Tuesday's CNN panel on Anderson Cooper detailed the schemes President Donald Trump and his family employed to avoid paying millions in taxes.
In a statement from the White House, staff claimed that the Trump family used respectable experts to help them design their finances and estate planning and that the IRS signed off on it. That's not entirely true, according to New York Times reporter Russ Buettner.
"So, I think we've pointed out cases where it looks like things were just hidden from [the IRS], and that's how it kind of slid through," he explained. "In other cases, like the one we were just discussing, that was never reviewed by anyone, that we're aware of."
CNN legal analyst Jeff Toobin called it "grotesque" saying that most people don't have the ability to cheat on their taxes like this. It's only the wealthy that have the money to be able to funnel into different places, shell corporations or off-shore accounts.
"And an important thing to know now is that the IRS is being cut by the Republicans over and over again, so they have no investigators or very few investigators to ferret stuff out like this," Toobin said. "So, it's open season for people who can hire lawyers and create scams like this. So, what the Trumps have done is epidemic throughout the whole economy."
Researcher and author Michael D'Antonio noted that all of these things fit perfectly into what he witnessed with Trump.
"I think the portrait of Fred Trump is a close fit," he said. "One of the wonderful things that The Times has done is they're describing a method that Fred Trump used in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, he then got caught a couple of times. There's an example where The Times writes about the family essentially leasing boilers back to Fred Trump in order to both reap the profit from the lease, but also retain a lot of the equity in it."
This is apparently what Trump did when he was building apartments and got caught by the New York Assembly renting himself equipment, D'Antonio explained.
"In the 50s, he used rents on veterans and low-income families that were moving into federally subsidized housing," the biographer continued. "And Dwight D. Eisenhower caught him. What's fascinating about this is that we don't have regulation anymore. There's not really an IRS checking up on entities, so, it's pretty easy to get away with all of this stuff."
Watch the full panel discussion below:
