Did the Trump Family Historian Drop a Dime to the New York Times?

[DonViejo]

A first cousin of the president kept a trove of financial records that appears to have provided evidence for a major investigation of the Trump family business.

By GWENDA BLAIR October 07, 2018

Nearly 8,000 words into its exhaustive investigation of the elaborate and allegedly illegal schemes by which Donald Trump’s father conserved his wealth and promoted the myth of his son as a self-made billionaire, the New York Times revealed the existence of a sham business the Trump family used to hide massive gifts from Fred Trump to his children, saving himself millions in federal taxes.

The company was called All County Building Supply & Maintenance and it was created in 1992 for the purpose of providing inflated invoices to contractors for Fred Trump’s sprawling real estate holdings in Brooklyn and Queens.

“All County had no corporate offices,” the Times reporters wrote. “Its address was the Manhasset, N.Y., home of John Walter, a favorite nephew of Fred Trump’s. Mr. Walter, who died in January at the age of 83, spent decades working for Fred Trump, primarily helping computerize his payroll and billing systems. He also was the unofficial keeper of Fred Trump’s personal and business papers, his basement crowded with boxes of old Trump financial records.”

Walter, as any Trumpologist knows, was the self-appointed family historian and enjoyed sharing family lore and memorabilia with journalists. He had assumed this role by virtue of his close relationship to the family: He was the son of Fred Trump’s older sister, Elizabeth, who had herself served as Fred Trump’s bookkeeper early in his career as a builder and developer. When I was working on my Trump family biography in the 1990s, I met with Walter in a modest office that was down the hall from Fred’s own longtime quarters at Beach Haven, a government-subsidized apartment complex near Coney Island that Fred had built nearly half a century earlier. Walter, it seemed to me, doled out bits of info in a somewhat gloating way.

For many years, during the long stretch of time when his younger first cousin Donald was a regular on the gossip pages of the New York tabloids and then the star of “The Apprentice” TV show, there wasn’t much demand for Walter’s archival services. Donald Trump was master of his own narrative. That changed when Trump ran for president and soon Walter was the increasingly beleaguered target of an almost unending stream of media requests. By the time his cousin had become the surprise 45th president, Walter had all but resigned his unofficial job. As he said to Michael Kruse in the summer of 2017, “I’m not doing anything. I’m letting Donald do his thing. I just can’t get involved and give information that always comes out wrong … I promised everyone I’m not going to do that.”

more
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/07/trump-new-york-times-tax-evasion-221082

[Achilleaze]

1. ...in a government-subsidized building...

How republican is that? Throw the poor, sick, and elderly under the bus. Damn the hell out of government programs. Then line up with your hand out for republican Welfare for the Wealthy.

upChuck Grassley (R) is following in Freddy Trump's skanky republican footfalls.