DragonI

After you receive the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) agency notice that you are under audit, the IRS has up to three years to audit you. While the time varies on different cases, most audits are completed within a year.

Even though the IRS has up to three years to audit your return, they like to close audits well before the statute of limitations expires. In fact, it is actually stated in the IRS training manual – the Internal Revenue Manual – that IRS agents must “strictly adhere to” the rule of opening and closing audits within 26 months after the due of the return or the date it was filed, whichever was later.

If there is a large amount of unreported income, the statute is six years to audit.

“Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.”, NYTimes

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig confirmed at a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Tuesday that there is "no rule that would prohibit the release of a tax return because it's under audit" 

— Axios, April 10, 2019

1. What Trump is trying to hide?
2. Where and how Trump makes his money?
3. If Trump really is a billionaire?
4. Why Trump broke his promise to release his ta returns?
5. Why Mick Mulvaney said Democrats will never get Trump's tax returns?

Trump's lawyers argue he can't be charged while in office — even if he shoots someone

"That's your position?" federal appeals court Judge Denny Chin asked. "That is correct," the president's lawyer responded.

www.nbcnews.com

• belongs to the Federalist Society
• a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. All Republican judges are Federalist Society members including those on SCOTUS 
• Two of Trump’s critics have called Consovoy’s views as “spectacularly anti-constitutional”.

A panel of three federal appeals court judges appeared to be unreceptive Wednesday to President Donald Trump's claim that local prosecutors cannot get his financial records as long as he's in office — and heard an extreme hypothetical example making that case.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”, Trump

Asked about that, Consovoy said a president could be charged with such a crime once he was out of office or if he was impeached and removed from office. "This is not a permanent immunity," he said.

"I'm talking about while in office. Nothing could be done? That's your position?" Judge Denny Chin asked.

"That is correct," Consovoy said.

• Coming to Trump’s defense: An unconventional lawyer for an unconventional president,  Washington Post - Aug. 22, 2019
• William Consovoy: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Heavy

Perspective | Trump’s businesses are full of dirty Russian money. The scandal is that it’s legal.

Shell companies put figures from Putin’s Mafia into Trump Tower. Should that be worrying?

www.washingtonpost.com

Collusion or not, President Trump and the Russians are thick as thieves.

What I mean is that for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.

Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld, a de facto state actor, has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. That oversight may be explained in part by journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what is legal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long insisted that American democracy itself is corrupt. Under his aegis, the Russians have methodically studied various components of the American body politic — campaign finance, our legal system, social media and perhaps especially the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find.

As Oleg Kalugin, a former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told me in an interview for my book “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” the Mafia amounts to “one of the branches of the Russian government today.” 

They had long and deep relationships. According to a tape recording made by former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was fatally poisoned in London, Putin had close ties to Semion Mogilevich, a top mobster, that dated to the early 1990s.

Over the next three decades, dozens of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other white-collar professionals came together to facilitate such transactions on a massive scale. According to a BuzzFeed investigation, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the United States since the 1980s, were shifted “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”

• David Bogatin
• Jacob (Yacov) Bogatin
• Semion Mogilevich *** Russian Mafia Boss
• Vyacheslav Ivankov
• Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov

Russian Agent Maria Butina’s Boyfriend Indicted for Fraud

The federal indictment in South Dakota alleges that he ran a criminal scheme from 1996 to 2018 using a chain of assisted-living homes.

www.thedailybeast.com

“Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump. He wants to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump to visit him in the Kremlin before the election. Let’s talk through what has transpired and Senator Sessions’s advice on how to proceed.” 

“The Kremlin believes that the only possibility of a true reset in this relationship would be with a new Republican White House,”

“Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

— Paul Erickson, email to Trump Campaign Adviser Rick Dearborn in May 2016 BEFORE the Trump Tower Russia Meeting in June 2016

Erickson tried to set up a meeting between Melania Trump and Maria Butina’s handler Alexander Torshin

via NYTimes: Operative Offered Trump Campaign ‘Kremlin Connection’ Using N.R.A. Ties

Paul Erickson, the American political operative and boyfriend of admitted Russian agent Maria Butina, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in South Dakota on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

The indictment alleges that Erickson ran a criminal scheme from 1996 to 2018 using a chain of assisted living homes called Compass Care. Erickson also allegedly defrauded investors through a company called Investing with Dignity that claimed to be “in the business of developing a wheelchair that allowed people to go to the bathroom without being lifted out of the wheelchair.” The indictment says he also ran a fraudulent scheme that claimed to be building homes in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota.

If convicted, Erickson faces up to 20 years in federal prison for each count.

'Most of the GOP leadership has been compromised' by Russian money: Trump biographer

A biographer who detailed the relationship between Donald Trump and the Russian mob explained that Russia’s financial links to the United States extend far beyond the president. Craig Unger, author of House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, wrote in a Reddit AMA that one of the biggest surprise in his book is how Trump has been compromised “for decades.”

www.rawstory.com

Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the Eighties back in the days of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

In 1984, my book shows, the Russian Mafia first began to use Trump real estate to launder money and it continued for decades and may have accounted for billions of dollars flowing to Trump.

In 1988, Trump, after his first trip to Russian, took out full page ads in the NYT and WaPO, etc, touting a foreign policy that was very anti-NATO.

The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee run by Mitch McConnell got millions from [Soviet-born businessman] Leonard Blavatnik. Much, much more int he book. As for the endgame, I think it is already begning to unravel.

In the 90s, the Russians began sending $ to GOP Speaker of the House Tom Delay

Q:  How much of Congress do you think ends up in the final indictments?

Don't know who will be indicted, but a lot of Republicans are implicated. It is sometimes said that in Washington, the biggest scandal is what IS legal, and in this case you will find boatloads of Russian money going to the GOP--often in legal ways. 

The National Rifle Association got $70M from Russia, then funneled it to the GOP. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee got big bucks. I'm certain I've barely scratched the surface. 

The big white shoe law firms--Jones Day, for example-- represent powerful Russian oligarchs who have billions and billions of dollars. Much of this is legal even though I believe it has compromised huge parts of the GOP.

Early on, a source told me that all this was tied to Semion Mogilevich, the powerful Russian mobster. I had never even heard of him, but I immediately went to a database that listed the owners of all properties in NY state and looked up all the Trump properties. Everytime I found a Russian sounding name, I would Google, and add Mogilevich. When you do investigative reporting, you antiicpate drilling a number of dry holes, but almost everyone I googled turned out to be a Russian mobster. Again and again. If you known, New York, you don't expect Trump Tower to be a high crime neighborhood, but there were far too many Russian mobsters in Trump properties for it to be a coincidence.

I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. “Justice” took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to “break” - make up stories in order to get a “deal.” Such respect for a brave man!

— Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump -  Aug 22, 2018 

Rudy Giuliani admits Trump's lawyers have a confidential backchannel to Paul Manafort

Rudy Giuliani has admitted that President Donald Trump’s legal team has a backchannel to communicate with Paul Manafort, the convicted felon who also previously served as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016.

www.rawstory.com

In an interview with Politico, Giuliani said that Trump’s legal team and Manafort’s have a joint defense agreement that allows them to share confidential information with one another.

“All during the investigation we have an open communication with them,” he said. “Defense lawyers talk to each other all the time where as long as our clients authorize it therefore we have a better idea of what’s going to happen. That’s very common.”

Giuliani confirmed he spoke with Manafort's lead defense lawyer Kevin Downing shortly before and after the verdicts were returned in the Virginia trial, but the former mayor wouldn’t say what he discusses with the Manafort team. “It’d all be attorney-client privilege, not just from our point of view but from theirs," he said.

i1.wp.com

A new report [PDF] released by Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) collects the available evidence that Trump’s real estate deals — many of them involving known criminals and associates of Vladimir Putin — may have violated money laundering and racketeering laws.

Meanwhile, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) says that the recently released testimony before the House Intelligence Committee of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, whose firm commissioned the 2017 Trump-Russia dossier, “reveal serious allegations that the Trump Organization may have engaged in money laundering with Russian nationals.”

These shady Trump Tower deals may be critical in understanding Trump’s Russia ties and Russia’s efforts to help Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The indictment says Manafort wired $6.4 million from an offshore account to purchase three different properties

The properties in California are now under the purview of the special counsel after Manafort reportedly failed to disclose a loan from a lender that was also the main creditor in his bankruptcy cases.

The creditor in the bankruptcies of Manafort's four properties in the Los Angeles area reportedly gave his shell company a loan for his Brooklyn property, according to court filings and public records.

1. 377 Union St. building in SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York. Purchased with money from an offshore shell company.
2. 29 Howard Street in SoHo, New York. Purchased with money from an offshore shell company.
3. 123 Baxter St. building in New York City. The shell company Manafort and his daughter used to purchase the Chinatown apartment received a $10 million loan from a Cyprus bank, the indictment alleges.
4. 1550 Blue Jay Way in Los Angeles, California
5. 2401 Nottingham Ave in Los Angeles
6. a condo in Alexandria, Virginia

• A 2.37 acres mansion in the Hamptons
• A  house in Palm Beach
• A house in Arlington
• A condo in Trump Towers