Did Trump commit tax fraud? New evidence suggests its possible

On January 26th, the special monitor appointed by Manhattan Supreme Justice Arthur Engoron to oversee Donald Trump’s businesses told the judge in a 12-page letter that the former president’s financial information had a lot of problems. 

Judge Barabra Jones was tasked with watching over the Trump Organization and digging into the complicated details of the former president’s business empire, and Jones' latest report indicated she had “identified certain deficiencies in the financial information” according to her letter to Engoron. 

The deficiencies discovered by Judge Jones included what she wrote were “disclosures that are either incomplete, present results inconsistently, and/or contain errors.” But that wasn’t where the former president’s problems ended. 

A footnote midway through the letter seemed to reveal that Trump claimed to owe an enormous debt to himself, one that did not exist, and may not have ever existed according to reporting from The Daily Beast. So what do we know about the debt?

Trump may have avoided taxes on $48 million dollars in income, a sum that he has said for years was what he owed as a debt to one of his companies according to an analysis of information from Business Insider that was cited by Judge Jones' letter. 

“When I inquired about this loan, I was informed that there are no loan agreements that memorialize the loan, but that it was a loan that was believed to be between Donald J. Trump, individually, and Chicago Unit Acquisition for $48 million," Judge Jones wrote.

“However, in recent discussions with the Trump Organization, it indicated that it has determined that this loan never existed—and thus that it would be removed from any upcoming forms submitted to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and would also be removed from subsequent versions of [corporate financial statements],” Jones added.

The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger noted that if what Judge Jones discovered turns out to be true, it would mean the Trump Organization “essentially admitted” that all of the financial disclosures filed by Trump with the federal government listed a fake debt. 

Trump Organization Chief Legal Counsel Alan Garten has challenged the claim made by Judge Jones and told the Daily Beast during a telephone interview that the comment from the monitor in her letter to Judge Engoron about the loan was inaccurate.

Garten explained that the loan issue of the multi-million dollar loan was “one of many inaccuracies contained in the monitor’s letter” and added that it would be addressed in court. Trump’s personal lawyer also claimed Judge Jones’ conclusion was wrong. 

“That the monitor seeks to now perpetuate this folly is beyond the pale,” Clifford Robert wrote in a court filing according to a separate report from The Daily Beast. “The Trump entities of course never said the loan did not exist.”

Robert explained that the Trump Organization had sent a copy of an internal company memorandum that said the business had “‘no liabilities or obligations outstanding’ to the loan at that time” before going on to attack Judge Jones. 

“The Monitor’s deliberate mischaracterization casts further doubt on her competency and veracity,” Robert continued in his letter. “This is yet another nonissue and material misstatement by the Monitor and simply fails to support continued oversight.”

Trump’s lawyer also accused Jones of “desperately” seeking “to justify the continued receipt of millions of dollars in fees going forward” and noted in his statement Jones had received $2.6 million in fees for her work as an independent monitor on Trump’s case

This isn’t the first time Trump’s mysterious multi-million dollar loan to himself has made news headlines according to The Daily Beast. Trump’s loan came up in a 2016 interview with the New York Times and he explained the situation quite simply. 

“We don’t assess any value to it because we don’t care,” Trump explained at the time. “I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank.” However, there may be very real consequences for his actions according to experts.