President Trump has long proclaimed himself a self-made billionaire, insisting that his wealthy father, Fred C. Trump, provided him almost no financial help.
An exhaustive investigative article published Wednesday by The New York Times says otherwise.
The Times said the article is “the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald J. Trump a gilded life. The reporting makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth.”
Donald Trump, in fact, has received more than $413 million from his father’s empire beginning when the president was a toddler and continuing to this day, the Times reported. Much of that money, according to the report, came through dubious tax schemes Donald Trump participated in during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud.
The Times reports:
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
The Times reported that the president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for the article. But a lawyer for Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings, the article said.
“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”
More from the article, written by David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner:
The findings are based on interviews with Fred Trump’s former employees and advisers and more than 100,000 pages of documents describing the inner workings and immense profitability of his empire. They include documents culled from public sources — mortgages and deeds, probate records, financial disclosure reports, regulatory records and civil court files.
The investigation also draws on tens of thousands of pages of confidential records — bank statements, financial audits, accounting ledgers, cash disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks. Most notably, the documents include more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts. While the records do not include the president’s personal tax returns and reveal little about his recent business dealings at home and abroad, dozens of corporate, partnership and trust tax returns offer the first public accounting of the income he received for decades from various family enterprises.
Read the full article in The New York Times.
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PHOTO: Donald Trump, center, sits with hands folded at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., April 6, 1990, before the start of grand opening ceremonies. Trump attended the gala with his parents, Mary and Fred, and sister US District Court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, right, and brother Robert Trump, left, and his wife Blaine Trump, third from left wearing green. Trump was dateless. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)