Politics With Charles P. Pierce
The President Is a Wannabe Oligarch
The President Is a Small Fish Swimming in an Ocean of Corruption With Actual Predators
Donald Trump has a secret Chinese bank account.
By Charles P. Pierce Published: Oct 21, 2020
Samuel Corum//Getty Images
The New York Times continues to dig up delightful truffles from the president*'s financial history.
And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president's tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump's public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear. The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015.
A secret Chinese bank account?
Just as the Founders intended.
And, surely, we all have taken note that the president* paid a helluva lot in taxes to the People's Republic, while not exactly paying his share to this one.
In response to questions from The Times, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said the company had "opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes" associated with efforts to do business there. He said the company had opened the account after establishing an office in China "to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia."
"No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive," Mr. Garten said. "Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose." Mr. Garten would not identify the bank in China where the account is held. Until last year, China's biggest state-controlled bank rented three floors in Trump Tower, a lucrative lease that drew accusations of a conflict of interest for the president.
Get out while you can, Mr. Garten. Open a nice personal-injury firm in a strip mall outside of Sarasota. That's more respectable than working for this operation, and it's all going to come down around you anyway.
But Mr. Trump's plans in China have been largely driven by a different company, Trump International Hotels Management — the one with a Chinese bank account. In 2017, the company reported an unusually large spike in revenue — some $17.5 million, more than the previous five years' combined. It was accompanied by a $15.1 million withdrawal by Mr. Trump from the company's capital account.
A little more than a week ago, the Supreme Court essentially killed the long-running lawsuit brought by congressional Democrats based on the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which forbids a president from receiving money from a foreign government. The Court refused to take up the matter after a lower court ruling dismissed the case. In doing so, the lower court stated:
"The Members can, and likely will, continue to use their weighty voices to make their case to the American people, their colleagues in the Congress and the President himself, all of whom are free to engage that argument as they see fit. But we will not — indeed we cannot — participate in this debate."
In retrospect, the courts may have called this ballgame a little early.
Maybe they called it a little early on the Emoluments question.
Every now and again, I get an email from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Currently, the ICIJ is plowing through a vast trove of leaked documents called the FinCen Files that were originally obtained by BuzzFeed News from the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. These documents demonstrate that, in terms of financial ethics, the difference between the way international finance and international drug cartels operate is not vast—and that, more than occasionally, it's the same thing. Basically, the files show that international finance is pretty much a laundromat for horrible people the world over—cartels, terrorists, dictators who looted the wealth of their country before bailing, and "fugitive financiers," of whom there are quite a few these days. From the ICIJ:
Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world. The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money. U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.
And, amid the documents, some familiar characters emerge.
JPMorgan also processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade, the records show, for Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump. The bank shuttled at least $6.9 million in Manafort transactions in the 14 months after he resigned from the campaign amid a swirl of money laundering and corruption allegations spawning from his work with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
The genuinely frightening part of it all is that, in this vast ocean of corruption, our president* is a very small fish swimming with predators who are much smarter and much richer than he is. He's an oligarch manque who's failed at every actual business he's ever run, and succeeded only in running a fake one on a television show. And he's dragged this nation into the deep water with him, with god alone knows what consequences we'll find out about later on.
A secret fcking Chinese bank account?
Lord save us.
The President Is a Wounded Animal
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
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