Trump's sister, Judge Maryanne Barry, implicated in family financial fraud

An article, "Trump's sister quietly retired in February, and it's actually a really big deal," was written by Vox.com's Matthew Yglesias:

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"The retirement of a federal appeals court judge is normally not a huge national news story, and while the fact that Maryanne Trump Barry is the sister of the president of the United States makes her decision a bit more noteworthy, on its face, you can still see why it’s been treated as relatively minor news.

"But peer a little bit deeper and the reason Barry is stepping down makes it clear that the story is a very big deal indeed.

"The key is that last fall, the New York Times published a bombshell investigation of Donald and Maryanne Trump’s father Fred Trump’s finances that appeared to reveal . . . that he illegally evaded taxes in transferring much of his wealth to his children . . .

"All this happened a long time ago, and the statute of limitations would have expired on any possible crimes. But some shrewd people noted that there is no statute of limitations on judicial ethics investigations and filed a complaint against not Donald Trump but Maryanne. This would have launched an investigation of her that would, were she found guilty of wrongdoing, have implicated the president as well.

"Now, according to Russ Buettner and Susan Craig of the New York Times, [Maryanne Trump] Barry has retired, which renders the investigation moot. Their reporting indicates that this all actually happened in February. . . Ten days later, Barry filed her paperwork to resign.

"And it certainly raises questions of whether she and her brother might have something to hide. . . .

"Did the Trump family's tax practices break the law?  An expert explains.

"The most striking of these . . . began in 1992. The Trump kids, including Donald and Maryanne [Note:  these "kids" were in their 50s in 1992], were set up as the owners of a company . . . [which sold equipment and supplies] at unusually high prices to buildings owned by Fred Trump. On its face, this looks a lot like an illegal effort to evade gift and estate tax by masking it as a business transaction.

"What’s more, Fred Trump then compounded the offense because the buildings in question were rent-regulated and he cited the high prices paid as legal justification for rent increases.  This is one of several schemes the court ethics panel was in a position to look at, but now the investigation is off.

"This all makes for extremely relevant context as the Trump administration continues to defy legally valid requests from congressional Democrats to see his tax returns.

"There has been, for years, considerable speculation around what Trump might be hiding in those returns. . . .  a possibility raised by the Times’s examination of Fred Trump’s returns is that examining his son’s returns would, likewise, reveal tax evasion.

"Fred Trump evidently managed to slip these shenanigans past the investigators at the IRS, . . . But if those returns were to be disclosed today, they would obviously attract a ton of attention from the media and various outside experts, and Maryanne Trump wouldn’t be able to avoid accountability by quietly retiring."

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Now, to be fair to Judge Trump Barry, she just turned 80 last week; so that may also have had something to do with her retirement plans.   But, shall we just say, sometimes you can kill two birds with one stone?

It seems pretty clear on the face of it that the Trump family has participated in very shady, and perhaps illegal, evasion of taxes -- i.e., cheating the government and the American people;

Ralph

PS:  Related story:   According to analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington think tank, the following corporations are among those that make huge profits yet who, under the new Trump tax law, will pay zero corporate taxes for 2018:   Amazon, Netflix, Chevron, Eli Lilly, Delta Airlines, GM, IBM, and Goodyear.   And, unlike the Trumps, this appears to be completely legal, thanks to the new Trump tax law.