President dismisses ‘hit piece’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at The New York Times, dismissing a lengthy story about the vast extent to which his father had fueled his wealth with taxavoidance schemes that at times amounted to fraud. The president, accusing the paper of holding a grudge from the 2016 election, said the story was both a “hit piece” and “boring.”

The Times story reported that Trump had participated in “dubious tax schemes” that allowed his father to pass him more than $413 million while minimizing tax payments.

“The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen done before,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “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!”

The concept of “time value of money” is the idea that money that is available at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future, due to its potential earning capacity.

The New York Department of Taxation and Finance said is has begun reviewing the allegations detailed in the Times report, according to the paper.

The Times said it had unraveled a complex effort by Trump’s father, Fred, to build and then pass along his wealth by examining more than 100,000 pages of documents from the businesses of Fred Trump. It said that, starting in the 1990s, Donald Trump had helped his father lower his tax bills via a sham corporation that processed padded invoices. Improper tax deductions were used and his father’s real-estate properties were systematically undervalued, the paper reported.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the Times story “a totally false attack” but declined to identify any specific errors.