Trump Tweets “Iron O Range”, for Monday’s Open Thread

Trump Tweets Logo. Image by Lenny Ghoul.

It’s Monday aka The Day Before the First Presidential Debate.

For The Day Before the First Presidential Debate, President Scared Shitless, Probably, has tweeted 8 times and retweeted 5 times, so far.

His first Monday tweet was sent at 12:13 a.m. D.C., time, where he tweeted in all caps…

He elaborates on what was fake news at 10:29 a.m. D.C., time, sort of.

On Sunday The New York Times reported that they have obtained tax information on President Not the Smartest Businessman extending over more than two-decades, “revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.”

New York Times editor Dean Baquet explains in an editors note:

Today we are publishing the results of an examination of decades of personal and corporate tax records for President Trump and his businesses in the United States and abroad. The records stretch from his days as a high-profile New York real estate investor through the beginning of his time in the White House.

A team of New York Times reporters has pored over this information to assemble the most comprehensive picture of the president’s finances and business dealings to date, and we will continue our reporting and publish additional articles about our findings in the weeks ahead. We are not making the records themselves public because we do not want to jeopardize our sources, who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public.

We are publishing this report because we believe citizens should understand as much as possible about their leaders and representatives — their priorities, their experiences and also their finances. Every president since the mid-1970s has made his tax information public. The tradition ensures that an official with the power to shake markets and change policy does not seek to benefit financially from his actions.

The reporters who examined these records have been covering the president’s finances and taxes for almost four years. Their work on this and other projects was guided by Paul Fishleder, a senior investigative editor, and Matthew Purdy, a deputy managing editor who oversees investigations and special projects at The Times.
Some will raise questions about publishing the president’s personal tax information. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment allows the press to publish newsworthy information that was legally obtained by reporters even when those in power fight to keep it hidden. That powerful principle of the First Amendment applies here.

An Editors Note via The New York Times. 09/27/2020.

I paid many millions of dollars in taxes but was entitled, like everyone else, to depreciation & tax credits…..

According to the New York Times, “Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”

[For an analysis of the $750 President Likely Tax Evader has paid for 2016 and 2017 in taxes @ the News Blender.]

A lawyer for the Trump Organization, Alan Garten, in response to a letter that summarized the New York Times findings, said that, “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate.” Garten requested the documents in which the summarization was based on, “After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.”

Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015

Gartan via the New York Times. 09/27/2020.

The article explains; With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

During Sunday’s Campaign Rally which Tax Evader laughingly calls a press conference, he was asked if he knew about The Times being being published right as he was scheduled to hold his campaign rally, he said “no,” adding, he thought someone sent something to them…

Also, if you look at the extraordinary assets owned by me, which the Fake News hasn’t, I am extremely under leveraged – I have very little debt compared to the value of assets.

Dan Alexander with Forbes explains using information obtained from the bombshell article, plus other sources the debt President Debt finds himself in.

Note what is not underlined in red; Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the IRS over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

He issues several tweets that can be found following the embedded tweet, he paused at tweet 14, in order to do maths and write a piece for Forbes.

From Alexanders article:

Trump is a multibillionaire, worth $2.5 billion, by our count. His portfolio, which includes commercial buildings, golf properties and branding businesses, is worth an estimated $3.66 billion before debt. The president has a fair amount of leverage—adding up to a roughly $1.13 billion—but not enough to drag his net worth below a billion dollars.

To understand how Donald Trump could be so rich—yet look so poor—it’s essential to comprehend the difference between what we’ll call (a) tax income and (b) operating income. Tax income is the amount people tell the Internal Revenue Service they earned, after subtracting a bunch of things like depreciation, interest, past losses and, in Trump’s case, questionable business expenses. Operating income captures the amount businesses make from their standard operations, ignoring a bunch of fancy accounting tricks and financial maneuvers.

Trump’s operating income is real and documented, laid out in paperwork from local tax offices, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the president’s business partners. Don’t be fooled: The news is not that the president is broke (the Times story notes that tax returns do not list someone’s net worth). The news, instead, is that Donald Trump seems to have avoided paying much in taxes despite significant operating profits at certain properties. In other words, he figured out how to share very little of his fortune with the country he now leads.

Forbes. 09/28/2020.

He continues the thread, starting with the third paragraph of the New York Times article.

Other information found in the New York Times reporting:

The tax records for Mr. Trump and his hundreds of companies show precisely how much money he has received over the years, and how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president. The records also provide the first reliable window onto his finances before 2014, the earliest year covered by his required annual disclosures, showing that his total profits from some projects outside the United States were larger than indicated by those limited public filings.

Based on the financial disclosures, which report much of his income in broad ranges, Mr. Trump’s earnings from the Istanbul towers could have been as low as $3.2 million. In the Philippines, where he licensed his name to a Manila tower nearly a decade ago, the low end of the range was $4.1 million — less than half of the $9.3 million he actually made. In Azerbaijan, he collected more than $5 million for the failed hotel project, about twice what appeared on his public filings.

It did not take long for conflicts to emerge when Mr. Trump ran for president and won. The Philippines’ strongman leader, Rodrigo Duterte, chose as a special trade envoy to Washington the businessman behind the Trump tower in Manila. In Argentina, a key person who had been involved in a Uruguayan licensing deal that earned Mr. Trump $2.3 million was appointed to a cabinet post.

The president’s conflicts have been most evident with Turkey, where the business community and the authoritarian government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have not hesitated to leverage various Trump enterprises to their advantage. When Turkish-American relations were at a low point, a Turkish business group canceled a conference at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel; six months later, when the two countries were on better terms, the rescheduled event was attended by Turkish government officials. Turkish Airlines also chose the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia to host an event.

The New York Times. 09/27/2020.

There is more, and I probably left out something, others will find more important. Bottom line, it appears, on the surface at least, that our sitting U.S. President has evaded taxes and most likely committed perjury when signing tax forms.

Stay tuned, as the New York Times said this is just the first article in a series.

Back to midnight in D.C., tweeting from President Bat Shit Crazy.

From the article: [never fear I didn’t read the comments].

Project Veritas has released the results of an investigation into alleged ballot harvesting by supporters of Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, a key swing state in the 2020 presidential election.
Video footage captured by Project Veritas shows an operative, Liban Mohamed, bragging about collecting hundreds of ballots.
“Numbers do not lie. Numbers do not lie. … You can see my car is full. All these here are absentee ballots. Can’t you see? Look at all these; my car is full,” Mohamed can be heard saying in the video.

The video also includes testimony from a whistleblower, Omar Jamal, who called Rep. Omar’s alleged ballot harvesting an “open secret” and also discussed an alleged cash-for-votes scheme organized by staffers of Rep. Omar.
“She [Ilhan Omar] will do anything that she can do to get elected and she [Ilhan Omar] has hundreds of people on the streets doing that,” said Jamal.
James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas, said, “Ballot harvesting is real, and it has become a big business. Our investigation into this ballot harvesting ring demonstrates clearly how these unscrupulous operators exploit the elderly and immigrant communities — and have turned the sacred ballot box into a commodities trading desk.”
O’Keefe said, “We are showing Americans what is really going on in one of our great cities — but, it is not me saying — we have the operatives on tape saying it all themselves.”

Project Veritas said its investigation found three locations inside Ward 6, a ballot harvesting triangle, where the scheme operates: The Riverside Plaza apartments, the senior citizen community at Horn Towers, and the Minneapolis Elections and Voter Service.

Breitbart. 09/27/2020.

Newsweek explained that, “Ballot harvesting is not illegal in Minnesota, however. A district court in the state denied a Republican motion to stay a temporary injunction against a law that made it illegal for anyone to help more than three people vote. Jeremy Slevin, Senior Communications Director for Omar, said: “The amount of truth to this story is equal to the amount Donald Trump paid in taxes of ten out of the last fifteen years: zero. And amplifying a coordinated right-wing campaign to delegitimize a free and fair election this fall undermines our democracy.””

They also explain that Project Veritas has “a history of dubious claims and doctored videos. O’Keefe first came to prominence in 2009 with videos about ACORN, a community group that lost federal funding and had to shut down as a result.”

O’Keefe ended up paying “$100,000 to a former ACORN employee who didn’t consent to be filmed and claimed he called the police after a disguised O’Keefe asked how he could make underage prostitution look like a legitimate business,” they add, “Since 2009, O’Keefe and Project Veritas have carried out several “sting” operations against liberal and Democratic groups. O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for unlawfully entering federal property in 2010 relating to an operation involving then-Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu.”

About the timing of the release; O’Keefe’s claims also come just two weeks after liberal groups in Wisconsin asked the state’s attorney general to investigate Project Veritas. They say members of the group mislead them by using false identities and tried to get them to agree “to use illegal methods.”

Congresswoman Omar responded to the claim via Twitter.

Iron O Range =’s Iron Range, near as I can tell.

Minnpost explains that; The Mesabi Iron Range wasn’t the first iron range to be mined in Minnesota, but it has arguably been the most prolific. Since the 1890s, the Mesabi has produced iron ore that boosted the national economy, contributed to the Allied victory in World War II, and cultivated a multiethnic regional culture in northeast Minnesota.

The end their history lesson on the Mesabi Iron Range by writing “Even with school consolidation and diminishing populations, the Mesabi Iron Range has continued to mine taconite, and copper-nickel mining may start in the near future. While the Range is still enduring a long transformation, the mining industry has left an indelible mark on the region’s economy, landscape, and regional culture.”

He ended his late night tweeting pushing a book written by a person who was tired of others telling him what to think. The tweet was from June 7th that he quotes over.

I also clicked on the store, and it’s true, you can purchase these socks or this super reduced in price Trump 2020 banner!!!!

DavidHarrisJr.store.

You can also pick up his book for 20 dollars.

Prior to denying but somehow confirming the reporting from the New York Times, he once again earned a Twitter link explaining how he’s lying about the upcoming Presidential election.

Seem =’s seen Marshall Cohen made a typo. Cohen is not wrong about President When in Doubt Lie, Cheat, and Steal’s relentlessness to undermine faith in our voting process.

After he denied a story he called “FAKE NEWS,” only to add that The Times somehow “illegally obtained information,” to use with “bad intent.” He responded to Former Vice President Joe Biden’s dismissal of Dummies “strongly demanded,” statement that they be drug tested prior to Tuesday nights debate.

*Flashback*

September 27th, 2020.

Biden’s campaign response.


Changes are the 2 p.m. D.C., time event will be another campaign rally on tax payers dime. #Winning.

Live Feeds.

Fox News.

It’s unclear if he will take questions, if he does, the tax story will be featured, along with a new report from NBC News that says CDC Director Robert Redfield was overheard on a phone call stating that everything Dr. Scott Atlas says is false.

Atlas claims that what he says is based on science in the linked article.

This post might be updated.

This is an Open Thread.

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About Tiff 2521 Articles
Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.