Politics - News Analysis

New York Prosecutors Believe Ivanka Trump Skimmed Millions From the 2016 Inaugural Fund and Where It Stands Now

So we’re doing a little look back, a retrospective on a couple of things that some of our least tolerable Trumps did or went through this year, which started years ago, and what we wrote at the time, filling in some stuff we’ve learned since.

We put what we wrote then in italics.

There is some movement regarding a lawsuit filed in January meant to nab Ivanka Trump for illegally over-billing the non-profit Inauguration Committee. Let’s set this out clearly. People donated in record amounts to an inauguration that spent very little money with the promise that all leftover funds would go to charity. As you might guess, there was preciously little that leftover to go to charity, like fifteen bucks, we kid. maybe $15,000 – not a lot, we know that.

The thing is, and everyone knew this, it’s just one of those things that Americans sort of “accept” from grifters like the Trumps. People donate a shitload of cash hoping it falls into Trump’s pocket (it will) and thus influences Trump, (It did).  The tricky part is getting that big big big lump of cash into your own bank account. It’s not easy because it’s mostly illegal, you just have to work hard.

But Trump had a hotel in Washington DC! If they just charged $250,000 per night per room for every inauguration guest, that would take the money out, right quick-like. Problem solved. Nyet as they say in Trump circles. Because the Inauguration committee is non-profit, people can judge whether payments constitute illegal bilking of a non-profit.

This was precisely Ivanka’s problem, though not being quite as obvious as $250,000 per room. She did start at $450,000 a day for the ballroom. We speculate that you can rent the University of Wisconsin for $450,000 per day and so some lawyer got ahold of her and said no, that’s too high, she might have gone down from there until she ended at $180,000 per day and that still got her sued. Too much. And she had a deposition taken.

Let’s take a look back at what we wrote long ago regarding the use of all the inauguration funds, some of it involved criminal investigations that are ongoing. Ivanka’s recent deposition was in a civil suit by DC for billing a non-profit.

It doesn’t take an FBI agent with 30 years of experience to see that all that money pouring in, over $114 million for an inauguration committee, a number that vastly exceeded all previous inauguration funding, despite this being a smaller party maybe be going to bad ends. Rumors circulated that much of the money originated outside the United States, which operated as a big red light. Apparently, that strobing right light proved too difficult to ignore, and the investigations started.

Back to civil matters:

In the civil complaint, Attorney General Karl Racine charged the Trump inaugural committee and the Trump Organization with using around $1 million of charitable funds to improperly enrich the Trump family.

We should have known right back then just how cheap these people would be. Billionaires leave $1 million as a tip. Wow, we were downright clairvoyant at times:

Someone who cares about what is legal versus illegal attempted to intervene and warn Don and Ivanka. Winston-Wolkoff probably knew better than anyone that this was standard practice for the Trumps, and if memory serves, she knew she best leave a trail of evidence proving she wasn’t doing this on her own volition or for her own enrichment. (She got plenty rich anyway)….

…. Winston Wolkoff was the one attempting to warn Ivanka about charging too much. Ivanka likely cares for laws as much as daddy does and knew the price would be met.

Must have been when she started warning and later would start taping stuff Melania. Friendships get tossed away fast around the Trumps, especially when investigations come around and someone needs to be blamed.

This particular article doesn’t even get into the most unseemly practices that have been alleged. There are allegations that the committee paid an ungodly rate for services to Winston-Wolkoff, a very good friend of Melania, close to $24 million if memory serves (Winston-Wolkoff has the ring of someone who is comfortable dealing in large amounts of money and someone willing to look the other way on highly lucrative pay structures.) Let’s stipulate that over $20 million was paid to Winston-Wolkoff for her services provided for this 4-5 day event, and questions remain as to why such an extravagant payment went to Winston-Wolkoff, with many believing that she and her 6 week old company were nothing but a pass-through to Donald Trump.

Our source material used a little loose language. The big payments, the ones for over $20 million were not to Winston-Wolkoffe personally but to her brand spanking new bubbly baby LLC that ran the thing and thus paid some expenses, and that’s where it gets dicey. How much were they “charged” for those expenses?

Here is how a typical scam goes. If they write $100,000 paid out for expenses and pay $100,000 for what would normally cost $40,000, they then get the company accepting the $100,000 an extra $10,000 above the $40,000 to shut up and just have that company pay back the $50,000 to the Trumps through a back door – that’s how it can work, though it’s tough to make it invisible and not all that hard to catch. You’re counting upon being powerful enough to dissuade close investigations.

With a straight face, they still walk around discussing the impossibly corrupt Bidens, while evidence of Trump corruption is everywhere. If New York State and the DC prosecutor (both state jurisdictions outside the oversight of the federal court) investigate this properly, this could be yet another breaking criminal charge set to go off in the last summer of 2020 – perhaps October. Surprise!

They always accuse the other side of shit they’re doing, a trick as old as time.

Now we have Ivanka testifying in a deposition – which can be used in a criminal case, too. Pinning her down to certain facts. She certainly pronounced her simple innocence with one itty bitty tweet: “It should be fair market rate.” As we pointed out. That one tweet means nothing. If her first tweet that day was “Charge $1.4 million until it bleeds out their ears!!” and goes down from there until the last tweet written by her lawyer, it paints a different picture.

Anyway. We thought we’d revisit one of the most noteworthy and ongoing aspects of the Trump family financial issues just from this one issue. It isn’t going away, either. They may end up having to pay a hefty fine, cutting into or taking much of the money they made during the entire shifty endeavor.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak

meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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