profitable to the lender and less so to property tax officials.

Those discrepancies were “versions of fraud,” according to Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. The penalties for false filings can include fines or criminal charges.

The diverging numbers match a pattern described by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, in congressional testimony this year. Cohen said Trump at times inflated assets’ value in documents submitted to lenders in an effort to secure loans. In reports to tax officials, Cohen testified, Trump would lower the value to reduce what he owed.

The focus on Trump’s business and personal financial records has been particularly intense of late. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has subpoenaed a wide array of Trump financial records to investigate claims that the Trump Organization falsified records of hush-money payments to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who said she and Trump had a sexual encounter. (He has denied the affair.)

Congressional lawmakers are seeking Trump’s personal tax returns, as well as other financial information, as part of their investigation into potential foreign influence on the presidency. Two federal courts have affirmed lawmakers’ right to enforce the subpoenas, and Trump has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

ProPublica used New York’s Freedom of Information Law to obtain property tax filings for four of Trump’s Manhattan buildings, including Trump Tower. The income and expense statements Trump filed when repeatedly appealing the city’s valuation of his property are public under the law. We then compared information in the tax reports to loan data made public when Trump’s debt became part of pools of loans sold publicly as bonds known as commercial mortgage-backed securities.

Information in tax and loan filings can differ for legitimate reasons, experts said. A small portion of the occupancy gap at Trump Tower did appear to have an explanation: About 2.5 percentage points of the discrepancy in 2012 consisted of an instance where the Trump Organization treated newly leased, but still empty, space as full in its loan documents (which Trump’s lender disclosed) but not in tax documents.

The Trump Organization refinanced Trump Tower in 2012, replacing its existing $27 million in debt with a loan for $100 million. That allowed Trump to extract about $68 million in cash. The same institution that handled the refinancing, Ladder Capital, refinanced 40 Wall Street and the Columbus Circle property a few years later.

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Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies
The president’s businesses made themselves appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax officials. One expert calls the differing numbers “versions of fraud.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-never-before-seen-trump-tax-documents-show-major-inconsistencies

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Occupancy, along with cash flow, is a factor used by lenders and ratings agencies to assess the riskiness of a loan. Trump secured relatively favorable terms: an interest-only loan that allowed him to avoid paying monthly principal. The Trump Tower loan received coveted AAA and Aaa ratings, respectively, from credit agencies Fitch and Moody’s. (The company has continued making payments.)

When it comes to reporting property taxes in New York City, there’s a potential incentive for owners to minimize how much space they’re renting to themselves. The city’s Tax Commission, which handles property tax appeals, tends to treat owner-occupied space as if it’s being rented at full market price, which increases the value the tax commission assigns to the building, and thus increases the tax bill. But the commission often won’t assign such income to vacant space, said Mancuso, the New York property tax expert.

The Trump Tower filings showed smaller discrepancies when it came to income. (New York City assessors consider income when calculating the taxable value of commercial properties, making New York property tax filings resemble those of income taxes more than property tax filings typically do in other parts of the country.)

Trump Tower, however, fell shy of expectations for profit set out by underwriters working for Ladder Capital during the refinancing, tax and loan records show. They had pegged net operating income at roughly $20.4 million a year. In the years after the loan was made, the building hasn’t come close.

New York City real estate observers have suggested that the tight security needed at the tower because of the presidency has cut into Trump’s ability to make money from the building.
This year, China’s biggest bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, made plans to reduce its space in Trump Tower when its lease ran out, according to Bloomberg News. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-09/china-s-biggest-bank-said-to-reduce-space-at-nyc-s-trump-tower

The financial institution that arranged the Trump Tower refinancing, Ladder Capital, is a publicly traded real estate investment trust that reports more than $6 billion in assets. It has a close Trump connection: Jack Weisselberg, an executive in loan origination, is the son of the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.
Allen Weisselberg is under investigation by the Manhattan DA for his role in the Daniels payments. https://www.propublica.org/article/prosecutors-investigating-the-trump-organization-zero-in-on-trump-cfo-allen-weisselberg

Ladder Capital declined to comment.

Doris Burke contributed reporting.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-trump-tower-tax-records-reveal-new-inconsistencies

[fuagf]

Intelligence Committee to begin circulating draft Ukraine report Monday

"Today’s Impeach-O-Meter: How Things Could Get Worse for Trump
"Former White House lawyer must testify in impeachment probe, judge rules" "


House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff | Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images

By MELANIE ZANONA, KYLE CHENEY and HEATHER CAYGLE

11/30/2019 08:33 PM EST

Members of the House Intelligence Committee will begin reviewing a report Monday on the panel's investigation of President Donald Trump's efforts to press Ukraine to investigate his Democratic adversaries, a crucial step in the House's fast-moving impeachment inquiry.

Lawmakers on the panel will get a 24-hour review period, according to internal guidance sent to committee members and obtained by POLITICO. On Tuesday, the panel is expected to approve the findings — likely on a party-line vote — teeing it up for consideration by the Judiciary Committee, which is in turn expected to draft and consider articles of impeachment in the coming weeks.

[...]

The House Judiciary Committee is slated to hold its first impeachment hearing .. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/26/judiciary-committee-to-hold-first-impeachment-hearing-next-week-073991 .. on Wednesday, with a panel of constitutional experts explaining exactly what constitutes an impeachable offense, including defining the nebulous “high crime and misdemeanor” term specified in the Constitution.

Trump’s counsel has also been invited to attend and participate in the hearing. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) gave Trump until Dec. 6 to indicate whether he planned to participate but the White House has yet to do so.

Senior Judiciary aides would not elaborate on other potential impeachment hearings. But Democratic lawmakers and aides say the committee is expected to have at least one more hearing, likely the second week of December, in which Democrats will present their case against Trump. The committee is then expected to draft and vote on articles of impeachment, teeing up a full House vote before the Christmas recess.

Lawmakers on the committee spent the weekend sparring over the makeup of that panel of constitutional experts, with the committee’s top Republican, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), requesting that it include an equal number of witnesses favorable to the Democratic and Republican perspective. He said such a balance would be a “small concession” toward bipartisanship, and he noted that a similar panel during the Clinton impeachment process was much larger.

Trump has made clear he intends to portray the hearings as a partisan distraction from more urgent work of the nation. He tweeted ..

I will be representing our Country in London at NATO, while the Democrats are holding the most ridiculous Impeachment hearings in history. Read the Transcripts, NOTHING was done or said wrong! The Radical Left is undercutting our Country. Hearings scheduled on same dates as NATO!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2019

.. Saturday about flying to London next week for a NATO summit, chiding Democrats for holding their first hearing “on same dates as NATO.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/30/intelligence-committee-draft-ukraine-report-074518

Doug Collins is still pushing the equivalency line even while so much of the defense of Trump involves evidence-free conspiracy theories.

[fuagf]

More than 500 law professors say Trump committed ‘impeachable conduct’

"Today’s Impeach-O-Meter: How Things Could Get Worse for Trump"

We don't really need even one, still 500+ will do.


President Trump participates in a luncheon with the permanent representatives of the U.N. Security Council on Thursday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

ByMatt Zapotosky
Dec. 7, 2019 at 3:17 a.m. GMT+11

More than 500 legal scholars have signed on to an open letter asserting that President Trump committed “impeachable conduct” and that lawmakers would be acting well within their rights if they ultimately voted to remove him from office.

The signers are law professors and other academics from universities across the country, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan and many others. The open letter .. https://medium.com/@legalscholarsonimpeachment/letter-to-congress-from-legal-scholars-6c18b5b6d116 .. was published online Friday by the nonprofit advocacy group Protect Democracy.

“There is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election, for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress,” the group of professors wrote. “His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that lawmakers would begin drafting articles of impeachment against Trump, a day after the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony from four constitutional scholars .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/impeachment-hearings-live-updates/2019/12/04/b7cc7b4e-1682-11ea-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_6 .. on the matter. Three law professors who were called for that hearing by Democrats argued that Trump’s behavior was impeachable, while one invited by Republicans argued that the process was moving too quickly.

VIDEO - The House Judiciary Committee questioned four law professors at
a hearing on Dec. 4. (Video: Mahlia Posey/Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

[‘The president gave us no choice’: Pelosi resisted Trump’s impeachment, now she’s the public face
https://tinyurl.com/wpvgfal]

Those who signed on to the letter said they “take no position on whether the President committed a crime.” Earlier this year, Protect Democracy gathered signatures for a similar letter .. https://tinyurl.com/whgwb73 [Earlier here: https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148647592], in which hundreds of former federal prosecutors signed on to a statement asserting that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against Trump — if he were not a sitting president.

“But conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable,” the group of professors wrote. “Impeachment is a remedy for grave abuses of the public trust.”

The group noted in particular that Trump’s conduct seemed to be directed at affecting the results of the 2020 election, and thus it was not a matter that could be left to voters at the polls.

The impeachment inquiry has focused on what Democratic lawmakers say were Trump’s efforts to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to announce an investigation into a potential 2020 rival, former vice president Joe Biden, in exchange for a White House meeting and the release of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid. Trump has rejected Democrats’ allegation that he engaged in any sort of corrupt quid pro quo.

“Put simply, if a President cheats in his effort at re-election, trusting the democratic process to serve as a check through that election is no remedy at all,” the professors wrote. “That is what impeachment is for.”

Because Democrats control the House, Trump will almost surely be impeached. The matter would move then to the Senate for a trial to see if he should be removed from office. There, it seems unlikely that Trump would be ousted. The Senate is GOP-controlled, and two-thirds of senators would have to vote against the president.

On Thursday, Trump suggested on Twitter that even impeaching him would set a dangerous precedent.

“This will mean that the beyond important and seldom used act of Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents,” he wrote. “That is not what our Founders had in mind. The good thing is that the Republicans have NEVER been more united. We will win!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/more-than-500-law-professors-say-trump-committed-impeachable-conduct/2019/12/06/35259c16-183a-11ea-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html

Trump telling you what the founders had in mind makes as much sense as a fish telling you to take your damn hook out of it's mouth.