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Judge Maryanne Trump Barry Is Behind The Explosive Donald Trump Tax Revelations

Judge Barry's financial disclosures were the key to this story.

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Donald Trump and Judge Maryanne Trump Barry (ED Jones/AFP/Getty Images).

By now you’ve surely read the blockbuster report from the New York Times delving into some of the shady financial machinations that helped Donald Trump obtain and maintain his millions. If you need a quick primer, it revolves around a company called “All County Building Supply & Maintenance,” created by Fred Trump (Donald’s father), that engaged in some… creative bookkeeping:

[T]he company was a middleman entity created by President Trump and his siblings essentially to move cash from Fred Trump’s companies to his children. After All County bought various items for Fred Trump’s buildings, like boilers and cleaning supplies, a secretary would bill the items to Fred Trump’s buildings with a 20 to 50 percent markup. The siblings would then pocket the difference.

In short, the siblings received millions in untaxed gifts from their father, skirting a 55 percent tax on gifts over a certain value that would have cut the total significantly.

Of course, there are more levels to the scheme than just that, but, the nut of it is that shell corporations were used help the Trumps avoid tax obligations on millions of dollars:

Over all, the effort was sprawling and multilayered, involving more than 100,000 pages of documents, both public and confidential; interviews with key sources and requests through the Freedom of Information Act. Together, they showed that the president participated in dubious tax schemes in the 1990s, including outright fraud, and that he wasn’t the self-made billionaire he has claimed to be.

But the interesting question is, how did the Times get turned on to the scheme? It turns out Donald’s sister — and Third Circuit judge — Maryanne Trump Barry is to blame.

Well, “blame” is a bit of a strong word, but an unredacted financial disclosure form from Judge Barry’s Senate confirmation proceedings had an entry for a $1 million contribution from All County that started the reporters on the trail.

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It’s unclear how involved the judge was in the financial schemes that the Times revealed, but we do know she was one of the executors of her late father’s estate, as CNN reports:

“She signed the estate tax return. She is required to submit accurate information to be truthful. She was a lawyer at the time,” professor Lee-Ford Tritt, a law professor and the director of the Center for Estate Planning at the University of Florida Law School, told CNN on Wednesday. Barry also was a sitting federal judge at the time her late father’s tax returns were filed.

Judge Barry has yet to comment on the story, but the president and his brother Robert Trump have denied there was any tax fraud in their financial dealings.

headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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