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Notes -
Is Trump actually always innocent?
From the Laetita James suit I have to come to the conclusion that he is in fact always innocent. Reddit lefties are salivating that they’ve finally caught their guy. I see three main issues at play:
He likely has some personal guarantees on loans and that’s why he has to submit net worth documents to banks. He was aggressive on some valuations but valuations are subjective. Banks have underwriters for this stuff. And real estate developers always have lofty views on their property valuations. These properties he has loans against the banks would have first underwrote them at the property level before considering a personal guarantee.
Discrepancies between say property tax valuations and what he submitted. These always differ on everyone’s property.
He donated some property for conservation. She’s saying the property had some issues and the value should be lower. His total tax savings were 3.5 million. Assuming 40% federal rates and 10% New York that means he saved 700k in NY. If the properties worth less then maybe he owes NY a couple hundred thousand. This is something you deal with in an audit not a civil case or criminal case.
I can’t comment on the FBI raid as I don’t know anything about what’s normal with classified information. I do know the tax code, accounting, real estate development, banking. And this is just a loud press conference and book report for something that just sounds like an audit.
Also no victims who lost money at any of the banks he did business with. Art of course is a whole legalized fraud of donating after making your art look really valuable. JB pritzker legendarily removed toilets from his house to make it “uninhabitable” and lower his property tax bill. This just breaks down to tax law is complex and people play games to lower their taxes.
I expected Trump having some corrupt deals - I mean, he's a billionaire RE developer from New York, he must have cut some corners and greased some palms. But I see that they are digging into him for 6 years now, with all force of the FBI, DOJ and every Democrat local prosecutor in the nation, and so far they got zilch. I mean not just zilch as court convictions, the worst thing he did that I know (which I knew before he run for President, actually) is that he lent his name and likeness to a fake university which charged simpletons a lot of money to teach them to make money. Which I guess is a sleazy thing to do but hardly literally Hitler. The rest is just routine stuff where the taxman disagrees with you on the value of some property - as a homeowner paying property taxes (obviously much less than Trump does) I know what it's like. So I am moving to the conclusion there's actually nothing on Trump - at least nothing worth talking about. He is that clean, somehow, otherwise they'd found it by now. That doesn't mean they can't manufacture some crime to get an indictment - partisan control combined with partisan fervor does wonders to the notions of justice - but he looks surprisingly less corrupt than my priors were.
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