Donald J. Trump really is his own worst enemy because he has a big mouth, and the words he uses usually come back to haunt him. Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance explained just that while on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe.’ The Trump Organization and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg were charged by the Manhattan D.A’s office with a list of tax crimes. On Thursday, prosecutors charged the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 counts, and Weisselberg was hit with 15 felony counts connected with an alleged scheme stretching back to 2005 — and Vance addressed Trump’s response to that.
Trump’s own words could come back to bite him in his ass.
“I’m struck every time I hear the former president’s comments,” Vance told host Willie Geist. “He didn’t say, you know, ‘this is untrue, we’re going to fight this.’ He didn’t say like you would think a business owner might, ‘this is outrageous; I can’t believe this was going on in my company.’ Instead, he returns to ‘witch hunt.'”
“What can you say when prosecutors file a highly detailed document that alleges with a lot of specific information that there was a pattern and practice across 15 years of doing all sorts of things to avoid both the payment of taxes by your employees and to permit the corporation to engage in some fraudulent conduct?” Vance continued. “This is a president who infamously in his debate with Hillary Clinton said he was smart because he didn’t pay taxes.”
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“We don’t know yet whether this case will ultimately reach him right now; it’s limited to the corporation that’s his namesake corporation and to the CFO, but those comments in that debate may come back to haunt him,” she added.
Watch:
In 2016, while on the debate stage, Hillary Clinton tore into Trump for not revealing his tax returns. In response, Trump said that he’s “smart” by not paying income taxes — and argued that if he did, the money would be “squandered.”
“The only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax,” Clinton said at the time. Trump shot back: “That makes me smart.”
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
