PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Number7 on April 05, 2023, 12:17:21 PM
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Yep.
You read that right.
The mother fucking asswipe, alvin bragg made a case that PRESIDENT TRUMP was not being accused of tax fraud as commie democrats prayed.
You have to wonder what is next for the morons masquerading as lawyers that the criminal syndicate known as the democrat party is doing these days.
You Won't Believe the Most Outrageous Claim in the Trump Indictment
The Donald Trump indictment is our Late Roman Republic cirque du jour, and until now I’ve recused myself from writing about it. I had to wait for that one tiny detail to emerge, that one giant tell, so absurd that it required the special attention of the man who invented drunk blogging.
Only now, on Day Two of our accelerating descent into Total Banana Republic from Partly Banana Republic, has that absurdity come to light.
ASIDE: Yes, a tiny detail can be a giant tell. Have you never played poker?
To see that absurdity in all its slimy glory, we must venture now to the pages of POLITICO, the semi-official mouthpiece of all goodthinking Outer Party swamp-dwellers.
“The charges against Trump do not include any tax fraud offenses,” Josh Gerstein reported on Wednesday, “that some legal experts said they hoped to see to buttress the seriousness of the case.”
I must interrupt myself for a moment to remind you that when someone at POLITICO uses a phrase like “some legal experts said…,” what they really mean is, “group-thinking swamp-dwellers all agree…” That done, let’s get back to Gerstein’s report.
“The statement of facts [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg filed along with the indictment makes a surprising claim,” and when Gerstein describes it as “surprising,” what I took away from it was “gob-smackingly stupid.” The problem, you see, is “that Trump and his associates engaged in deception by paying New York state more in taxes than it was owed.”
Trump cheated on his taxes by paying too much in taxes? What was he supposed to be distracting us from — that Orange Man Bad because Orange Man Bad?
According to Bragg’s statement, “The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.”
What all that boils down to is this: Trump allegedly paid his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, $180,000 in legal fees instead of just $130,000 to reimburse him for the alleged hush money to Stormy Daniels.
The “fraud” here is that Cohen’s payment was recorded as legal fees when Bragg says it was hush money plus an extra fee to cover the taxes Cohen owed on legal fees, but wouldn’t have owed for money transferred from Trump to Daniels via Cohen.
Got that?
But the best evidence we have so far shows that Cohen acted on his own, according to testimony last month from another Trump lawyer, Robert Costello. “If they want to go after Donald Trump,” he said, “and they have solid evidence, so be it. But Michael Cohen is far from solid evidence.” Bragg never brought in another witness to contradict Costello’s grand jury testimony about Cohen.
If there was any fraud here, it looks like it might have been committed by Cohen against Trump — charging him $180,000 for lord-knows-what in a misguided effort to “protect” Trump from a discredited adult actress.
So if you want to know why Bragg is trying to smear Trump as a tax cheat without actually charging him as a tax cheat, now you know. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
Daniels, you’ll recall, was just ordered to pay Trump an additional $120,000 on top of the $500,000 she’d already had to reimburse him in legal fees for her ridiculous defamation suit.
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Why that scoundrel (Trump). He is purposely trying to make the rest of us honest citizens look bad by overpaying his taxes!
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So if I understand:
(1) Trump pays Cohen $180,000 in legal fees. But I presume he did not deduct it as a business expense, which would cause him to overpay on taxes.
(2) Since they are categorized as legal fees, and not a simple pass-through, the fees are taxable income to Cohen. Presumably $50,000 in taxes to state and fed.
(3) Cohen pays $130,000 to Daniels. Net to Cohen is presumably ~$0. (Wonder how Daniels declared that $130,000 income to the IRS, assuming she did?)
(4) Bragg presumably claims the failure in (1) to deduct a business expense shows that Trump did not consider it a deductible business expense. Ergo it was something else - hush money categorized as a business expense in order to hide its intent (but from who?)
Bragg's claim “The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme,” makes no sense to me.
If he had written “The participants also took steps that mischaracterized the taxable category of the transfer to obscure the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of a scheme to bypass election reporting laws,” he'd have come closer to (I think) to outlining his alleged case. He doesn't seem that bright, though. But the mental gymnastics needed to consider it as something other than a simple deduction oversight are a wonder to behold.