Donald Trump Is Running Out of Scapegoats and Enablers
Companies want to survive, people want to keep their jobs, and few think it's worth going down for this guy.
By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 15, 2022
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a39091753/trump-organization-mazars-accountants-unreliable-statements/
Who would survive? That's an interesting question. I would predict... convicts and file clerks…The worst convicts. Those deep down in solitary confinement. And the most ordinary file clerks. Probably for large insurance companies, because they would be in fire-proof rooms, protected by tons of the best insulator in the world: paper.
—Prof. Groteschele, Fail Safe
You knew they were going to run. You knew they were going to find a way to survive when it all imploded. All the cubicle-incarcerated, gray people of the business universe. They were never going to go down with somebody else’s ship. From CNBC:
Mazars, which for years prepared Trump’s income tax returns and financial statements used to obtain loans for his company, told the Trump Organization’s top lawyer Alan Garten that it would no longer represent the company due to the lack of reliability of the financial statements in a letter last Wednesday. The letter was cited by AG Letitia James’ office on Monday as it asked a state judge to order the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka Trump, and others to comply with subpoenas seeking documents and testimony.
This moment was foretold back in 2019, when Michael Cohen, the former president*'s onetime fixer, told the House Oversight Committee that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago regularly engaged in creative accounting in the course of whatever business he was pretending to do at the time. From the Washington Post:
“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed amongst the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen said.
The Trump Organization and Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, declined to comment about the statements Wednesday. Deutsche Bank also declined to comment. The “statements of financial condition” are not rigorously audited financial documents. According to a cover letter on one of the documents obtained by The Post, they represented Trump’s own estimates about what he was worth and what he owed.
Now, hearing footsteps in several directions, Mazars has decided that, as far as enabling this kind of thing, a few decades is quite enough.
The firm told Garten that its conclusion was based on filings made by the AG’s office, “our own investigation,” and other information from different parties.
“While we have not concluded that the various financial statements, as a whole, contain material discrepancies, based on the totality of the circumstances, we believe our advice to no longer rely upon those financial statements is appropriate,” Mazars said in its letter to Garten. Mazars also said in its letter that it would no longer “provide any new work product to the Trump Organization.”
He may finally have run out of enablers, blind groupies, pliable bureaucrats, and general scapegoats. Companies want to survive. People want to keep their jobs. Nobody wants to pay whopping fines or risk jail time. Not for him. Not anymore. A collective decision is being made that in many ways, including on the balance sheets, the former president* is simply not worth it.
