President Donald Trump promised several times during the campaign to release his tax returns, but as everyone knows, he never did.
But he did release a financial disclosure form as required by law for all candidates for federal office. That form revealed that Trump owes approximately $713 million to 16 different debtors. These debts, by themselves, obviously pose the risk of conflicts of interest.
But Mother Jones reports that one of those loans also represents a real mystery.
According to the disclosure form, the President owes a minimum of $50 million to a corporation called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. But the same document shows that Trump himself owns this LLC.
Here is where the mystery comes in. Mother Jones reports that the LLC should have been listed in the disclosure document as having a value of at least $50 million, since that is what is owed to it.
But the reality is that this LLC is not listed anywhere on Trump’s financial disclosure form. That means that it has no value, because the law requires the candidate to reveal any business or asset worth more than $1,000.
So if Trump owns his own LLC more than $50 million, how can it not be worth at least $1,000? Well, if the LLC in turn has borrowed more than President Trump owes it, it would have no value.
Is this the case? We don’t know.
Experts can only speculate about this particular mystery. Perhaps the President owes millions to a company that he actually owns, but perhaps that company has in turn borrowed even more millions from some other unknown creditor.
If, in fact, this is the truth of the situation, the American public really needs to know who owns the IOU.
Kathleen Clark is a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She believes that Trump may be in violation of ethics laws, given that he may be in debt to some unknown entity that might influence his decisions as President. She said:
“I think the American people are at risk because we don’t know know with whom Donald Trump is entangled financially. If I owe a lot of money to someone, I will probably want to do what I can to keep that person or institution happy. We don’t know the terms of this debt and we don’t know whether Donald Trump will be tempted to look out for his own financial interest in addressing the concerns of his creditor, whoever that is.”
The Wall St. Journal recently reported that Trump pays about $4.4 million in loan interest each year. But what is most interesting is that the paper paid two different research firms to find information about the Chicago Unit Acquisition loan, but neither was able to find anything.
Anything at all.
Two prominent ethics lawyers, Richard Painter and Norm Eisen, are suing the President because they believe that he has violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution. They say that Trump needs to release his tax documents in order to prove that he doesn’t owe tens of millions of dollars to a person, or a company, or a country, that might demand special treatment from him now that he is President.
Unless the mystery of the huge debt is cleared up, and unless the country finds out just who has this much influence over our President, speculation will continue.
We support their call for a release of President Trump’s tax returns as well as a complete explanation of this mysterious LLC and its huge debt. We need to know just who may have influence over the man in charge.
Featured image by Chris Potter via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
