My money is on the forms not mentioning the payoff in any way and when Trump is queried on them, his response will be, “The paperwork is in order. Next question.”
Trump probably dictated the disclosure, same as he did with the Bornstein letter about how he was the healthiest man to ever run for POTUS.
IOW, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
I’m not sure it’s so easy for him to slide on this, with Stormy and her sidekick ready to make an issue of it. If he doesn’t report it he’s violated campaign finance law. If he does, he has to try to make that “I did nothing and paid 130K to spare my wife’s feelings” crap fly. While he’s flopping on the dock with all that, it stirs up things like that supposed Broidy $1 million payoff with the abortion that people think was quite possibly Trump.
Is there an “Income From Violations of the Emoluments Clause” category on the disclosure form?
ETA: Might need to attach some extra pages to that one.
With Mueller holding the gaff
I’m sorry folks but trump has lied so often and so egregiously that even if he was being truthful i wouldn’t believe him.
Ethics office? Trump being “ethical” is a sick joke.
Not even the newsprint it’s scrawled on in crayon.
He didn’t properly disclose his liabilities last year, so for the sake of consistency with GOPer Accepted Accounting Prevarications, that will have to be offset by exponentially more complicated fictions this year.
For example, we should expect a material write-down in the valuation of certain assets, to offset any inclusion of cash bribes.
Plus look to a significant increase in both the size and opacity of certain categories of liabilities, such as under “Mis” …
… which could stand for “miscellaneous”, yetis so vague it could contain groups of any items disingenuously described collectively by a word starting with mis, e.g. missteaks, missawges, misteries, miscarriages (of justices), mistressed boxes, envelopes, packages and other receiptickes that had to replaced.
(all included in the latest edition of the New Trump Consize Cofeve Dickionerry of Spelt Words.)
And he*ll forget the $500Million from ZTE AND all his money laundering commissions . Plus trade commissions .
So that adds up to about 2 billion in debt.
He lives off borrowed money and he is always working towards paying it back at the taxpayers expense.
He said himself, I use other peoples money, that makes me smart.
Ethics and trump don’t mix just like fire and water
I thought he had 10 billion, minimum. With this kind of balance sheet Doyle Lonnegan would laugh him out of the room.
This presupposes that Trump personally paid the money. That assertion has not been backed up by anything other than Guiliani creating it out of thin air after flailing around for days looking for a story to stick to.
The reality is…Cohen formed the LLC on 10/17. Payments were due to Daniels on 10/27. The Trump campaign made a series of 5 payments from 10/17-10/25 totaling $129,999.72. Cohen then used Trump Org email to confirm the payment to the LLC via Republic Bank.
The Trump campaign paid Trump Org, who then paid Cohen’s LLC. No money ever came out of Donald’s pocket, so there is no liability to report.
If Trump goes with that story…Avenatti is going to pounce, because it destroys the myth that Trump was party to the NDA. If Trump claims it was a liability, then he is on the hook for campaign finance fraud and probably money laundering related charges.
As I see it, the only “clean” way out of this for Donald is to show it as a liability and then show a check dated early 2017 for $130K written out to Cohen personally.
Because even a check written out to Essential Consulting is contributing to a slush fund…and once the money trail of how all that money was spent comes to light…his troubles multiply. Rapidly. That’s what is going to hang him; Cohen was bringing in all sorts of questionable money into the same account, to be used for all sorts of things. Contributing to that, puts Donald (or Trump Org, depending who made the payment) on the hook for every thing.
Presidential grifting is a profitable business. Gotta show the kids how a “pro” does it. The young 'uns need to learn by example y’see. That way the trump organization will … ahem… grow.
Spare me he might face charges. The man just sold us out to China for funding for his resort in Indonesia. If we don’t stop this shit then this country is no longer what it was and there will be no going back.
That’s why you have to hand it to Avenatti for looking at the whole chessboard and seeing the checkmate in it.
Trump’s previous report, covering January 2016 through the first few months of 2017, showed he had at least $1.4 billion in assets and at least $594 million in income.
A 35% return on his money is a red flag for corruption. Warren Buffett doesn’t make that kind of return.
And tRump is no Warren Buffett.
This country already is no longer what it was. We may eventually go back to more or less the way it was, but it will take a generation at least, and nothing will ever be quite the same. There will be so much to fix when Trump is gone – carefully rebuilding NATO and other alliances, rebuilding our trust in our own government, figuring out how many ways the Federal govt was gutted and trying to patch that up, undoing all the steps backward, exiling John Bolton to Russia – it’s going to be a massive, massive undertaking and can’t be rushed.
I am dying to know where the Essential Consulting LLC money went, and a bit mystified as to why no intrepid reporters are busily ferreting out those answers.
Followed by 24 - 48 hours (depending on when it drops in the news cycle) of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, followed by whatever egregious shit he does next.
I think one reason is few news organizations these days will pay for the kind of investigative reporting that takes weeks, months, sometimes the better part of a year or more to do and requires a deep knowledge of how to access and read financial documents. When I was young the Inquirer had a famous team known as Barlett and Steele who’d do stuff like sit down and comb through the 1986 tax revision looking for weird stuff like tax breaks for shipping companies if they had a particular type of ship and then tracking down big contributors who happened to have a ship like that. The Inky is a non-profit shadow of itself now, and Barlett and Steele, while still working, aren’t a typical model for the struggling metro dailies any more. A guy like David Fahrenthold is something of a throwback these days, because the WaPo puts money into reporting.