Successful criminal mastermind avoids scrutiny…
While driving back from New York City this afternoon, I briefly listened to AOC and fellow Democrats question one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers. I learned that Trump was a successful criminal mastermind who had escaped attention from the authorities and prosecutors for decades. Then he decided that the best way to keep a low profile and avoid close scrutiny of his misdeeds would be to run for and become President.
A specific part that I remember concerned the valuation of a Trump golf course. AOC noted that the management valued the course different for investment purposes than for property tax. Yet this would apparently be true for hundreds or thousands of golf courses in the U.S. (see this article for how golf clubs may be taxed based on a low valuation due partly to a belief that it is beneficial to have some open/green space: “In Pennsylvania, for instance a golf facility can apply for inclusion in the ‘Clean and Green’ Act 515 program, which preserves open space in return for a reduction in taxes.”).
Representative reaction from my virtuous Facebook friends:
Well, I was wrong about Trump. I substantially underestimated his perfidious criminal conduct, if half of what Cohen says is true, and I suspect most of it is.
Readers: Did you watch the hearing? Learn anything new?
[Separately, if you want to see what a country looks like when it can’t support any additional people with its infrastructure, try driving Boston to New York and back during what used to be the mid-day off peak. The forecast on Monday morning was for 47-knot wind gusts at Teterboro, of which 37 knots would have been a crosswind component. It would have been 1.5 hours of moderate-to-severe turbulence to get there in the Cirrus. So it was time for the Honda Odyssey to show off its immunity to crosswinds (fairly impressive!).]
Related:
- “Cohen: Trump asked me to mislead public about hush money payments” (CNN), i.e., a young woman supposedly had sex with an older man and definitely received cash
- “Even as President, Trump Focused on Hush Money, Cohen Says” (NYT), i.e., a young woman was got paid as a result of having had sex with an older man
- “Michael Cohen: I probably threatened people for Trump hundreds of times” (Vox): over a 10-year period, Trump needed this one lawyer to threaten people 500 times. I.e., every week the two had a meeting and Trump gave him the name of a new person to threaten. (Cohen was thus threatening more people than the book Bad Blood describes the entire firm of Boies Schiller Flexner threatening on behalf of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos).