House Democrats just told the IRS to cough up President Trump’s tax returns and named five companies in particular that they’re interested in. “The five companies are those that really comprise his empire. These are the five corporate entities that he wholly owns that are basically the picture of his financial interests,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which requested the documents, told The Daily Beast. So why are each of those companies so intriguing to Congress?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Personal returns: In addition to tax documents for Trump’s companies, the House Ways and Means Committee wants the president’s personal returns. Trump consistently refused to release his personal income taxes during the 2016 campaign as other presidential candidates had before him, raising questions about what he wanted to keep from the public eye. But if the committee gets the returns, they won’t be made public, Kildee said. “The next step would be the deep dive analysis, which is as painful as the wait for this letter.” The IRS, he noted, is legally required to hold six years of tax returns (though he thought it may be seven). “So we asked for six.”
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The Donald J Trump Revocable Trust: Trump’s revocable trust is key to understanding the finances of his business empire. In 2017, he transferred his personal interest in a myriad of companies to the revocable trust in response to an outcry about his conflicts of interest. But while the move gives the appearance of divestment, Trump still exercises significant control over the trust, and its two trustees, his son Donald Trump Jr. and longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, are hardly independent buffers.
So why does Congress want a look at the trust’s taxes? As Rep. Kildee said, it’s among the most important entities in the president’s business empire. But there may be another reason: It was Trump’s piggy bank to reimburse Michael Cohen for his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. In Cohen’s plea agreement, prosecutors alleged that “Executive 1”—widely reported to be Weisselberg—emailed a Trump Organization employee instructions to reimburse Cohen for the Daniels payout with the line “Please pay from the Trust.” During his appearance before the House Oversight committee in February, Cohen presented a reimbursement payment check from the trust signed by Trump and dated in March 2017.
Transparency through booze: What little we know about the trust comes from Trump’s 2017 and 2018 financial disclosure forms. How much is it worth? The most we can say is that it’s at least worth $50 million, as the forms reported a Capital One checking and savings account for it that holds a minimum of that amount and perhaps more.
Information about the structure of the trust has come from a more unlikely source: liquor licenses. When Trump became president and transferred his personal ownership to his trust, he had to notify a few state alcoholic beverage control agencies about the new owners of his liquor licenses because his clubs were now under nominally new ownership. ProPublica got hold of the paperwork he sent to officials in Washington, D.C., to notify them about the change in ownership for the Trump International Hotel there. Those documents showed Trump has the authority to pull money out of the trust anytime he wants to.
DJT Holdings: DJT Holdings, owned by the revocable trust, is one of the entities Trump uses to hold properties like his hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., and his golf course in Scotland. It’s also long been a target of Democrats, who want to know more about the D.C. hotel, which foreign diplomats and domestic supplicants make it their business to stay at when they’re in Washington. Attorneys general from Maryland and Washington, D.C., tried to subpoena DJT Holdings’ state and federal tax returns, among other documents, in December 2018 as part of a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s businesses violated the emoluments clause of the constitution.
DTTM Operations: Sift through the ownership structure of the dozens of tiny LLCs dotted throughout Trump’s 2017 and 2018 financial disclosure forms and you’ll see “DTTM Operations” pop up quite a bit. Like DJT Holdings, it’s owned by the revocable trust. It’s also the company used to hold the various companies involved in licensing deals renting out the Trump name on various properties and products.
So what’s so interesting about licensing and trademarks? Trump keeps getting them, including from adversarial foreign countries like China. China has given the Trump family a lot of them since he became president—including nine that it rejected before Trump became president. The timing of China’s decision to grant Ivanka Trump trademarks shortly before her father reversed sanctions on Chinese telecom giant ZTE also raised eyebrows.
Bedminster: The House Democrats’ letter also calls out a few lesser-known entities, including Lamington Farm Club, LFB Acquisition LLC, and LFB Acquisition Member Corp. Local New Jersey news outlet MyCentralJersey.com obtained documents from New Jersey Alcoholic Beverage Control showing that those companies form the ownership structure of Trump’s Bedminster golf course. “There are three specific to the New Jersey golf course and those were included only because there were substantial media reports about tax issues related to that entity,” Rep. Kildee told The Daily Beast.
What was the holdup? Democrats have had the gavel in the House for over three months but are only just starting to ask for Trump’s taxes. What was behind the delay? “Better to do it right than fast. We expect a legal challenge,” Kildee said. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t give anybody around the president the ability to deny it on some technical issue.”
