Ivanka and Jared 2: Tarnished Gold

[Howl]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess Nicki Haley meant "silent scum" instead of "silent genius": "Kushner Paid No Federal Income Tax for Years, Documents Suggest"

Spoiler

Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million.

And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes, according to confidential financial documents reviewed by The New York Times.

His low tax bills are the result of a common tax-minimizing maneuver that, year after year, generated millions of dollars in losses for Mr. Kushner, according to the documents. But the losses were only on paper — Mr. Kushner and his company did not appear to actually lose any money. The losses were driven by depreciation, a tax benefit that lets real estate investors deduct a portion of the cost of their buildings from their taxable income every year.

In 2015, for example, Mr. Kushner took home $1.7 million in salary and investment gains. But those earnings were swamped by $8.3 million of losses, largely because of “significant depreciation” that Mr. Kushner and his company took on their real estate, according to the documents reviewed by The Times.

Nothing in the documents suggests Mr. Kushner or his company broke the law. A spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s lawyer said that Mr. Kushner “paid all taxes due.”

In theory, the depreciation provision is supposed to shield real estate developers from having their investments whittled away by wear and tear on their buildings.

In practice, though, the allowance often represents a lucrative giveaway to developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner.

... < interactive component >

The law assumes that buildings’ values decline every year when, in reality, they often gain value. Its enormous flexibility allows real estate investors to determine their own tax bills.

The White House last year championed a sweeping revision of the nation’s tax laws that expanded many of the benefits enjoyed by real estate investors, allowing them to reap even larger deductions.

“The Trump administration was in a position to clean up the tax code and promised to get rid of some of the complexity that certain taxpayers use to their advantage,” said Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Instead, they doubled down on those provisions, particularly the ones they have familiarity with to benefit themselves.”

The documents, which The Times reviewed in their entirety, were created with Mr. Kushner’s cooperation as part of a review of his finances by an institution that was considering lending him money. Totaling more than 40 pages, they describe his business dealings, earnings, expenses and borrowing from 2009 to 2016. They contain information that was taken from Mr. Kushner’s federal tax filings, as well as other data provided by his advisers. The documents, mostly created last year, were shared with The Times by a person who has had financial dealings with Mr. Kushner and his family.

Thirteen tax accountants and lawyers, including J. Richard Harvey Jr., a tax official in the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations, reviewed the documents for The Times. Mr. Harvey said that, assuming the documents accurately reflect information from his tax returns, Mr. Kushner appeared to have paid little or no federal income taxes during at least five of the past eight years. The other experts agreed and said Mr. Kushner probably didn’t pay much in the three other years, either.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he would not respond to assumptions derived from documents that provide an incomplete picture and were “obtained in violation of the law and standard business confidentiality agreements. However, always following the advice of numerous attorneys and accountants, Mr. Kushner properly filed and paid all taxes due under the law and regulations.”

Mr. Mirijanian added that, with regard to the tax legislation, Mr. Kushner “has avoided work that would pose any conflict of interest.”

Representatives of the White House and Mr. Kushner’s firm, Kushner Companies, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The revelation about Mr. Kushner’s minimal tax payments comes as his father-in-law’s taxes are under renewed scrutiny. A Times investigation published this month found that Mr. Trump participated in outright fraud that shielded his family’s fortune from estate and gift taxes.

Mr. Trump has broken with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. But portions of a 1995 tax return previously published by The Times show trends similar to the one visible in the documents detailing Mr. Kushner’s finances. Mr. Trump at the time reported nearly $916 million in losses, which could have permitted him to avoid any federal income taxes for almost two decades.

The summaries of Mr. Kushner’s tax returns reviewed by The Times don’t explicitly state how much he paid. Instead, the documents include disclosures by his accountants that estimate how much tax he owed for the year just ended — called “income taxes payable” — and how much he paid during the year in anticipation of taxes he would owe, called “prepaid taxes.” For most of the years covered, both were listed as zero.

Peter Buell, who runs tax services for the real estate practice of the accounting firm Marcum, said the lack of prepayments indicated Mr. Kushner most likely didn’t owe income taxes in those years. Mr. Buell said he was especially confident that Mr. Kushner had no tax liability because the documents also report no “income taxes payable.”

Kushner Companies — where Mr. Kushner was chief executive and remains an owner — has been profitable and has thrown off millions of dollars in cash annually for Mr. Kushner and his father, Charles, according to an analysis by the company that was included in the documents reviewed by The Times.

But as far as the Internal Revenue Service is concerned, the Kushners have been losing money for years.

Kushner Companies, like many real estate firms, passes on any tax obligations to its owners, including Mr. Kushner and his father, who incorporate them into their personal tax returns.

Unlike typical wage earners, the owners of such companies can report losses for tax purposes. When a firm like Kushner Companies reports expenses in excess of its income, the result is a “net operating loss.” That loss can wipe out any taxes that the company’s owner otherwise would owe. Depending on the size of the loss, it can even be used to get refunds for taxes paid in prior years or eliminate tax bills in future years.

Mr. Kushner’s losses, stemming in large part from the depreciation deduction, appeared to wipe out his taxable income in most years covered by the documents.

He is reporting the losses even though he bought his properties with borrowed funds. In many cases, Mr. Kushner kicked in less than 1 percent of the purchase price, according to the documents. Even that small amount generally was paid for with loans. Mr. Kushner’s credit lines from banks rose to $46 million in 2016 from zero in 2009, the documents show.

The result: Mr. Kushner is getting tax-reducing losses for spending someone else’s money, which is permitted under the tax code. Depreciation deductions are available in other industries, but they generally don’t get to take losses related to spending with borrowed money.

“If I had to live my life over again, I would have been in the real estate business,” said Jonathan Blattmachr, a well-known trusts and estates lawyer, now a principal at Pioneer Wealth Partners, who reviewed the Kushner documents. “It’s fantastic. You get tax deductions for things you don’t pay for.”

One of the only years in which Mr. Kushner appeared to have owed anything was 2013, when he reported income taxes payable of $1.1 million. According to the documents, Mr. Kushner has filed tax returns separately from his wife, Ivanka Trump — a relatively common practice among wealthy couples who want to avoid entwining their complex personal finances.

Mr. Kushner’s father appears to have benefited from the same tax deductions, the documents indicate. The experts interviewed by The Times said Charles Kushner most likely avoided paying federal income taxes from at least 2012 to 2016.

The tax code affords real estate investors great leeway in how they calculate their depreciation — flexibility that often is used to inflate their annual deductions. Among the tactics used by many developers: Their tax advisers prepare studies arguing that much of a property’s value is attributable to things like appliances and parking lots, which under the law can be depreciated more quickly than the building.

Such strategies are almost never audited, tax professionals say. And the new tax law provides even more opportunities for property investors to take larger deductions.

Developers might have to pay capital gains taxes if they sell their properties. But the Kushners, like others in the real estate business, often avoid that tax, too, by using the proceeds of sales to buy more properties within a certain time window.

At least in part because of that perk, the Kushners’ property sales in the period covered by the documents — totaling about $2.3 billion, according to Real Capital Analytics, a research firm — generated little or no taxable income for Mr. Kushner.

Last year’s tax legislation eliminated that benefit for all industries but one: real estate.

 

 

[Howl]

From a Greg Olear thread about Jared back in March 2018, to just remind us of the kind of power Jared has deployed while bringing peace to the Middle East. 

 

[fraurosena]

Oh, deer Rufus, the irony here hurts...

 

[AmazonGrace]

This is Ivanka. But her emails... 

 

[47of74]

19 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

This is Ivanka. But her emails... 

 

Lock her up!

Lock her THE FUCK up!

[AmazonGrace]

5 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Lock her up!

Lock her THE FUCK up!

I think she will get a medal now that it's been proven that she actually did some work and took care of some government stuff.

[WiseGirl]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ivanka-trump-used-a-personal-email-account-to-send-hundreds-of-emails-about-government-business-last-year/2018/11/19/6515d1e0-e7a1-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html

Well this person certainly wants her locked up. "Ivanka claimed that she was unaware of the rules about personal email"  She wasn't "aware" of the government rules?

Bullshit.   I call bullshit based on daddy knowing and blaming Hillary all the time.

Lock her up, lock her up! (I can play this maga game too).

 

.

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm surprised there hasn't been a twitter meltdown from the tangerine toddler yet: "House Democrats plan to investigate Ivanka Trump’s use of personal email for government business"

Spoiler

The House Oversight Committee plans to investigate whether Ivanka Trump violated federal law by using a personal email account for government business, the panel’s incoming chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said Tuesday.

In a statement, Cummings said the committee launched a bipartisan investigation last year into White House officials’ use of personal email accounts, but the White House did not provide the requested information.

“We need those documents to ensure that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and other officials are complying with federal records laws and there is a complete record of the activities of this Administration,” Cummings said.

In what appeared to be an acknowledgment of the potential risk of a backlash against Democrats for aggressively probing the Trump administration, Cummings also emphasized that his focus upon becoming chairman of the committee will be to address the everyday issues impacting Americans.

“My goal is to prevent this from happening again — not to turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton,” he said.

American Oversight, the liberal watchdog group whose record requests led to the discovery regarding Ivanka Trump’s use of her personal email, said in a letter to the top members of the panel and the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier Tuesday that “it is incumbent on Congress to investigate this matter immediately.” It drew a comparison between the use of personal email accounts by President Trump’s daughter, a White House senior adviser, and Hillary Clinton when she was serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.

“The parallels between Ms. Trump’s conduct and that of Secretary Clinton are inescapable,” Austin Evers, the group’s executive director, said in the letter. “In both her use of personal email and post-discovery preservation efforts, Ms. Trump appears to have done exactly what Secretary Clinton did — conduct over which President Trump and many members of Congress regularly lambasted Secretary Clinton and which, they asserted, demonstrated her unfitness for office.”

Evers added that “while much of the rhetoric surrounding Secretary Clinton’s use of personal email was hyperbolic and untethered to the law or facts, the extensive use of personal email by a senior public official raises important questions that merit investigation.”

The White House has been bracing for the new revelation to spur a deeper investigation next year by House Democrats of Ivanka Trump’s correspondence in her personal, official and business life.

Ivanka Trump first used her personal email to contact Cabinet officials in early 2017, before she joined the White House as an unpaid senior adviser, according to emails obtained by American Oversight and first reported by Newsweek.

When she joined the White House, Trump pledged to comply “with all ethics rules.” But she continued to occasionally use her personal email in her official capacity, people familiar with an administration review of her email use told The Washington Post.

In a statement Monday, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, said that the first daughter’s email use was different than that of Clinton, who had a private email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. At one point, an archive of thousands of Clinton’s emails was deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional investigation.

Democratic lawmakers criticized Ivanka Trump over the matter Tuesday, with some arguing that it pointed to larger ethical problems within the Trump administration.

“There’s no way that she had no knowledge of the rules,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said on CNN. “But really there’s a larger story here, which is the mixing of public and private, as with her clothing brand and her public position, the blending and mixing of emails. . . . There should be some kind of investigative effort.”

In the wake of the news, several lawmakers ridiculed President Trump for having attacked Clinton over her email use.

“Cue the chant?” tweeted Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), in a nod to Trump supporters’ frequent cries of “Lock her up!” at the president’s rallies.

Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) tweeted a story about Ivanka Trump’s email and commented, “Karma has a sense of humor.”

Some former Trump White House officials also chastised Ivanka Trump over the matter.

“It’s hypocritical, and, certainly, it looks bad. And I’m sure the media will have a field day with it today,” Marc Short, who served as President Trump’s legislative affairs director, said on CNN. He added that there are “some important distinctions” between the Clinton and Ivanka Trump cases, such as the fact that thousands of Clinton‘s emails were deleted.

Anthony Scaramucci, who served as White House communications director for 11 days last year, told CNN that the error was so glaring that Ivanka Trump herself would have to acknowledge it if asked.

“Certainly, I think it’s hypocritical,” he said. “I think even Ivanka, if she was interviewed about it, she’d have to say that it was a mistake. You can’t do that in that position.”

You know it's bad if The Mooch says you made a mistake...

[mamallama]

Forget locking her up, subpoena every damn email from that account.

 

[JenniferJuniper]

I can't take much more.

I'm against the death penalty as a general rule but this sleazy, anti-American, piece of shit crime family needs not only to be locked up, they need to be executed.  Fucking traitors.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[mamallama]

I can just imagine her saying, "But it's not a private server it's Gmail."

[GreyhoundFan]

I love The Onion:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Fox & Friends’ spent months blasting Hillary Clinton’s email use. Ivanka Trump got 25 seconds."

Spoiler

“Fox & Friends” — and many, many other Fox News programs — dedicated significant portions of its 2016 presidential campaign coverage to a question that seemed at the center of our faith in our republic:

Did Hillary Clinton’s rule-breaking use of private email to conduct government business render her unfit to serve in the topmost levels of the federal government?

There was analysis about “operational intel” in the emails that could put U.S. citizens at risk. A question-and-answer segment focused on whether a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton could pardon herself. At one point, Judge Jeanine Pirro demonstrated what it would be like to smash two BlackBerrys with a hammer.

So when news broke Monday that the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump was embroiled in a similar issue — only with some names and political parties switched around — it was a chance for “Fox & Friends” to dive into its deep repository of information about the ethical and political implications of private email use.

The segment lasted 25 seconds.

The information was one of several news tidbits relayed to viewers of “Fox & Friends” by Jillian Mele, an early-morning host, and focused on Ivanka Trump’s lawyer “slamming a report.”

“The Washington Post claims the White House adviser may have violated federal rules by using her personal account to communicate with officials,” Mele read, echoing language that had been read on other Fox News shows. “A spokesperson for Trump’s lawyer tells Fox News, quote, there was never classified information transmitted; the account was never transferred or housed at Trump Organization; no email was ever deleted.”

Media observers were quick to point out the irony.

“I mean, this seems pretty light in comparison to the Fox News outrage over Hillary’s private email, but I’m sure that they will start to spew similar amounts of bile that they spewed over the Clinton email, right?” Colby Hall wrote in an opinion piece for Mediaite. “If they didn’t, they’d look ridiculous, right?”

As The Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey reported Monday, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails to Cabinet officials, White House aides and assistants using a private account, which violated rules about federal records.

According to Leonnig and Dawsey, shortly after then-candidate Donald Trump blasted Clinton on the campaign trail, his daughter used her personal account for “much of 2017” with Jared Kushner, her husband and fellow White House adviser. She sent hundreds of emails from the account.

“The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s prac­tices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign,” Leonnig and Dawsey wrote. “He attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her ‘Crooked Hillary’ for using a personal email account as secretary of state.”

Ivanka Trump’s use of the private account was unearthed by White House ethics officials responding to a public records lawsuit.

People close to Ivanka Trump told Leonnig and Dawsey that she wasn’t trying to hide her government work and was unaware she was breaking email rules. Such use of email could violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires official White House communications be preserved. It’s also a security and potential risk. The House Oversight Committee plans to investigate.

Fox News has faced criticism from those who have claimed the network serves as a mouthpiece for the Trump administration.

On the day before Election Day, for example, Fox News host Sean Hannity joined President Trump at a rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo. The campaign had described Hannity as a “special guest.” Hannity maintained on Twitter that he was covering the rally for his show, not campaigning with the president.

Judge Jeanine, the smasher of BlackBerrys, was also present and was singled out by Trump.

She “treats us very, very well,” Trump told the audience. “She’s my friend, and she’s your friend.”

 

[Howl]

On 11/20/2018 at 7:22 PM, mamallama said:

Forget locking her up, subpoena every damn email from that account.

Very VERY good possibility this could will happen, unless her account gets swiffered.  "I didn't know this would happen when I had IT hit the DEL button." 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ivanka Trump ignores rules because she doesn’t treat the White House as a real job"

Spoiler

Ivanka Trump arrived Tuesday at the annual White House turkey pardon with her three children in tow as musicians played Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” — a song about unity that would be perfectly appropriate for a Thanksgiving celebration designed to align everyone around the notion that not all turkeys deserve to die for the benefit of American gastronomes.

But much like the selected turkeys, Trump was playing a role. She is a cultural emissary for her father, the president, but she also often appears as his formal proxy in her role as a senior White House adviser.

So it was all the more remarkable that she has spent this week pleading ignorance for her failure to use proper channels for secure email communications. Her father, after all, spent most of 2016 talking about someone else’s emails. Once ensconced in the White House, thanks in part to Hillary Clinton’s own electronic correspondence habits, the first-daughter-slash-senior-adviser proceeded to send hundreds of emails via private channels in 2017, a good year after the American public was subjected to more literal words in mainstream newspapers about Clinton’s emails than all of Trump’s scandals combined, according to researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.

Trump claims she didn’t know that her use of a private email account for government business was improper. For that claim to be credible, Trump would have to argue that she somehow missed all the news about the 2016 campaign or that she was too oblivious to understand the implications of it. So the simplest explanation is that she thinks the rules that applied to Clinton don’t apply to her.

To be fair, this is no surprise. Research suggests that ultrarich people genuinely believe that the rules don’t apply to them, and the rich tend to break rules and violate norms more frequently as a result. They have reduced levels of empathy, because they’re not accustomed to having to depend on others to lead fruitful, prosperous lives. They have very little understanding of the value of things like sacrifice for the greater good or, well … public service for its own sake.

President Trump appears to believe the rules don’t apply to him, either — or else he would have, as every other president in the past four decades has done, put his assets into a blind trust upon taking office and released his tax returns. He also reportedly uses unsecured phones despite warnings that Russia and China are probably listening in.

And like her father’s, Ivanka Trump’s own violations of norms and laws extend well beyond communications security. For instance, Ivanka has, reportedly, personally pocketed $3.9 million in profits from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, the foreign proceeds of which are supposed to be remitted to the U.S. Treasury. And this is a violation for which we can publicly account: We have no idea how much money she is or isn’t making overall. The entire Trump family is accustomed to operating from behind a protective wall of lawyers, PR people and secretive LLCs that mask the origins of their financing and the manner in which they choose to conduct business. No wonder email rules don’t seem to apply to her: Actively avoiding transparency might not be the norm for the Oval Office, but it is for commercial real estate and for the Trump family.

This particular angle could well be the entire game for her. The outcomes of her tenure in the White House are very measurable in terms of accrual of money and power to Ivanka Trump. They are less apparent if we evaluate her in her role as senior White House adviser and public servant. What has she done for Americans that justifies paying for the travel, office, resources and access that she enjoys solely as a result of occupying a job for which she has no obvious qualifications beyond being the president’s daughter?

The answer is nothing, which shouldn’t be surprising, because she didn’t take the job seriously in the first place. It has never been her primary mandate. Her official travels have been built around her business objectives and self-aggrandizing projects that allow her to network with people she couldn’t access before her father became president. A state dinner with the president of China comes in handy when you’re waiting on trademark approvals and your company manufactures clothing there, despite your public cheerleading of American workers and American-made products. And it’s fine to give sunny speeches about women’s empowerment in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, if you have Saudi business partners who’ve just handed you $100 million for an investment fund.

The reality is that Ivanka claims to care about working women but has done nothing to stop or even mitigate her father’s administration’s policies that harm them. She has had no effect on the xenophobic immigration policies of the administration in which she serves or its attempts to disenfranchise gay and transgender people. She has been ineffective and useless.

By this point, it’s clear that she doesn’t view her unpaid White House gig as her primary job. It’s an extracurricular activity on a résumé, gifted to her by her father. So in her mind, who cares about email protocols? Who cares if she sits in dad’s chair at the G-20? Or if she eludes questions about her boss’s sexual improprieties? We all know she’s not a real government official, right?

But she is, no matter how nepotistically and inappropriately she got there. And she can’t have it both ways. You don’t get the high-powered government job without the security protocols.

Now the new Democratic House is sure to look into the whole thing. President Trump argues that because Ivanka’s emails are a matter of public record, all of this is fine. If she did something wrong, that doesn’t matter, because at least we all know about it.

This is a defining characteristic of Trump values or lack thereof: If you can get away with something in plain sight, it’s not a crime in the first place. Another Trump value: If a core rule or norm doesn’t matter to you personally, just ignore it, no matter how crucial it is to American democracy or the healthy functioning of society at large. You’re rich, after all, and you don’t need all of these other people to live the good life. Of what use is empathy? Or rules, when you can lawyer and spin your way around them? And why should any of it matter, really, when it’s just a side gig, a lark? Your personal safety and security is intact and immutable.

And you think to yourself, what a wonderful world.

 

[fraurosena]

Do we even wonder why he went? Nah, it’s too obvious. Their flimsy pretext that it was about the Middle East peace process is simply ludicrous. 

 

[Penny]

Anyone see Ivanka's interview on ABC about the emails? When ask if she should be locked up, of course she said no. Her attitude in the interview is obnoxious. 

[fraurosena]

Here's a part of the interview @Penny mentions in the post above:

Why is she being filmed through a 'hazy' filter that 'softens' her features? I know it's all about her actions and her words, but this bothers me no end. Just note the difference in her image and that of the interviewer.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Why is she being filmed through a 'hazy' filter that 'softens' her features? I know it's all about her actions and her words, but this bothers me no end. Just note the difference in her image and that of the interviewer.

I bet that the soft-focus filter is part of the agreement ABC signed to get the interview.

 

[Howl]

Quote

Mexicans are furious after their president granted Kushner the nation's highest honor for foreigners https://thebea.st/2E3bv6m

Andy Borowitz?  The Onion?  Nope, it's a real thing.  Maybe Nikki Haley is right and Jared really does have "hidden genius." 

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, Howl said:

Andy Borowitz?  The Onion?  Nope, it's a real thing.  Maybe Nikki Haley is right and Jared really does have "hidden genius." 

He hides it well.

[AmazonGrace]