 of 2023. Welcome to American Issues Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And today's title is The IRS Fails to Audit Trump's Tax Returns. We're going to actually cover two topics today. That being one is the IRS failure to audit President Trump's tax returns for several years. And the other one is to discuss the arrival of Representative George Santos and from New York and what that entails and the horrific stories that he's been telling a tale of yarn, as an old term is, a tale of lies, and the impact of those lies to not only the voters who put him in office, but certainly to the leadership of the Republican Party. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce my guest, Jay Fidel, my co-host, and Cynthia Lee Sinclair, our contributor. Good morning. Good morning, Tim. Morning. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. It is going to be a happy New Year. I hope. I don't know what makes you say that, but you go right ahead. Yes, I live in my own world, Jay, and I'm welcome to it. Thank you. Jay, since you opened things up here with that little comment, let's go to you on, you know, Trump's tax returns. They weren't audited by the IRS, although there was a mandatory requirement to do so. And it didn't happen until the Democrats took over the House back in 2018, specifically the Ways and Means Committee. And the audits weren't brought to the intention of the IRS until Neil Richards, Democrat from Maine, said, Hey, as you like to say, K-PASA, what's K-PASA about these audits? What's going on? So Jay, I'm curious, what's your what's your theory as to why the IRS blatantly ignored conducting an audit, which they've done for every president prior to this? I'm reminded of Comey, Comey's rule, and the book and the movie by James Comey of the FBI, where he gave us a great detail about how Trump tried to corrupt him, invited him to a dinner, you know, in the White House, just two of them. And he said to Comey, you like your job? And he says, Yes. It says, Well, you want to keep your job, you have to be loyal to me. That was the essence of the dinner. So we know that he tried to, tried hard, by the way, to corrupt the FBI. Ultimately, he fired Comey and he fired McCabe as number two. And he tried to corrupt the FBI. We know he took great steps to corrupt the Department of Justice and the United States attorneys in various districts. You know, he put his judges all over the country. And that was a kind of his own corruption. We know he brought his people into the Department of Homeland Security, and so on, I could, I could go on. The whole cabinet was a, you know, a corruption and the people, of course, around him, around the Oval Office, they were a corruption. So why not the IRS too? Most recently, we heard about the Secret Service. Well, yeah, I was just about to talk about remember the joy of the U.S. Postal Service. Yeah, we have James Murray of the Secret Service, and we certainly had indications from Homeland Security, that the agency heads or directors weren't really following their agency's mission or duties. And in some cases, blatantly not following them. And the question is, Jay, is this out of loyalty to Trump, or his instructions to not follow their duty? Both. Both. Yeah, I mean, he corrupted the government. That was, you know, that was the central mission. And you say, well, okay, until now, we didn't know that he corrupted the Internal Revenue Service. I think it's clear that he did. This was the policy. He had promised the country he was going to turn over his tax returns. There was plenty of press about it. But he didn't. And they didn't audit him, even though he said they had been auditing him. And so what do you have here? You know, you have a left-right combination, which, you know, ultimately settles out at the fact that he had stopped the Internal Revenue Service from auditing him. And it's just, I mean, to me, I guess we should have realized early on that no government agency was exempt from his attempts to corrupt everything. But this is again, you know, confirmation that he did, including, and it's kind of a surprise about the IRS, because you think the IRS kind of like walks on water, they're very independent, you know, their very elitness in their style of, you know, of management and relating to the government doesn't exist. But no, he somehow reached them. We don't know the whole story yet. Unfortunately, we're not going to find out the whole story anytime soon. But I think why is that? I mean, okay, so we have a, you know, quite a bit of circumstantial evidence, but we don't have any, you know, hard fact evidence. And so the question is, will we ever find out number one and two, what are the consequences to these agency directors that just followed what seemingly says or to be Donald Trump's marching orders? What are the consequences? And why isn't Joe Biden, who's technically in charge of all these things, as President of the United States, why isn't there consequences being handed down? You know, I don't know the answer to that. There should be. But remember, we have a House of Representatives that is not only in disarray, but is contemplating, terminating the ethics commission that was established in the 90s. And that is going to make it much easier for Republicans to violate ethical rules. It's going to make it much harder to investigate ethical violations. And, you know, although the Democrats had their had their chance to do a, what do I call it, a bilateral type of investigation over January 6th, that ended last week. And it's not going to start up again. There won't be another committee or commission or a select committee or anything like that that will go after, you know, this issue or other corruption issues as long as the Republicans are running things. And I use the term running very loosely. You know, I don't think we're going to find out. All we can do is connect the dots. It is therefore incumbent on the media not to forget, you know, what the dots are saying to us, not to forget that this was reported. Now it has to be examined. We should expect more in the Times and the Post and other national newspapers. We should. Does this story get buried? Well, the Republicans want to bury it. Certainly Trump wants to bury it. And you know what? Probably the IRS wants to bury it. It's going to be very embarrassing if the details come out. But I think there's a fair chance the details will say that he corrupted them. Okay. Cynthia, what's your take on this? Similar to Jay's or not? I think very similar to Jay's. I have sort of not trusted the IRS for quite a long time because of the way they've been walking everything. They never came out with any news of audits or no audits or anything for that matter. So I personally don't even trust what was handed over. But that's just me because once these people are corrupted, how are we supposed to know how corrupt? Right? Are they able to get in there and change numbers and change things? And so I don't know as I even as much damning evidence as there is in this, you know, whole release of these tax returns. For me, the foreign bank accounts that were undisclosed are the biggest red flag for me as far as possible liability for Trump because there's been other cases, there's plenty of precedent set for people that don't disclose and what the punishments are. You know, I'd like to read something and as much as I hate repeating anything that Trump ever says, I think this is important. He says, the Democrats should never have done it. This is all in regard to releasing these six years into the public. The Democrats should never have done it. The Supreme Court should never have approved it and it's going to lead to horrible things for so many people. Okay, so that's a threat. What horrible things? And which so many people? Well, what he said, what he said is that he was worried. I mean, I mean, in a sense, I say it, he was concerned that this would mean that Biden would have to turn over his returns, but he was ill-informed. Biden has already turned over his returns. Trump, and the problem is, I thought to myself, when I saw that, there's a lot of people in the country believe it. They believe that Joe Biden is going to have to turn over his returns and it's going to be embarrassing. And they don't know, because Trump lied, that Biden already turned his returns over. He already has said that. And the Republicans now aren't saying they're going to go after Joe Biden. They're saying that they're going to go after a Hunter Biden. But this is the other part of what the quote that I was going to read is. The Trump tax returns once again show how proudly successful I have been, and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures of enterprise. All this holier-than-now smoke screen that he's throwing up. Yet in these returns, we saw something that is apparently according to quite a few tax experts never, never happens. And that is the operating cost, just like for example, his helicopter company, right? They claim the exact amount of overhead and cost as they, as they made. To the exact dollar and penny. To the exact penny, which is the thing that is so unusual and never happens. And it's fun. There was four that claim the same thing. Okay, so you know, many Americans overestimate their expenses and if they're caught they're audited and they pay their penalty and their fee. End of story. Happens all the time to millions of Americans that are quite generous with their expenses with their schedule, schedule E or schedule C. So what? Is this a nothing burger about Donald Trump's taxes that have been in the news and we've been fighting about it and went all the way to the Supreme Court after many, many six years, six plus years. And what are we going to ultimately find out that is all that damning or I'll put it the way Trump did. You can't learn much from my tax returns but it is illegal to release them if they're not yours. So what did we learn from this Cynthia? Well I think we learned about the foreign bank accounts for one. I think we also learn a little bit more about the IRS because how trustworthy are they? As Jay was saying before, how corrupt are they? How much can we actually trust what was released to the Ways and Means Committee? So those things I think are important. Some of the the things that he overestimated or obviously estimated perfectly to match up to the penny, those things he does have to pay for when he's audited but there's not been an audit since they never completed the one so they didn't do one for two years. Then the one that they did start after the Democrats required it never even got finished. It just stopped being done. So that says a lot. It also says something to me anyway about the Supreme Court and so we know that the Supreme Court basically backs everything Trump does so because there's their majority. Wait a minute they just they just released they just made a decision to release to return. Well that's where I'm going with this. Okay go. That shows me that we can't trust what they are because if they were trying to protect Trump like they always do they would have declined the release of them. So how convenient is it for Trump to get tax returns released that don't really show anything that's that bad? It actually is in his favor so that's where I go wait a minute. I think you're going way way out there on this one. Well that is a matter of law. I don't think that was needed to help. Jay from day one was this a Donald Trump classic silver distraction a silver object distraction? Well yeah I think he you know as part of his MO he said he you know they asked for it way back when even when he was running and he said oh yeah I'll turn it over but you know I'm being audited he wasn't being audited he lied and then he obfuscated and delayed for years and as I recall Cynthia that the IRS did and I'm not saying the IRS is corrupt I'm saying as so many other agencies Trump corrupted it on a given issue and and this one it sure it sure looks like that's what happened. I think they assigned one auditor just one and to audit all these returns and there were many of them they were as complex as you get and you know it was it was hard it was impossible for him to actually go to it so he never could finish. The other thing I want to point out is that you know what we have here is that the Trump's returns are not consistent with his statements of wealth and success. They are rather a statement of loss and mismanagement over a long period of time and I don't think we can forget that because he was telling us he was lying to us about just how wonderfully successful he was when he wasn't and the returns demonstrate that. Now as to the valuations and the returns we really don't have an answer on that yet but remember in New York State there's a litigation pending about undervaluation overvaluation. The whole Michael Cohn thing where he revealed that to Congress that Trump regularly mis-evaluated intentionally willfully by multiples. You can say Tim that you know there are people in this country that really don't follow exactly what they're supposed to do in reporting income and expenses to the IRS and I don't know the numbers on whether that's worse or better than it used to be but you know there's always been an issue around that and the IRS is you know supposed to look into it. In this case presumably when they do if they do when the newspapers do or or maybe there's a sort of nexus between what Letitia James is doing and what's on those tax returns it's likely we're going to find out that the same overvaluation and undervaluation MO that he was using you know in the case that she has pending against him was being used in those tax returns I think a number of relate to the same years that she's covering. So I agree with Cynthia that you know you can't believe anything from him at all. He's pathological and these returns reflected that it's really odd that the income and expenses would have been the same you know right down to the dollar and I and I add something that we always knew. There are three kinds of people on Wall Street there's the bulls there's the bears and there's the pigs and what you don't want to be is a pig that to have the income and expenses net out exactly the same dollars that's being a pig and that's what he was doing for his entire professional life. Good point so okay so we have the Supreme Court making a decision that there to be released does that now become case law as a basis for every president's tax returns to be released to Ways and Means Committee and ultimately to the public is that is that it's a good thing or or does Donald Trump have a point Jay. No he doesn't have a point. They have been for the last several presidents released and it's only fair that the American people who you know who have voted and therefore adopted this this person president any president is at the father of our country we have to know about him we have to be sure you know that he's been vetted we want to know during his campaign not after would not years after it and I might add I know you want to talk about George Santos also that it would have been really effective if we had seen George Santos's tax returns I mean I would describe to the notion that everybody running for political office has to be transparent about his his business activities especially now in a world where you can not only be compromised you know by players and actors in the country but by players and actors outside the country and I think that's a great concern in the investigation of those bank accounts overseas from spank account so I think every everybody running for office has to be transparent and they should all turn over their tax return. Great point last question on this topic Cynthia to you is it do you agree with Jay that it is proper and right to release tax returns of a presidential candidate or president United States to the general public either before election or during during holding the office. I absolutely agree with that I think it is paramount for us to understand what kind of especially in this case with the foreign bank accounts China right is this is big at the same time that his daughter was getting all those you know uh what you call it's that um I'm a mental block against that word right now but um thank you all the patents thank you um at the same time right that this is happening he's got this secret bank account at the same time that the Republicans are standing up saying that Joe Biden is in bed with the Chinese financially we find out that it's Trump that's in bed with the Chinese financially and so these are things that we should know from Biden or Trump or anyone else that is ever going to hold public office including Congress because think about all the senators that came in and they make what two hundred thousand a year and they're billionaires now and of course they blame it on their spouses but they don't have to tell us what's going on we don't get to find out about how inappropriate they are with stock information and insider trading and all these other things that the ethics committee could investigate but if it gets gutted then we won't know and i think it's inherited for public to know you know the last question because the last one wasn't my last question uh if there is evidence of tax evasion will the IRS follow up on it and do something about it well not if it's corrupted like we've been talking about it well Trump's not in office now he's not in office and to the extent that it that might have been a corruption certainly would be embarrassing to the IRS but really the IRS has the mechanisms to report all that through the Department of Justice think Al Capone and the Department of Justice could prosecute i don't think there's a real barrier to that as presently exists it's just that somebody has to get in there roll up his sleeves and look at those returns yeah and well they claim that the tax is so complicated that the IRS doesn't have the personnel to actually understand and audit it now isn't that crazy well i think that's a budget question and i think that uh i don't recall exactly but at some point in Trump's administration he was cutting the the budget to the IRS and therefore making it harder for them to have the resources necessary to audit his returns and yeah and a lot of the returns are the one percenters right okay hey let's we're almost out of time so let's move on to the next topic because this certainly has caught my attention and i scratched my head every time i see an update on um representative elect George Santos from New York my god uh Cynthia he's lied about his jobs he's lied about his education he's lied about his heritage um saying he's Jewish but not Jewish but Jewish my god what what more or how much more can he lie and did he whamboozle the voting public of of of his district your thoughts about him soon to be or depends on who the speaker of the house is in the house of representatives but what's your opinion about this guy being seated as a representative of congress Cynthia well i can't imagine that it could happen except for that the republicans want his vote so bad and they want that you know bigger majority so bad that they're not going to do anything to hold him accountable so but i would think if they had known this one piece of information before the election he never would have won and that is the fact that he said his mother died on 9 11 and new yorkers are pretty protective over that all of the information in fact so what what happened to candidate research before you you threw your hat in the ring what happened to those uh those things that normally do take place well there's so much misinformation out there and there's so many people that are getting their information from just random internet sources that it's hard to know and they may have heard it but it was you know on this side had so much other stuff that they weren't sure which one to pick right so now that it's all coming out as you know we know for sure he lied it's a different story but um i think it's too bad and i think it's partly on uh on the backs of the media for not doing their due diligence to find out and to voters for not doing their due diligence to find out and what about the representatives in new york why weren't they doing it so it's like a long chain of of mishaps and misinformation that i think is the problem behind so much of this stuff that's going yeah you know synthia we just had a midterm election and a lot of the the election deniers were not elected as a direct result of voter saying we've had enough of some of this we just want people to do their job and do them right um so if they seat george santos in this position how much more does that stain the existing g.o.p party as far as uh bringing in these deplorable candidates and quite frankly george santos is deplorable oh yes so how does that stain or does it matter anymore that there's yet another you know huge stain on on their namesake there is a huge stain on their namesake and i think it's just sort of a nameplate for all of them george santos being a complete liar who will manipulate the truth to suit himself and to suit his own desires and how often do we see that with the republican party anyway when you think about kevin micarthie not being able to get to the votes for speaker and he's one of the big election deniers himself so yeah and and we know santos is an election denier and we know that there's a quorum of 20 not a quorum but a a group of 20 other republicans that aren't willing to come over to the freedom caucus that aren't willing to come over and vote for him so um we know there's so much upheaval happening in the republican party they are just in complete chaos and i think he's just a you know a good stamped point to put in the front of all of it okay thank you synthia hey j you know new york is not the backwaters of the united states there's a lot of savvy voters a lot of savvy media how did this happen in new york that a candidate like this made it through all the checks and balances and actually was elected as house representative you know this is more than one pathological individual likes to tell stories it's it's more than the one candidate it is emblematic of a broken system and when i say system i i point at you know the people um you know that synthia was talking about and everyone involved in the election it could have happened in nebraska just as well um okay the voters did not do their due diligence the media did not do its due diligence uh and that's really sad because they probably could have found the stuff out before that they found out after you know there was no reason why if they had looked at it before that they couldn't find out what they found out after um and of course uh what about the opponent he wasn't running in a vacuum somebody could have said something uh the democratic party could have said something and what what is and and of all that money how did that money get to him i mean these are all you know these are all um indications that the voting system you know aside from all you know the um the voting suppression that we see in the red states uh and you know the business with the electoral college that we saw in several states and you know the republican shenanigans aside from that this is not that this is just lying to the public and selling snake oil and everybody is buying it um if we are going to have democratic elections this cannot happen it can't happen with santas or santos or anyone else we should not let them lie we should do our due diligence we should require the press to do its due diligence um and of course we we also need to have a mechanism to throw him out of congress which we don't have right okay well you know the standard bearer of someone who has a real trouble uh communicating reality and truth is our former president uh did he become the standard bearer or the the the guiding light for candidates like santos to not worry about their past and say ah if donald trump could be a uh a compulsive habitual liar so can i is that the new standard and that's how we got elected standard with trump all along he can trump lies and and the message he sends is that it's okay to lie it's his politics not underwrote they'll never catch you you know it's catch me if you can kind of thing that's what he did in his real estate business uh that's what he did with the media you know through his life and uh that you know certainly that's what he encourages here and you know he endorsed the guy uh i'm you know i'm very concerned about about how this worked out and um i'm you know i think it's this is trump's fault if i didn't mention him on my list of horribles um trump endorsed him trump put him out certainly there were people out there in that district who were trumpers who voted for the guy because trump had endorsed him um so you know this is really bloody awful and i don't think people get it yet this could happen again ladies well it can jay and i think that's a great point i guess i'm still perplexed as to how it happened in the first place how a candidate this flawed in this compulsive lying trail that he's laid um how that wasn't um and exposed and yet it did happen and i don't think we've heard a reasonable explanation as to how it did happen either of you on that point well i think the system is broken i mean you have secret money coming in nobody knows where it came from you have a guy who lied you have people who don't do diligence and they vote for somebody they you know they don't know anything about um so the system is broken and and you know this is one of those layered things that trump did to pervert democracy this is an attack on democracy not only in what happened in the election in the run-up the campaign and the election but what is happening right now he should not be permitted to hold office and yet he is well that's a great point and synthia i know that a local newspaper in long island did pick this up picked up a lot of the inaccuracies of his resume and it was reported yet that newspaper didn't get to the bigger news agencies and so the story died a natural death of not enough readers and not enough spotlights on it your thought on that we know it was social media where we expect you know is an open book on everything social media is missing in action on this one where are they that's what i said to where are the media and aren't they behind so much of this but not just that there has been a full on attack against truth it has been devolved into alternative facts and and so often we were told during the trump administration that everybody lies all politicians lie so now suddenly line is the norm so it's been established that line is a norm there you know it's been established that that truth doesn't matter because there's always okay that's my point is is the george santos an anomaly or is this of things to come i think it is a standard barrier of things to come until we can start reestablishing the difference between truth and alternative facts there's either facts or there's lies there's truth or there's lies there can't be some okay but i i'm seeing comments of disgust not only from democrats but also from fellow republicans i mean my god he was a pariah yesterday if you saw him on the news and there's been reports that even his g.o.p even his new york g.o.p brethren um avoided him as if he was the plague himself uh so there is some pushback on this um your thought on the bottom line is he's he's still in office that's the bottom line does he stay in office we'll see Cynthia does he stay in office we'll see i don't see we don't know yet but we don't know we're if we have to count on the republicans to do it no i have a great little quote from uh jennifer rubin here seriously asking republicans to exercise personal restraint is like asking a tiger to go vegan so i'll see you know i mean you know we posted a link to a front line lies truth and ignorance and democracy on on front line which is um on pbs and also on youtube and uh it's an interview of a woman named uh was a really incredible woman named uh mona charan uh who was in the reagan white house she's conservative in fact a republican and what she said was the republican party had changed completely um that that they you know no longer believed in the truth or in democracy and that uh until they shape up and they may never shape up we can never support them again that's not an exact quote but that was the essence of her interview remarks we can never support them again and and as you say that they're not going to throw santos out um they're they're not going to have a reasonable period in this uh congress uh reasonable policy reasonable conversations and we can never support them again they're done as far as millions and millions of people are concerned all righty hey we've run out of time but i want to go ask both of you your your last thoughts either about the george santa's uh placement or the irs audit story uh synthi with you i have one last uh quote that came out of uh jennifer rubin's last uh article that i read and it says when the inquisitors exempt themselves from ethical restraints they send the message that rules are only for democrats democrats in turn will send the message in 2024 that it's time to return to honest competent governance so all this uh machinations and uh and trouble and chaos that's going on with the removal of the ethics committee and all of these other things could come back to bite them because there's even republicans they don't want all this chaos either some do but the majority of them don't so it's time for the reasonable republicans and you've heard me say this a million times to come back to reality so that we can get back to competent honest governance well stated thank you synthia jay your last thoughts i'm not optimistic about that um there is no leadership in the republican party that's going to return it to what it was and uh jennifer rubin was right and um mona charon was right and uh i don't i don't have any high expectations um the other thing i want to point out in my my final comment is that what we are seeing now is the legacy of donald trump he did more damage than we ever understood we on this program and we in the country we never knew how corrosive how damaging how destructive his moves were not only the visible ones but the invisible ones and they will form his legacy they will last for a long time the damage he the damage he did to the country and our democracy and our government and our relations overseas it will will continue for a long time and it may actually be historically permanent for us thank you donald trump thank you very much jay uh what scares me about your comment is you speak to the audience as if this was past tense he is a current candidate for the 24 president of the united states position um so again vigilance is uh required from from you me sythia and everyone that uh is in the media business and every voter that votes the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and we better start being more vigilant than we've been great great way to end great note to end on thank you very much my co-host jay fidel and sythia leeson claire i want to thank everyone for tuning in this show american one american issues take one i wish everyone a prosperous and healthy 2023 i'm tim apichel your host join us next week thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram and linked in and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com mahalo