As you know, Trump's tax returns obtained by the New York Times show that he only paid $750 in taxes in two out of the last 17 years that records are available for, but that evidently doesn't mean he didn't pay taxes to someone.
The Times first reported last night that Trump has a secret bank account in China that has never been listed on his financial disclosure forms because it's registered to one of his business entities.
Records show that Trump did, in fact, pay taxes using his secret account, but he paid the taxes to China.
And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president’s tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear.
The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015.
The tax records do not include details on how much money may have passed through the overseas accounts, though the Internal Revenue Service does require filers to report the portion of their income derived from other countries. The British and Irish accounts are held by companies that operate Mr. Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, which regularly report millions of dollars in revenue from those countries. Trump International Hotels Management reported just a few thousand dollars from China.
Curious. How did Trump's secret account end up paying almost $189,000 in taxes while reporting just a few thousand dollars in revenue? Where did the rest of the liability come from? Was it really taxes that he was paying, or something else? Did he earn more in China than he reported? Just how fucking corrupt is Donald Trump?
Good questions we'll only get the answer to if he's thrown out of the White House.
This is news to us, but I'm sure it's not news to the Chinese government, their intelligence service, or other foreign intelligence services including Russia. They know where all his financial bodies are buried even if we don't. That makes Trump vulnerable to the world.
We've always known that, but now we're actually getting a glimpse of what the rest of the world already knows.