The Patriot Post® · Trump & Taxes

Over the weekend, The New York Times broke a story on Donald Trump’s taxes. The report states that in 1995, Trump reported a $916 million loss, “a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.”

The key word in that sentence is “legally.” The Times also states that tax experts it consulted “said nothing in the 1995 documents suggested any wrongdoing by Mr. Trump.”

So even The New York Times concedes Trump acted legally and appears to have done nothing wrong. So why is this news?

It’s not news. It is nothing more than a left-wing hatchet job, carried out by an arm of the Clinton campaign. Don’t forget, my friends, that The New York Times tried to smear John McCain with unsubstantiated accusations of adultery.

As a businessman, Donald Trump has every right to take full advantage of our tax laws. And the tax laws do allow individuals and businesses to deduct losses. This is central to almost all investment in the country.

Moreover, The New York Times knows this — it did something very similar in 2014. So did many major U.S. corporations and even Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Now, a word about illegality.

It was not illegal for The New York Times to publish this story. But Trump’s tax returns were illegally obtained by someone. Perhaps we have another IRS scandal in the making, which would not be at all surprising.

The IRS exposed the tax records of a conservative traditional marriage organization and was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine. You may also recall that Joe the Plumber had his personal records exposed by vindictive state bureaucrats when he dared to expose Obama’s socialism.

Given that the Times is not accusing Trump of doing anything illegal, perhaps we should all focus on the crime that was committed and demand that the individual responsible for leaking Mr. Trump’s tax documents be held responsible.

In response to The New York Times story, the Trump campaign released the following statement:

“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes. Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”

Hillary Insults Sanders’ Supporters

While talk of Trump’s taxes dominated the airwaves this weekend, the news wasn’t all good for Hillary Clinton. Audio of Hillary Clinton speaking at private donor event in February reveals her contempt for young supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

In her remarks, Clinton said that many of these voters were “children of the Great Recession” who were stuck “living in their parents’ basement” and who had “bought into a false promise.” Clinton adds, “There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough…”

Are you kidding me?!

As first lady, it was Hillary Clinton who led the Democrats’ first serious effort in decades to socialize America’s healthcare system. And right now her major campaign theme is “free college.”

Hopefully, Sanders’ supporters will realize what a fraud Hillary is. Many younger voters are finding it difficult to enter the economic mainstream because of the policies pursued by Barack Obama, policies Hillary Clinton supports.

Meanwhile, Hillary has gotten extraordinarily rich using the State Department as a personal hedge fund and trading off her celebrity.

Thousands of Illegal Voters

Be on the lookout for zombies this Halloween — specifically zombie voters. Reports of dead voters in California, Colorado and Virginia are raising concerns about the integrity of our electoral process.

But while dead voters may be extreme examples of fraud, illegal immigrants registering to vote may be a far more common problem.

For example, a disturbing new report by the Virginia Voter Alliance found that there were more than 1,000 illegal immigrants who were registered to vote in Virginia. That’s not an insignificant figure given that the 2013 election for attorney general was decided by fewer than 170 votes.

Many of you will recall that the 2000 presidential election was decided by fewer than 600 voters in the state of Florida.

Moreover, these 1,046 illegal voters were discovered after a survey of just eight voting jurisdictions. That’s approximately 131 illegal immigrants per jurisdiction, and hundreds of them had in fact cast ballots.

The report states, “The problem is most certainly exponentially worse because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities.”

If you do the math, more than 16,000 illegal immigrants could be registered to vote in Virginia.

Reports like this explain why voter ID laws are so popular, and they highlight that more must be done to ensure the integrity of the electoral process. Yet Democrats fight tooth-and-nail whenever someone tries to stop voter fraud.

Here’s what you can do: Make sure all your friends and family members are registered to vote. Please don’t delay. Voter registration deadlines in many states are just days away!