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Happy Tax Day! Here are 14,000 words on Trump and his family's decades-long tax-fraud schemes. Here's why the story is central to the Russia investigation: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Donald Trump has always been a terrible businessman. He only managed to stay afloat because his father Fred was constantly bailing him out, often using illegal methods to avoid paying taxes. themoscowproject.org/dispatch/the-t…
By the end of the 1990s, Fred had basically transferred the whole company to his son, meaning Donald’s safety net was basically gone. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
That’s when he turned to guys like Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, who helped him build a new foundation based on foreign-licensing deals with shady characters in Russia and the former Soviet Union. themoscowproject.org/dispatch/the-t…
It’s also when pretty much every bank stopped lending to him, with one exception: Deutsche Bank, which also just happens to be a favorite of Russian money launderers. wsj.com/articles/when-…
That’s how he ended up with projects in hotbeds of corruption like Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Panama, all of which have raised serious red flags for money laundering. newyorker.com/magazine/2017/…
The one constant: Russian money—which creates the exact type of corrupt relationships Putin and his cronies love to exploit. newyorker.com/news/swamp-chr…
That would explain why Trump doesn’t want to release his tax returns: Because doing so would open up to scrutiny the decades of corrupt deals on which he built his fortune and his reputation. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
