In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that allowed Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance to access “millions” of former President Donald Trump’s tax documents, multiple reports have speculated on just how much trouble this could actually mean for Trump. And one Bloomberg journalist thinks it could get even worse for the former president once this is all said and done.
Bloomberg‘s Tim O’Brien is one of the very few journalists who has actually seen Donald Trump’s tax returns with their own two eyes and told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last night that now that Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance has eight years worth of the former president’s tax returns (from the year 2011 through 2019) he knows he’ll be able to sleep better at night. He also adds that Trump “is very afraid of what’s in these documents, I think,” because the financial documents put him in serious jeopardy of criminal charges. But, O’Brien points out, Trump isn’t the only one that could be implicated in this tax mess of his.
The reporter goes on to predict that Trump’s accountant, Allen Weisselberg, will ultimately flip on the former president in connection to the investigation into his taxes.
“The thing to really focus in on here is that it’s not just the tax records that Cy Vance has now,” O’Brien stated. “He probably has reams and reams of the accountant’s work product. This is a criminal case, they’re going to need to prove criminal intent on the part of Trump, his three eldest children, Allen Weisselberg, and anyone else in the Trump Organization who’s fallen under the parameters of this investigation. And if there are email and notes and other records of communication about what they intended to do when they inflated the value of buildings so they could get loans against them and then turned around and deflated the value of the buildings so they could pay lower taxes on them, and there’s a communication around that that predates any of these tax entries, that is gold for a prosecutor.”
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A few hours prior, O’Brien has spoken with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and told her that the specific eight years worth of tax documents that the Manhattan DA’s team has procured “is important, because it predates Trump’s ascent into the White House, and I think helps build the narrative around the money trail and Trump’s motivations for his destructive and obscene dance with people like Vladimir Putin. It’s a shame they couldn’t go back further — think this is one of the tragic misses of Robert Mueller’s investigation, he could have gone back further, I think, than Cy Vance is able to into Trump’s finances.”
He was also sure to note that the investigation has the potential to implicate Eric and Ivanka Trump, at the very least, and “it also targets people inside the Trump Organization who might flip on Trump if they’re exposed to criminal liability,” but “the brass ring in all of this is that if Trump has a criminal conviction, he cannot run for president again, and that’s looming over this entire thing as well.”
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
