NYC Looks To 'Recoup' Money From Trump After Report On Tax Dodges

NEW YORK — New York City is "looking to recoup" money owed to it by President Donald Trump after a bombshell news report detailed his alleged efforts to dodge taxes, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.

The New York Times published an investigation Tuesday outlining how Trump — who made his name as a New York-based real estate developer — engaged in various tax schemes, "including instances of outright fraud," that inflated the fortune he inherited from his family. The president received at least $413 million in 2018 dollars from his father's real estate business, the report says, far more than he has claimed.

The state's Department of Taxation and Finance has said it is reviewing the allegations in the Times' story. De Blasio said the city would work with state officials in its effort to recover "any money that Donald Trump owes the people of New York City."

"We are going to look under every stone," the Democratic mayor said at an unrelated news conference. "... That’s money that could be going to veterans, could going to seniors, could be going to kids, that he should’ve paid in taxes and didn’t."

The Times investigation was based on thousands of pages of documents and interviews with former associates of the president's father, the New York City developer Fred C. Trump. It found nearly 300 revenue streams through which the elder Trump helped the president build his fortune.

One of the schemes involved All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a sham company through which Fred Trump's real estate money reportedly flowed to his children. That allowed the family to avoid a 55 percent tax on gifts by disguising them as "legitimate business expenses," the Times reported.

De Blasio, a frequent critic of the president, said Donald Trump "finagled and paid his way" to avoid close legal scrutiny. He called the Times report an "indictment" of a culture in New York that goes back decades.

"There was a good-ole-boy network that obviously Donald Trump played like a fiddle and evaded the kind of regulation and investigation and prosecution he should have received many times over," de Blasio said.

A lawyer for the president denied the allegations of fraud and tax evasion in a statement to the Times, saying Trump had "virtually no involvement" in financial matters that were handled by others.

"The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory," the lawyer, Charles J. Harder, told the Times. "There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone."

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the report "very boring," but said it in fact showed that Trump's father "had a great deal of confidence in him."

"The president brought his father into a lot of deals and they made a lot of money together, so much so that his father went on to say that everything he touched turned to gold," Sanders said Wednesday at a White House press briefing.

(Lead image: President Donald Trump speaks at a news conference in New York City on Sept. 26, 2018. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)