Donald Trump will witness the veil ripped away to reveal his fake failed "dump-ire"

Hail to the Fraudster in Chief

Echo opinion by Paul Krugman in The New York Times:

Ever since debt was invented in ancient Sumer, there have probably been people enriching themselves through bad investments. 

So, the trick is to make these investments using other people’s money.

Suppose, for example, that a wheeler-dealer uses borrowed funds to make risky investments in New Jersey casinos. If the investments somehow end up making money, he can pocket the profits. But if the investments fail, he may — if he’s been tricky about the wording in his loans or manages to persuade his creditors not to go after his other assets — be able to walk away and leave other people holding the bag. That is, it’s heads he wins, tails the creditors lose.

He may also be able to siphon off some of the borrowed money, say by having the casinos pay him or businesses he owns large sums for various services before they go bust.

As readers may have guessed, this isn’t a hypothetical example. It is the story of Donald Trump’s New Jersey casino empire, a venture ending in multiple bankruptcies that was a disaster for outside investors but appears to have been quite profitable for Trump.

The problem for someone who wants to play that game is how to persuade lenders to play along. Why would any people risk their money in such dubious ventures?

Well, there are a couple of ways to pull this off. One, perhaps the main story with those casinos, is sheer power of persuasion, perhaps supported by a cult of personality: Convince lenders that these dubious ventures are actually good investments or that you’re a uniquely effective businessman who can turn straw into gold.

Alternatively, you can try to persuade lenders that they’re safe by offering collateral that seems sufficient to protect them but isn’t, because you’ve inflated the value of the assets you put up and possibly also inflated your personal wealth to make it seem you are both a brilliant businessman and a reliable borrower.

Which is why making false claims about the value of assets you control is illegal. And on Tuesday, Justice Arthur F. Engoron ruled in New York that Trump did, in fact, persistently commit fraud by overvaluing his assets, possibly by as much as $2.2 billion.

Trump and his lawyers offered, as I read it, three main defenses against accusations of fraud.

1.  First, they argued that the value of real estate is, to some extent, subjective. Indeed, if you own a building, you don’t know for sure what it’s worth until you try to sell it.

But while there’s some wiggle room in valuing real estate, it’s limited. And Engoron ruled that Trump went far beyond those limits, creating a “fantasy world” of indefensible valuations. For example, the Trump Organization treated rent-regulated apartments as being worth as much as noncontrolled apartments. The judge made special note of Trump’s claim that he had a 30,000-square-foot residence in New York, when the true number was only 11,000; square footage isn’t subjective.

2.  Second, Trump’s lawyers argued that banks that lent to him got repaid in full, so there was no harm done. Of course, that wasn’t true for lenders caught up in Trump’s earlier bankruptcies. More generally, playing heads-I-win-tails-you-lose based on fraudulent valuations isn’t legal even if sometimes the bets come up heads.

3.  Finally, Trump declared on social media that “my Civil Rights have been taken away from me” and that he borrowed money from “sophisticated Wall Street banks” that presumably wouldn’t have been easily deceived by fraud. If you know anything about Wall Street’s attitudes toward Trump, that’s a real hoot. For years, only one major Wall Street player, Deutsche Bank, was willing to deal with him at all, leading to much puzzlement about that bank’s motives. And eventually Deutsche Bank also pulled the plug, citing concerns about his financial claims. Trump did manage to pay off that debt, although it’s a mystery where he found the cash. But as I just explained, getting lucky is no excuse for fraud.

What’s remarkable about Engoron’s finding that Trump committed large-scale fraud (it’s now a ruling, not a mere accusation) is what it says about the man who became president and the voters who supported him.

Back in 2016, some observers warned conventional political analysts that they were underrating Trump’s chances because they didn’t appreciate how many Americans believed that he was a brilliant businessman — a belief based largely on his role on the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” What we now know is that the old joke was, in Trump’s case, the simple truth: He wasn’t a real business genius; he just played one on TV.

But the truth is that this was obvious, to anyone willing to see, from the beginning of Trump’s political rise.

I’d like to predict that this ruling will finally destroy Trump’s public persona. In reality, however, his supporters will probably brush this ruling off, partly because they’ll view it as the product of a left-wing conspiracy, partly because at this late date, few of those who backed him will be willing to admit that they were taken in by a charlatan.

But they were. And the fact that so many Americans were and remain fooled should lead to some serious national soul-searching.

Donald Trump is swirling in legal abyss

In my opinion, Donald Trump lives in a culture of lies and as a result he is knee keep in legal and political quick sand- he is "individual 1".

Bloomberg Opinion by Timothy O'Brien

As Donald Trump and his lawyers turn toward 2019, they’ll have to contend with a legal narrative that’s taken fuller shape through a flurry of court filings and news reports that began landing about three weeks ago and extended through Friday afternoon: Members of Trump’s presidential campaign — and possibly “Individual 1” himself — may have orchestrated a number of criminal conspiracies that took root before and during the 2016 presidential campaign, continued after Trump won the election, and have tainted the White House’s policies and torn at its operations ever since.

The breadth of investigations is so sweeping — as many on social media and reporters with the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg News have already noted — that few of the worlds Trump inhabits have escaped prosecutors’ attention. The Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, the Trump family, the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, the Trump inauguration, and the Trump White House are all being probed for wrongdoing.

The Trump team’s possible collusion with Russia to sabotage and tilt the 2016 election, a probe spearheaded by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, pulls many strands of the investigations together. Trumplandia’s intersection with Russia may have started with business propositions more than a decade ago (such as the Trump SoHo hotel and condominium), and included more recent undertakings like a project in Moscow, before evolving into a political partnership during the 2016 campaign after Trump’s presidential prospects brightened.

But there are many other threads, some related to Russia and some not, that investigators are pulling on. The Trump inauguration raised $107 million, and $40 million of that amount remains unaccounted for; Ivanka Trump, according to a joint report from ProPublica and WNYC, refereed payments to Trump’s Washington hotel during the inauguration. The Wall Street Journal said last week that federal investigators are examining whether inauguration donors gave money in exchange for policy favors.

Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney, has told prosecutors that Trump directed him to violate campaign finance laws by paying hush-money to two alleged paramours during the 2016 campaign to keep Trump’s presidential bid alive. David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, said he helped bury stories about Trump’s affairs for the same reason. New York law enforcement officials are probing how Trump managed his charitable foundation, and they and federal law enforcement officials have also corralled the president’s longtime accountant and chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, for questioning.

“Let me point out that there are a lot of unanswered ethical, legal and factual questions but clearly this was not a good week for President Trump, nor for his campaign organization and these allegations are concerning,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, in an interview Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “But we need to wait until we have the entire picture. And that's why it's so critical that the special counsel be allowed to complete his investigation unimpeded so that we can have the full picture.”

The reality, however, is that Trump is having much more than a bad week. Mueller’s investigation, which Trump routinely pillories as a “witch hunt,” may end up being narrowly drawn around the 2016 campaign, collusion and obstruction of justice — and conclude relatively soon. On the other hand, investigations in New York, including the state attorney general’s probe of Trump’s charity and finances and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s examination of Cohen’s dealings with the president, could wind up reaching back years into Trump’s business history — well beyond some of the events that have come to light in the last week — and proceed for much longer than the Mueller probe.

If that’s the course the various investigations follow, then Trump may emerge as a brazen grifter who, by aspiring to the White House like a wizened, soiled version of Icarus, flew beyond the boundaries of his own luck and abilities and delivered his business, children and well-being into the hands of prosecutors.

And it’s not only law enforcement officials nipping at the president’s heels. The House of Representatives, which Democrats will control come January, are teeing up probes that could explore new angles and go on longer than the Mueller investigation.

Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat who will head the House Intelligence Committee, said he plans to dig deeply into Trump’s finances. On Sunday, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that he wants to examine Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank AG because it could expose “a form of compromise” with Russia. (I wrote a recent column detailing Trump’s history with Deutsche after German authorities raided the bank in a money laundering probe, noting that the House Financial Services Committee also wants to explore the Trump-Deutsche relationship.)

“The concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money," Schiff told NBC. “And this, apparently, was the one bank that was willing to do business with the Trump Organization.”

Last week, Representative Nancy Pelosi, the likely incoming House speaker, said that Democrats will also try to obtain Trump’s income tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service. That promise is likely to ignite a lengthy legal battle with the president, who, unlike his predecessors of recent decades, has declined to make his tax returns public.

In all of the recent legal filings that touch on events in which Trump is involved — hush-money payments and the Moscow project, for example — Trump doesn’t come across as a mere bystander. At a minimum, his actions are the kind that often leave someone described as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” A worst-case scenario is that Trump, depending on how presidential powers and immunity ultimately get defined and adjudicated, could be portrayed as the chief architect of some of the schemes and criminal activities that have swarmed around him.

Trump never thought he would win the presidential election that has landed him in a legal vise. He had seen his previous presidential bids as free marketing opportunities and he likely was drawn to the 2016 campaign for the same reason. (“Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool,” he tweeted recently.) That sort of opportunism undoubtedly seeped down to everyone working for Trump on his campaign and in his White House.

But the president and many of those around him — including advisers and family members — pursued business opportunities or political collaborations long after they had passed the point of simply being unseemly. And now they’re all exposed to the sharp edge of the law.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O'Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.net