I know we are pessimistic about Dems being able to capitalize on this stuff and plan a course of attack, but what if this leak was being orchestrated by a foreign intelligence service that is actually competent at this sort of thing? Any possible suspects?
Notice the story says data, not returns. So it implies that it was an electronic transmission, I think.
Literally anyone except Russia, Israel, or Saudi Arabia?
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China and Iran would be likely candidates, but I’ve got Germany as my sleeper pick.
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I still say death by covid is the only way out. Prison is a distant second.
If this were Iran’s payback it would show an incredible level of nuance on their part.
Sure, but it would have been better if they further leveraged themselves and somehow built a hotel last year/early this year then the pandemic stripped every bit of value from that as well.
Relevant:
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I would not be to sure about China.
I’m rooting for it to somehow be Canada, but Iran would be fun.
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Hard to know how much credibility to give them, but IC assessments have already said that Iran is trying to meddle with the elections ( US election 2020: China, Russia and Iran 'trying to influence' vote - BBC News ) , and everyone knows that the press is jonesing for the tax returns. Dreaming up the play wouldn’t be hard, but I guess getting the returns and then getting them to the Times in a seemingly legit way might be tricky…
It’s an interesting question whether the NYT would print info obtained from a foreign intelligence op.
To me the whole “but who does he owe the money to” line is stupid. We know who he owes the money to, they file mortgages. It’s mostly lol Deutchebank.
So by all means, look into DB and Anthony Kennedy’s kid and that asshole that also banks the Kushners whose name I forget. But if he is actually laundering money for Russians, or in hock to Putin allies or whatever, that’s not going to show up anywhere on a tax return, duh.
No but their may be bread crumbs?
So this would be illegal, right?
I think in this case the answer would be yes. It would depend on both the type of info and the source.
The Times article says they got the info from someone who has legal access to it. Don’t think that applies to foreign intel.
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My read is that there are probably both pro-Trump and pro-Biden factions. And just a general pro-chaos faction. I was living in China during the 2000 election and the CCP and state -affiliated media clearly enjoyed driving home all of the absurdity that arose during it as a way of undermining the concept of democracy.
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And on the impact of the story — we all had our suspicions that he paid little or no taxes. But this puts a number on it. I’m already seeing lots of posts on social media mentioning $750 or saying “I’m an X and I paid more taxes than Trump.” I think the small positive number is actually a catchier story than if he had paid no taxes at all.
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If they like absurdity trump their man…