Nicolle Wallace and Tim O'Brien talk about the "Pandora's Box" that would be opened once Trump handed over his taxes, and if his personal banker at Deutsche Bank was forced to testify.
August 3, 2020

The hits keep coming for Trump, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Nicolle Wallace and Tim O'Brien discussed the latest legal blow: a court filing by Manhattan DA Cy Vance, showing that Cy Vance is looking into bank and insurance fraud by Trump and his company. According to Wallace, "[i]t's a broader scope than we first knew, and it comes as Vance continues to argue that the president must comply with the subpoena for eight years of his taxes." Here's O'Brien's take on that:

O'BRIEN: I would suspect that Michael Cohen is a key source in this. He said in his congressional testimony that Donald Trump's chief operating officer, Matthew Calamari, yes, Trump's chief operating officer's last name is Calamari. His accountant, essentially, Allen Weisselberg, and Ron Lieberman and other executives all had knowledge of Trump routinely inflating the value of his assets in order to get bank loans and insurance policies.
[...]
Clearly, Cy Vance said in court today that they're looking into the possibility of criminal fraud around those things. The shoe that's dropping here is we are now in the wake of the Supreme Court saying that Trump can't withhold his tax returns from a prosecutor. So his tax returns are in play. But also, the other thing that's in play here, Nicolle, is this will probably go beyond the election this fall. And if he doesn't get re-elected, some of the protections of the presidency are going to fall away, and he's going to have to face these prosecutors without that armor around him. So, this is a very significant development.

We know Trump is doing everything possible to delegitimize the November election, and that the longer he can hold on to power, the longer he can avoid facing the legal music in New York. If, heaven forfend, he wins another term (*spits twice over my shoulder*) the statute of limitations runs out. Nothing else matters to him. He has never faced consequences for anything in his life, so he is literally and fully willing to destroy our democratic republic to keep that streak going.

But there is another legal speed bump Trump faces, and with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Yes, Orange Twitler and his little clementine are under scrutiny along with their personal banker with Deutsche Bank, Rosemary Vrablic. Seems she loaned them hundreds of millions of dollars, and made a few unsavory real estate purchases with Jared-of-the-undescended-testicles back in 2013.

Again, here's O'Brien, with a much more professional and educated explanation:

O'BRIEN: Donald Trump welched on billions of dollars of loans in the early 1990s, and after that, no major bank would deal with him. The predecessors to banks like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, et cetera. The bank that continued to do business with Donald Trump was Deutsche Bank, they continued doing business with him even after he litigated in the mid-2000s and tried to walk away from a loan then. That is not typical bank behavior. Deutsche bank has had myriad problems over the years involving money laundering and other issues and has gotten into trouble with regulators in Europe and the United States. They have been trying to clean up their act in recent years. And what's come to the fore, now, is that the Kushners and Trump's private banker, Deutsche Bank was with a number of colleagues buying apartments from the Kushners. That's not an arm's length transaction. It raises questions about whether she was conflicted in terms of any business dealings that she did with Trump and the Kushners. So that's being explored internally at Deutsche Bank now. And that private banking operation at Deutsche Bank is a potential powder keg. If she has to begin to provide evidence or testimony involving work she's done for Trump and Kushners, it is going to unlock a pandora's box for both of those families.

Oh, dear. I know lots of people who wish the Trumps and Kushners would die from COVID. I'm not one of them. I want to see them humiliated out of office, then twisting in the legal winds before they're shackled and permanently clad in orange jumpsuits.

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