President slams N.Y. Times over taxes reporting
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday criticized a New York Times investigation into his and his family’s use of dubious tax schemes over the years and the origins of his own wealth, calling the article an “old, boring and often told hit piece.”
He wrote: “The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen done before. They used the concept of ‘time value of money’ in doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me. Added up, this means that 97% of their stories on me are bad. Never recovered from bad election call!”
Trump did not offer an outright denial of the facts in the report, such as that the money he made during his decades in real estate came from tax schemes of dubious legality, the existence of records of deception in documenting the family’s financial assets, and that the beginning of the president’s so-called selfmade fortune dates back to his toddler years when, by the time he was 3 years old, Trump earned $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father.
Trump has consistently refused to release his tax returns — although making their returns public has been a common practice by most presidential candidates dating back decades — that has left questions about his personal finances, business practices and taxes paid to the federal government. The 18-month Times investigation is based on reams of records and documents about the Trump family empire.
In his Twitter post, Trump singled out the notion of “time value of money,” an economic concept about how the value of one dollar today is worth more than the value of one dollar tomorrow. Among the Times’ findings was that Trump received today’s equivalent of $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, far more than a $1 million loan, to be repaid with interest, which Trump has regularly cited as the one-time loan that he shrewdly used to amass his eventual wealth and success.
The Times found that the original loan from his father was a series of loans totaling $60.7 million, today’s equivalent of $140 million.
The Times report also showed how Trump and his family took part in fraudulent schemes, such as how Trump and his siblings set up fake corporations to disguise millions of dollars’ worth of gifts from their parents, in order to evade taxes.