Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see an occasional morning shower with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:31 PM, for 11h 36m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 37.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred ninety-fourth day.
The Whitewater School Board will hold a listening session at the high school at 7 PM tonight about an upcoming operational referendum.
On this day in 1862, the Second Battle of Corinth, Mississippi, begins: “The Second Battle of Corinth began when Confederate forces attempted to retake Corinth, Mississippi. The 8th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 18th Wisconsin Infantry regiments, along with the 6th and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries, fought to protect the city from Confederate troops. The brigade commander recalled that, “I had the 8th Wisconsin, big burly fellows, who could march a mule off its feet, and who proved at Corinth… that they could fight as well as march.” At one point, musket fire coming at the 8th Wisconsin Infantry cut the tether holding Old Abe the Eagle on his perch. He soared high above the lines as the battle raged beneath him.”
Recommended for reading in full — Trump family’s documented tax fraud, Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford, silence in the face of Russian election interference, conditions for detainees, and video of Earthrise —
David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner report Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes
as He Reaped Riches From His Father (“The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s”). The reporting is so detailed – relying on thousands of documents – that it has its own explanatory summary, 11 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth:
Donald J. Trump built a business empire and won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help. “I built what I built myself,” the president has repeatedly said.
But an investigation by The New York Times has revealed that Donald Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire. What’s more, much of this money came to Mr. Trump through dubious tax schemes he participated in during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, The Times found.
In all, the president’s parents transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate on gifts and inheritances that was in place at the time. Helped by a variety of tax dodges, the Trumps paid $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax returns show.
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The Trumps’ tax maneuvers show a pattern of deception, tax experts say
The line between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion is often murky, and there is no shortage of clever tax-avoidance tricks that have been blessed by either the courts or the Internal Revenue Service itself; the wealthiest Americans rarely pay anything close to full freight. The Trumps’ tax maneuvers met with little resistance from the I.R.S., The Times found.
But tax experts briefed on The Times’s findings said the Trumps appeared to have done more than exploit legal loopholes. They said the conduct described here represented a pattern of deception and obfuscation that repeatedly prevented the I.R.S. from taxing large transfers of wealth to Fred Trump’s children.
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Father and son set out to create the myth of a self-made billionaire
All told, The Times documented 295 distinct streams of revenue Fred Trump created over five decades to channel wealth to his son.
But the partnership between Donald Trump and his father was about more than the pursuit, and the preservation, of riches. They were also confederates in a more ambitious project: creating the myth of Donald J. Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. If Fred Trump was the silent partner, helping finance the accouterments of wealth, it was Donald Trump who spun them into a seductive narrative.
Emblematic of this dynamic is Trump Tower, the talisman of privilege that established Donald Trump as a player in New York. Fred Trump’s money helped build it. His son recognized and exploited its iconic power as the primary stage for both “The Apprentice” and his presidential campaign.
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The Trump parents dodged hundreds of millions in gift taxes by grossly undervaluing the assets they would pass on
With the cash flowing out of Fred Trump’s empire, the Trumps began transferring ownership of the lion’s share of the empire itself to Donald Trump and his siblings. The vehicle they created to do that was a special kind of trust called a grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT.
The purpose of a GRAT is to pass wealth across generations without paying the 55 percent estate tax. The Trump parents did have to pay gift taxes based on one crucial number: the market value of Fred Trump’s empire. But The Times found evidence that they dodged hundreds of millions of dollars in gift taxes by submitting tax returns that grossly undervalued the assets placed in two GRATs, one for each parent.
Fred Trump’s 1995 gift tax return claimed that the 25 apartment complexes and other properties in the trusts were worth just $41.4 million. The implausibility of this claim would be made plain in 2004, when banks valued that same real estate at nearly $900 million.
Josh Dawsey and Felicia Sonmez report Trump mocks Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford:
SOUTHAVEN, Miss. — President Trump mocked the account of a woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of assault and told a Mississippi crowd that the #MeToo movement was unfairly hurting men.
Trump, in a riff that has been dreaded by White House and Senate aides, attacked the story of Christine Blasey Ford at length — drawing laughs from the crowd. The remarks were his strongest attacks yet of her testimony.
“ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ‘Upstairs? Downstairs? Where was it?’ ‘I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember,’ ” Trump said of Ford, as he impersonated her on stage.
“I don’t remember,” he said repeatedly, apparently mocking her testimony.
Ford has said the incident happened in an upstairs room and that she is “100 percent” certain it was Kavanaugh who assaulted her, although she has acknowledged that her memories of other details of the evening remain unclear.
WaPo’s @GregPMiller describes a tense moment from 2016 involving a CIA director trying to sound the alarm on Russia and a senior U.S. senator wanting none of it…:
Yikes. WaPo’s @GregPMiller describes a tense moment from 2016 involving a CIA director trying to sound the alarm on Russia and a senior U.S. senator wanting none of it… pic.twitter.com/iuQEiOs5Bh
— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) October 2, 2018
Madison Pauley reports A Surprise Inspection of an ICE Detention Center Reveals Horrific Conditions (“Federal investigators found ‘significant threats’ to detainees’ health and safety”):
Inside an immigration detention center in the desert outside Los Angeles, guards threw detainees into solitary confinement without hearings, routinely forced them into shackles, and cut off visits with family. Doctors signed off on medical assessments that never happened. Detainees were allowed to hang knotted sheets inside their cells, despite the facility’s extensive history of suicide attempts. And an extraction-happy dentist refused to fill cavities while suggesting detainees floss with threads pulled from their socks.
These were just some of the conditions inside the Adelanto Detention Facility when federal inspectors from the Department of Homeland Security arrived for a surprise visit in May, according to a searing report released today by the DHS Office of the Inspector General. Investigators concluded that conditions at the privately run facility amounted to “serious” violations of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s own detention standards, representing “significant threats to the safety, rights, and health of detainees.”
Few of the government’s findings about Adelanto are surprising, given that many of the same complaints about health care and suicide risks have been made for years by concerned advocates and public officials. But the report’s graphic details—from the bed sheets to the dentist’s remarks—powerfully illustrate the severity of the detention center’s long-running violations.