Transcript for NYT reporter who broke Trump tax story details investigation
Okay, Kyra, thanks. We’re joined by one of the reporters who conducted the investigation. Susanne Craig. Susanne, you heard the statements concerned about a defamation suit? Not at all. Tell us about this, 18 months long, we heard 100,000 documents. Was there a key that unlocked it. A simple question, back last year when two or three pages of the 2005 tax return were released. Tax’s trump tax. Yes, Donald Trump’s tax returns were released and shocked to see he had made money that year. He made around 130 million and it was just such a juxtaposition from ten years earlier when “The New York Times” had published three pages of his 1995 tax return where he had — he had logged a billion dollar loss which would have enabled him to shelter taxable income up to a billion dollars for 20 years going forward and all of a sudden he has this really large profit and we just sort of what happened? And from there we started to dig and we realized in 2004 very quietly Fred trump’s empire, his father had died in 1999. The empire was sold in 2004 very quietly. One or two news arlss on it and started to look into Fred trump’s empire and from that we just kept going and going and going and it was just unbelievable journey that ended up in the story yesterday. You detail how Fred trump gave Donald Trump money going back to when he was 3 years old. Incredible. We found trusts and documents, that was one of the first things we found were the trusts from 1943 when he was 3. What was the most questionable evasion or possible legal problem you uncovered? The largest would be tax fraud we found was a company called all county building supply. It was not — it’s a pretty simple thing in terms of understanding it. What happened was when Fred trump was in his 80s he was sitting on not only did he own all of this real estate, he had huge amounts of cash sitting in the buildings. He didn’t believe in debt and the trump siblings were looking at then the early 1990s of he died of paying a 55% death tax if he died with all this money sitting up there. So what they did was Fred trump is part of running his buildings had to buy a bunch of stuff from boilers to, you know, plumbing supplies and they created a company so one day it spread and instead of buying it from the vendors from buy all county and they were paying whatever Fred was paying them and sent a padded receipt. They paid about 5% instead of 55%. We don’t know what their individual effective tax rates were but overall on the estate they did other things to reduce the tax bill due overall. We know the New York state tax authority is looking at this but the criminal statute of limitations has passed. Typically limitations would be three years. You can extend it to six years depending on the amount and when it comes to civil fines, to some degree there’s no statute of limitations meaning at some point depending on the timing, depending on the amount, depending on the actions you can actually go after sort of reimbursing the government in effect and paying additional fines based on conduct at any point. And so that’s the question is, is New York state now going to say, okay, you know, we’re not pursuing criminal charges here. But we want our money back. What stood out to you? Look, I think there are two things. Number one is it obliterates the claim of Donald Trump as a self-made man. That’s the whole beginning of the article really focuses on this claim that he borrowed a million dollars and turned it into 10 million and basically say he got 413 million in today’s dollars from his family. And then, number two, the legal side of this which is, you know, was there tax evasion? You notice very carefully the response from trump’s lawyer relates to the legal side of this, right? It’s the tax evasion which is and fraud. He’s saying it didn’t happen and those can be interpret tiff when it comes to the law in terms of what constitutes tax evasion. What would his tax returns add to the story? We had some pieces and fragments of paper that went into his tax returns. To see his tax returns you would understand what each of his businesses are making, the deductions he’s taking. You could see loans that are going back and forth that are being forgiven. So much in tax returns and to think with what we had, we had 200 pages of tax returns from Fred trump’s empire including a number of his tax return, look what we were able to piece together about Donald Trump just through his father’s returns. It’s incredible. Thank you both very much.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
