As the investigation winds down and the panel plans a series of hearings in June, members of the committee are debating whether to call the two men, whose conflict over whether to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win was at the center of the attack. Trump pressured Pence for days, if not weeks, to use his ceremonial role presiding over the Jan. 6 count to try to block or delay Biden’s certification. Pence refused to do so, and rioters who broke into the building that day called for his hanging.

There are reasons to call either or both of them. The committee wants to be as thorough as possible, and critics are sure to pounce if they don’t even try. But some lawmakers on the panel have argued that they’ve obtained all the information they need without Trump and Pence.

Nearly a year into their wide-ranging investigation into the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries, the House committee has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and received more than 100,000 pages of documents. Interviews have been conducted out of the public eye in obscure federal office buildings and private Zoom sessions.

The Democratic chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, said in early April that the committee has been able to validate a lot of the statements attributed to Trump and Pence without their testimony. He said at that time there was “no effort on the part of the committee” to call Pence, though there have been discussions since then about potentially doing so.

Speaking about Pence, Thompson said the panel had “initially thought it would be important” to call him, but “there are a lot of things on that day we know — we know the people who tried to get him to change his mind about the count and all of that, so what is it we need?”

A lot of the people they are interviewing, Thompson added, “are people we didn’t have on the original list.”

The panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has said that the evidence it has compiled is enough to link Trump to a federal crime.

Much of the evidence the committee has released so far has come from White House aides and staff — including little-known witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant in the Trump White House, and Greg Jacob, who served as Pence’s chief counsel in the vice president����ap office. The panel also has thousands of texts from Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and has talked to two of the former president����ap children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who were with their father the day of the attack.

Among hundreds of others, the committee has also interviewed former White House aide Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband, former communications director Alyssa Farah and multiple Pence aides, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, and his national security adviser, Keith Kellogg. Former White House press secretaries Kayleigh McEnany and Stephanie Grisham have also appeared, as has former senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

There are still questions that Trump and Pence could answer, including what they talked about the morning of Jan. 6, when Trump made his final plea for Pence to overturn the election when he presided over the Electoral College count in Congress. Lawmakers have been able to document most of Trump’s end of the call but not what Pence said in response.

In the hours after Trump and Pence spoke, the vice president issued a statement saying he did not have the power to object to the counting of electoral votes. But the president did not relent, and went on to publicly pressure Pence at his massive rally in front of the White House and then on Twitter even after his supporters had broken into the Capitol.

Still, it is unlikely that the two former leaders would speak about the conversation to the committee — and it����ap unclear if they would cooperate at all.

While Pence has yet to comment on the committee’s work, Trump would certainly be a hostile witness. He has fought the investigation in court, demonized the committee on TV and tried to assert executive privilege over White House papers and any conversations he had with his aides — demands that would certainly apply to his morning call with Pence.

In addition, calling a former president or vice president to testify in a congressional investigation is a rare, if not unprecedented, move that could face major legal hurdles and backfire politically.

The Jan. 6 committee has given only a glimpse of what it has found, mostly in court filings where excerpts of transcripts have been used.

A recent filing from the committee revealed portions of interviews with Hutchinson that took place in February and March of this year. That testimony provided new evidence about the involvement of GOP lawmakers in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, including a meeting at the White House in which attorneys for the president advised that putting up an alternate slate of electors declaring Trump the winner was not “legally sound.”

Another court document revealed testimony from Jacob, who served as Pence’s chief counsel. In a series of emails, Jacob repeatedly told lawyer John Eastman, who was working with Trump, that Pence could not intervene in his ceremonial role and halt the certification of the electoral votes. Jacob told Eastman the legal framework he was putting forward to do just that was “essentially entirely made up.”

Meadows’ texts have also been revelatory, detailing how people inside Trump’s orbit pleaded for him to forcefully condemn the attack on the Capitol as it unfolded. The pleas came from Trump’s children, members of Congress and even Fox News hosts.

“He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand,” Donald Trump Jr. texted Meadows as protesters breached the security perimeter at the Capitol.

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ivanka Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter and one of those closest to him during the insurrection at the Capitol, is testifying before the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said Tuesday afternoon that she had been answering investigators’ questions on a video teleconference since the morning and was not “chatty” but had been helpful to the probe.

“She came in on her own” and did not have to be subpoenaed, Thompson said.

Ivanka Trump, who was with her father in the White House that day, is one of more than 800 witnesses the committee has interviewed as it works to compile a record of the attack, the worst on the Capitol in more than two centuries. She the first of Trump’s children known to speak to the committee and one of the closest people to her father.

Whether she gives the committee new information or not, her decision to cooperate is significant for the panel, which has been trying to secure an interview with her since late January. The nine-member panel is particularly focused on what the former president was doing as his supporters broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

Ivanka Trump’s testimony comes less than a week after her husband, Jared Kushner, testified to the committee in a separate virtual meeting that lasted more than six hours. Members of the panel said his testimony was helpful and were hoping to further fill in the gaps with her help.

The panel is using the interviews to compile a comprehensive record and will begin to release information in the coming months as it holds public hearings and releases a series of reports on the insurrection. While Congress doesn’t have power to charge anyone with a crime, members of the panel say the objective is to create the most comprehensive record possible so nothing like it ever happens again.

Lawmakers have said they want to discuss what Ivanka Trump knew about her father’s efforts, including a telephone call they say she witnessed, to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden’s 2020 election win as part of his ceremonial role overseeing the electoral count. Pence rejected those efforts.

The committee is also interested in any concerns she may have heard from Pence’s staff, members of Congress and the White House counsel’s office about Trump’s pressure on Pence.

Ivanka Trump’s cooperation stands in contrast with some of her father’s other top advisers, several of whom have refused to cooperate as the former president has fought the probe. Trump has tried to exert executive privilege over documents and interviews, but in many cases has been overruled by courts or Biden, who has that authority as the sitting president.

The House is expected to vote this week to recommend contempt charges for Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, both of whom the committee says have been uncooperative. The committee previously voted to recommend contempt charges against longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, who defied a congressional subpoena, and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who ceased cooperating with the panel.

Bannon was later indicted by a federal grand jury and is awaiting prosecution by the Justice Department. The Justice Department has not taken any action against Meadows.

Other witnesses who are still close to the former president — and several who were in the White House that day — have declined to answer the committee’s questions.

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York attorney general’s office confirmed Monday that it has subpoenaed former President Donald Trump and his two eldest children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., demanding their testimony in an investigation into the family’s business practices.

Attorney General Letitia James’ office said in a court filing that it recently issued subpoenas seeking testimony and documents from the Trumps as part of a yearslong civil probe involving matters including “the valuation of properties owned or controlled” by Trump and his company.

Monday’s filing, made public as James went to court in a bid to enforce the subpoena, was the first time that investigators publicly disclosed that they are also seeking information from Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., both trusted allies of their father who’ve been executives in his family’s Trump Organization.

Last month, it was reported that James’ office had requested Trump sit for a deposition.

Lawyers for the Trumps filed court papers Monday evening seeking to block the subpoenas, calling them “an unprecedented and unconstitutional maneuver” and accusing James of attempting to obtain testimony that could then be used against the Trumps in a parallel criminal investigation being overseen by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

James “seeks to circumvent the entire grand jury process” and nullify the Trumps’ rights by forcing them to testify without the immunity that’s guaranteed under state law if they were subpoenaed to testify in front of the grand jury in the criminal probe, the Trumps’ lawyers wrote.

James, a Democrat, has spent more than two years looking at whether the Trump Organization misled banks or tax officials about the value of assets — inflating them to gain favorable loan terms or minimizing them to reap tax savings.

“Despite their names, they must play by the same rules as everyone else. These delay tactics will not stop us from following the facts or the law, which is why we will be asking the court to compel Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump to testify with our office under oath,” James said in a statement after the Trumps’ move to block the subpoenas.

The dispute over the subpoenas had played out in secret until Monday, when a judge who had handled other subpoena fights arising from the Trump investigation agreed to entertain arguments over the new subpoenas. The court filing from James’ office was then posted to the public court docket.

The judge, Arthur Engoron, previously sided with James on other matters relating to the probe, including making another Trump son, Trump Organization executive Eric Trump, testify after his lawyers abruptly canceled a scheduled deposition.

Last month, Trump sued James in federal court, seeking to put an end to her investigation. Trump, in the lawsuit, claimed that the attorney general had violated the Republican’s constitutional rights in a “thinly-veiled effort to publicly malign Trump and his associates.”

In the past, the Republican ex-president has decried James’ investigation as part of a “witch hunt” along with a parallel criminal probe being run by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Although James’ civil investigation is separate from the criminal investigation, her office has been involved in both, dispatching several lawyers to work side-by-side with prosecutors from the Manhattan D.A.’s office.

Last year, then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. gained access to the longtime real estate mogul’s tax records after a multiyear fight that twice went to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also brought tax fraud charges in July against the Trump Organization and its longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg.

Before he left office last week, Vance convened a new grand jury to hear evidence in the investigation, but left the decision on additional charges to his successor, Bragg. The new district attorney has said he’ll be directly involved in the Trump matter while also retaining the two veteran prosecutors who led the case under Vance.

Weisselberg pleaded not guilty to charges alleging he and the company evaded taxes on lucrative fringe benefits paid to executives.

Trump has been subpoenaed before, testifying in October in a deposition for a lawsuit brought by protesters who say his security team roughed them up early in his presidential campaign in 2015. Some presidents were subject to subpoena while in office, including Richard Nixon in 1974 for his infamous Watergate recordings.

Still, it’s exceedingly rare for law enforcement agencies to issue a civil subpoena for testimony from a person who is also the subject of a related criminal investigation.

That’s partly because the person under criminal investigation could simply cite their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. It is unlikely that Trump’s lawyers would allow him to be deposed unless they were sure his testimony couldn’t be used against him in a criminal case.

Both investigations are at least partly related to allegations made in news reports and by Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, that Trump had a history of misrepresenting the value of assets.

James’ office issued subpoenas to local governments as part of the civil probe for records pertaining to the estate, Seven Springs, and a tax benefit Trump received for placing land into a conservation trust. Vance later issued subpoenas seeking many of the same records.

James’ office has also been looking at similar issues relating to a Trump office building in New York City, a hotel in Chicago and a golf course near Los Angeles.

___

Follow Michael Sisak on Twitter at twitter.com/mikesisak

WASHINGTON — It was a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, and one of his aides had a delicate question: Wasn’t there going to be a backlash when it became known that the inauguration had spent donors’ money at Trump’s hotel in Washington, even though other places would cost much less or even be free?

“These are events in P.E.’s honor at his hotel, and one of them is with and for family and close friends,” Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, then an event planner for Trump, wrote in an email to a colleague in December 2016, referring to Trump as the president-elect and saying she raised the issue to “express my concern.”

As Trump’s presidency comes to a close, expenditures like those are receiving renewed legal scrutiny in the form of a civil case being pursued by the attorney general for the District of Columbia.

At the heart of the case is a question — whether Trump and his family have profited from his public role, sometimes at the expense of taxpayers, competitors and donors — that has been a persistent theme of his tenure in the White House.

More than 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments patronized Trump’s properties during his presidency while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Sixty of them spent $12 million at his properties during the first two years he was in office.

The Trump family business has received millions of dollars in payments by the Secret Service, the State Department and the U.S. military to Trump properties around the country and the world. The president has visited his properties on at least 417 days since taking office, at times with world leaders. And he and his affiliated political committees spent more than $6.5 million in campaign funds at his hotels and other businesses since 2017, including a $1 million final burst in the weeks before the election last month.

In the lawsuit moving forward, Attorney General Karl A. Racine of Washington is arguing that Trump’s inaugural committee illegally overpaid his family business by as much as $1.1 million for events held at the Trump International Hotel in the city in January 2017. Ivanka Trump was deposed in the case last week.

Questions about spending, influence and lobbying around the 2017 inaugural have also drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors from two different offices in New York, with charges filed against at least one donor.

But for all the attention focused on the issue, Trump is set to leave office without a clear resolution of what limits there should be on a president����ap ability to profit from his public role.

Lawsuits brought by nonprofit groups and attorneys general in Washington and Maryland claiming that Trump had violated the so-called emoluments clause of the Constitution were never resolved during his term and now face potential dismissal once he is out of power.

“It is more than just frustrating,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, who has been involved in the emoluments litigation. “The most serious questions about the abuse of presidential power and the use of the presidency as a center of personal gain and profit remain unresolved. The wheels of justice clearly ground more slowly than some would have hoped.”

The issue played out especially visibly at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which opened in late October 2016, two weeks before Trump was elected.

The hotel became a focal point for lobbyists, White House aides, Republicans in Congress and hundreds of others who sought a way to impress Trump, even though tax records obtained by The New York Times show that the property continued to lose money through at least 2018.

The Trump family had tried to sell its lease at the hotel last year before reversing course when the coronavirus pandemic hit. With revenue sure to have declined this year, Trump will have to decide whether to put the property back up for sale after he leaves office, or perhaps hope its value will increase if he runs again.

“Fifty percent of the people still will not go into the hotel,” said William W. Moyer, a hotel broker, noting that many potential customers who were not supporters of Trump avoided the property. “And the other 50% wanted to go there. You are not going to turn on or off people’s loyalties like a light switch.”

The case Racine is pursuing is moving ahead after he spent several years collecting evidence about the arrangements between the presidential inaugural committee and the hotel.

Trump’s inauguration was unlike any other in U.S. history: He raised more than $107 million, twice the previous record, as corporate donors poured tens of millions of dollars into the inaugural committee. Spending also took place at a record rate.

At the Trump hotel, the inaugural committee and guests attending the inauguration were already planning to fill most of the 263 rooms, which Racine argued meant that ballroom space would typically be offered for free or at least at a major discount.

But when the hotel initially asked the inaugural committee to pay $450,000 a day to rent the ballrooms and other common spaces, it provoked immediate questions from both Wolkoff, who has since broken with the Trump family, and Rick Gates, then the inaugural committee’s deputy chair, who would go on to plead guilty to charges stemming from the special counsel’s investigation.

“First, the cost itself seems quite high compared to other property buyouts for the week,” Gates wrote in an email to Ivanka Trump 38 days before the inauguration. “Second, I am a bit worried about the optics of PIC paying Trump Hotel a high rent fee and the media making a big story out of it,” he added, referring to the presidential inaugural committee.

Trump wrote to Mickael C. Damelincourt, the hotel’s general manager, and asked him to call Gates to negotiate a better deal for the inaugural committee. “It should be a fair market rate,” she said in a follow-up email, which soon led to a new offer of $175,000 per day.

Still, Wolkoff raised concerns.

“In my opinion, the max rental fee should be $85,000 per day,” she responded to Gates and Trump in an email where she also noted that other properties, such as Union Station, had offered their spaces for the inauguration at no charge.

This series of emails — filed in court documents as part of the lawsuit — is at the heart of the case that Racine, a Democrat, is pursuing.

The inaugural committee paid $220,000 for rooms at the hotel, including $75,259 to rent out the so-called Trump Townhouse, marketed as an ultraluxurious suite.

On two of the days that the inaugural committee paid the hotel $175,000 to rent the ballroom, it had no events that used it, the lawsuit said. And on a third day when it actually used the ballroom for a luncheon — again paying $175,000 — another nonprofit group had paid just $5,000 to rent the same presidential ballroom space for an inauguration-related event that morning.

The committee also paid the hotel for costs associated with a “friends and family” event for Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. that their father was not expected to attend. The inauguration staff was so uncomfortable sponsoring the gathering that they tried to cancel it, court documents showed. But Damelincourt objected.

“Rick … just heard that the Friday night reception had been canceled. Is it accurate?” Damelincourt wrote. “Tough on us if it is as it was a lot of revenue.” The event was then rescheduled and took place the night Donald Trump was sworn in.

Ivanka Trump was questioned for five hours last week about the matter, in one of a series of depositions that has also included Damelincourt and Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a major donor to Donald Trump who was the chair of the inaugural committee. Wolkoff will be questioned under oath this week and Gates this month.

Documents were also subpoenaed from Melania Trump, the first lady, but she has not been called to testify.

After her deposition, Ivanka Trump condemned the inquiry, as did her brother Eric Trump, who oversees operations at the hotel.

“This is a game stemming from a political vendetta,” Trump said in an interview, echoing his sister, who said on Twitter that the case was “another politically motivated demonstration of vindictiveness & waste of taxpayer dollars.”

So far, Judge José M. López at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia has sided with the attorney general, rejecting a motion by the Trump Organization and the inaugural committee to dismiss the case. López has authorized the parties to move ahead with depositions and other discovery until March to prepare for a possible trial.

The civil suit pursued by Racine is distinct from two separate cases raising the constitutional issues about the intersection of Donald Trump’s public role and his businesses. The two cases focused on the Constitution’s emoluments clause will be on shakier ground once he leaves office, lawyers involved in the cases said.

A U.S. District Court judge ruled in one of the emoluments suits in March 2018 that Maryland and the District of Columbia had the right to pursue their cases challenging whether Trump’s businesses could take payments from other governments. And for the first time, the court defined what an emolument is, accepting the broader definition advocated by Maryland and the District of Columbia that it represented just about any payment from a foreign government to the president����ap businesses instead of a payment made to the president explicitly in exchange for an official action he would then take, as he had argued.

But one of the remedies their lawsuit sought was an order that the president stop accepting these payments. Once he leaves office, that outcome will effectively have been achieved, perhaps undermining the case.

“We are having high-level discussions around the viability, survivability of the matter,” Racine said about the emoluments case.

Equally unresolved is the future of the Trump hotel in Washington.

The hotel bar is open again after closing in the spring when the virus first peaked. But traffic is slow, in part because the hotel is limiting entry to only those with reservations because of virus restrictions.

Zach Everson, who runs an online newsletter that tracks activities at the hotel, said its fate might be determined in part by how much of a power broker Trump remains.

“Any business that is sustained in some part by people wanting to get in his favor, once you take the official power he had to grant that favor, I am not sure how they can sustain it,” Everson said. “But with Donald Trump, he has been able to pull a rabbit out of the hat before.”

On Friday, White House-related business was still coming in.

Jason Miller, a Trump campaign aide, showed up at lunchtime without his name on the list. He told a security guard at the hotel entrance that he was there for a meeting with lawyers Eric Hershmann and Justin Clark, two other aides to Trump.

For a moment, Miller was prevented from entering.

“I work for the president,” he told the security guard, before finally being let in.

Under a U.S. Department of Agriculture program called , boxes of fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy and meat are distributed by local nonprofits and anti-hunger organizations. In September, USDA mandated the boxes include a letter from Trump touting the federal program and listing several sanitation tips.

The Denver Community Food Access Coalition says that letter, printed on White House letterhead, is a politicization of federal aid and contains outdated public health information. The letter advises people to “consider wearing a face covering when in public,” rather than directly tell people to wear a face covering.

“Politicizing the one lifeline Colorado families have left during this health pandemic and economic crisis by putting these letters in food boxes is shameful and degrading,” said Christine Alford, executive director of Denver Food Rescue, a member of the food access coalition.

USDA, reached for comment Wednesday, defended the president����ap letter, which is printed in both English and Spanish. The letter does not mention the election.

“Politics has played zero role in the Farmers to Families food box program — it is purely about helping farmers and distributors get food to Americans in need during this unprecedented time,” the agency said in an email. “The letter from President Trump has been included for several months now and contains health information that is critical to slowing the spread of COVID-19.”

USDA passed along praise for the Farmers to Families program from Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infection disease specialist, as well as Ivanka Trump, a senior advisEr to the president and his daughter.

Nonprofits across the country have with the Trump letter, fearful of running afoul of prohibitions on partisanship and losing their tax-exempt status if they leave the letter in food boxes. The program, set to end Saturday, reimburses farmers for the food it distributes to families, giving them customers at a time of shrinking distribution to restaurants and schools.

The Denver Community Food Access Coalition is made up of eight nonprofits, as well as the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment. In a press release Wednesday, the coalition accused the president of trying to influence next week’s election with the letter.

“We are not pawns in this election,” said Teva Sinicki, CEO of Metro Caring, a member of the coalition. “The largest public health and economic crisis Colorado has ever seen is not the time to exploit taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars and manipulate overworked direct service providers in an attempt to bolster one’s own reelection campaign.”

President Donald Trump has failed to do so. Most recently, he has jeopardized relief legislation for Americans who have been hit hard by the pandemic.

Across America, 215,000 of our loved ones have been killed by COVID-19, and we are approaching 7.8 million cases. COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death in the United States. And the virus has ripped through Black America, killing Black people at twice the rate of white Americans. Projections show that 40 million Americans could lose their homes by the end of the year, which is four times what was seen during the Great Recession. This past week, another 840,000 Americans filed for unemployment.

These statistics represent fellow Americans. We need a serious COVID-19 strategy and a substantive relief deal.

Trump promised he would be the greatest dealmaker president, but, not only has he failed to be the dealmaker he promised to be on Capitol Hill, the president����ap international strategy and dealmaking is abysmal.

Trump upended 30 years of U.S. strategy to make it look like he handled North Korea, but in reality, the regime abandoned diplomatic ties with the White House. North Korea has advanced its long-range ballistic missile systems and continues to pound its chest on the global stage.

Trump talks tough on China, but while he does that, his daughter Ivanka Trump continues from junk products to coffins. His trade war with China failed and his cavalier flip-flops on strategy have endangered American interests.

The monthly U.S. trade deficit in goods hit a record high this year. The overall trade deficit And this year, we saw the highest-ever deficit for U.S. goods trade by itself, which was .

Trump talked tough about taking on Iran and scrapping the Iran deal, which I thought needed to be shredded and redone. But Iran is closer than it was two years ago to . The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran resisted requests to access facilities potentially used in their weapon programs before it relented to inspections this summer. His reckless handling of Iran has destabilized global order has made us all less safe.

We need the president to care as much about real results and outcomes, as he does about retweets and photo-ops.

George Floyd was executed in the street. Americans were outraged and poured into the streets to peacefully demonstrate. The president turned holy ground into a battleground, gassing peaceful demonstrators, journalists and clergy. Instead of rising to the occasion and holding a presidential address from the Oval Office, he tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Trump kicked off Pride Month by attacking the LGBT community with a proposal to scrap in health care, finalizing a rule allowing medical workers to refuse to treat LGBT people, and drafting to turn away LGBT Americans. Not only during Pride Month, but during a pandemic.

In Portland as protests continued over civil rights and injustice, Trump dropped federal stormtroopers. Portlanders had their civil rights violated as they were abducted in unmarked vans and others were severely injured in clashes with the federal authorities. This kind of flagrant trial run for future police state crackdowns is not representative of conservative values.

As the governor of Michigan enacted COVID-19 policies, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Armed men took over the Capitol and recruited for a terror group. Last week, news broke of the Trump-supporting domestic terror group’s assassination plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They planned to kidnap and kill her. Trump’s response: attack her again.

On virtually every front, Biden and Harris have proven themselves better leaders to address the challenges facing our nation. They will re-assert American leadership abroad, taking on bad actors like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia.

They will deploy a superior national strategy for containing COVID-19 and restoring the economy and societal functions so we can build back better. Biden and Harris have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform, LGBT equality, and they have done it in a way that recognizes the failed policies of the past and works toward a better future.

I believe that it is time to bring in a team to the White House, and the executive branch, that will take seriously the responsibility of sound governance and preserving order. With Biden and Harris, we get to have real policy debates, we get back to a sense of normalcy and leadership.

Our republic is at stake. We need a coalition of conscience for the future. Join me in putting country over party, and vote Biden-Harris.

Jonathan Lockwood is the former press secretary for the Colorado House Republicans and has been a spokesperson for upward of 50 Republican lawmakers, candidates and organizations.

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Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a reelection campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decadelong audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the IRS portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’ findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Trump has disclosed to the IRS, not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

In response to a letter summarizing The Times’ findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents on which they were based. After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to protect its sources, Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president����ap business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’ analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

As the legal and political battles over access to his tax returns have intensified, Trump has often wondered aloud why anyone would even want to see them. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.

In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every business expense Trump claims to reduce his taxable income — for instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.

The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

Most of Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

The tax audit looms.

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.

The Times was also able to take the fullest measure to date of the president����ap income from overseas, where he holds ultimate sway over American diplomacy. When he took office, Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president����ap $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

Trump’s U.S. payment, after factoring in his losses, was roughly equivalent, in dollars not adjusted for inflation, to another presidential tax bill revealed nearly a half-century before. In 1973, The Providence Journal reported that, after a charitable deduction for donating his presidential papers, Richard Nixon had paid $792.81 in 1970 on income of about $200,000.

The leak of Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.

A Map of the Empire

The contents of thousands of personal and business tax records fill in financial details that have been withheld for years.

“I would love to do that,” Trump said in 2014 when asked whether he would release his taxes if he ran for president. He’s been backpedaling ever since.

When he ran, he said he might make his taxes public if Hillary Clinton did the same with the deleted emails from her private server — an echo of his taunt, while stoking the birther fiction, that he might release the returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate. He once boasted that his tax returns were “very big” and “beautiful.” But making them public? “It����ap very complicated.” He often claims that he cannot do so while under audit — an argument refuted by his own IRS commissioner. When prosecutors and congressional investigators issued subpoenas for his returns, he wielded not just his private lawyers but also the power of his Justice Department to stalemate them all the way to the Supreme Court.

Trump’s elaborate dance and defiance have only stoked suspicion about what secrets might lie hidden in his taxes. Is there a financial clue to his deference to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin? Did he write off as a business expense the hush-money payment to the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election? Did a covert source of money feed his frenzy of acquisition that began in the mid-2000s?

The Times examined and analyzed the data from thousands of individual and business tax returns for 2000 through 2017, along with additional tax information from other years. The trove included years of employee compensation information and records of cash payments between the president and his businesses, as well as information about ongoing federal audits of his taxes. This article also draws upon dozens of interviews and previously unreported material from other sources, both public and confidential.

All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it. While most of the tax data has not previously been made public, The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records previously obtained by The Times.

To delve into the records is to see up close the complex structure of the president����ap business interests — and the depth of his entanglements. What is popularly known as the Trump Organization is in fact a collection of more than 500 entities, virtually all of them wholly owned by Trump, many carrying his name. For example, 105 of them are a variation of the name Trump Marks, which he uses for licensing deals.

Fragments of Trump’s tax returns have leaked out before.

Transcripts of his main federal tax form, the 1040, from 1985 to 1994, were obtained by The Times in 2019. They showed that, in many years, Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer. Three pages of his 1995 returns, mailed anonymously to The Times during the 2016 campaign, showed that Trump had declared losses of $915.7 million, giving him a tax deduction that could have allowed him to avoid federal income taxes for almost two decades. Five months later, the journalist David Cay Johnston obtained two pages of Trump’s returns from 2005; that year, his fortunes had rebounded to the point that he was paying taxes.

The vast new trove of information analyzed by The Times completes the recurring pattern of ascent and decline that has defined the president����ap career. Even so, it has its limits.

Tax returns do not, for example, record net worth — in Trump’s case, a topic of much posturing and almost as much debate. The documents chart a great churn of money, but while returns report debts, they often do not identify lenders.

The data contains no new revelations about the $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress who performs as Stormy Daniels — the focus of the Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena for Trump’s tax returns and other financial information. Trump has acknowledged reimbursing his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who made the payoff, but the materials obtained by The Times did not include any itemized payments to Cohen. The amount, however, could have been improperly included in legal fees written off as a business expense, which are not required to be itemized on tax returns.

No subject has provoked more intense speculation about Trump’s finances than his connection to Russia. While the tax records revealed no previously unknown financial connection — and, for the most part, lack the specificity required to do so — they did shed new light on the money behind the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, a subject of enduring intrigue because of subsequent investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The records show that the pageant was the most profitable Miss Universe during Trump’s time as co-owner and that it generated a personal payday of $2.3 million — made possible, at least in part, by the Agalarov family, who would later help set up the infamous 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials seeking “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

In August, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that looked extensively into the circumstances of the Moscow pageant and revealed that as recently as February, investigators subpoenaed Russian singer Emin Agalarov, who was involved in planning it. Agalarov’s father, Aras, a billionaire who boasts of close ties to Putin, was Trump’s partner in the event.

The committee interviewed a top Miss Universe executive, Paula Shugart, who said the Agalarovs offered to underwrite the event; their family business, Crocus Group, paid a $6 million licensing fee and another $6 million in expenses. But while the pageant proved to be a financial loss for the Agalarovs — they recouped only $2 million — Shugart told investigators that it was “one of the most lucrative deals” the Miss Universe organization ever made, according to the report.

That is borne out by the tax records. They show that in 2013, the pageant reported $31.6 million in gross receipts — the highest since at least the 1990s — allowing Trump and his co-owner, NBC, to split profits of $4.7 million. By comparison, Trump and NBC shared losses of $2 million from the pageant the year before the Moscow event, and $3.8 million from the one the year after.

Loser, Winner

Losses reported by businesses Trump owns and runs helped wipe out tax bills on hundreds of millions of dollars in celebrity income.

While Trump crisscrossed the country in 2015 describing himself as uniquely qualified to be president because he was “really rich” and had “built a great company,” his accountants back in New York were busy putting the finishing touches on his 2014 tax return.

After tabulating all the profits and losses from Trump’s various endeavors on Form 1040, the accountants came to Line 56, where they had to enter the total income tax the candidate was required to pay. They needed space for only a single figure.

Zero.

For Trump, that bottom line must have looked familiar. It was the fourth year in a row that he had not paid a penny of federal income taxes.

Trump’s avoidance of income taxes is one of the most striking discoveries in his tax returns, especially given the vast wash of income itemized elsewhere in those filings.

Trump’s net income from his fame — his 50% share of “The Apprentice,” together with the riches showered upon him by the scores of suitors paying to use his name — totaled $427.4 million through 2018. A further $176.5 million in profit came to him through his investment in two highly successful office buildings.

So how did he escape nearly all taxes on that fortune? Even the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1% of Americans could have caused him to pay more than $100 million.

The answer rests in a third category of Trump’s endeavors: businesses that he owns and runs himself. The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.

That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.

Throughout his career, Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years.

That provision has been the background music to Trump’s life. As The Times’ previous reporting on his 1995 return showed, the nearly $1 billion in losses from his early-1990s collapse generated a tax deduction that he could use for up to 18 years going forward.

The newer tax returns show that Trump burned through the last of the tax-reducing power of that $1 billion in 2005, just as a torrent of entertainment riches began coming his way following the debut of “The Apprentice” the year before.

For 2005 through 2007, cash from licensing deals and endorsements filled Trump’s bank accounts with $120 million in pure profit. With no prior-year losses left to reduce his taxable income, he paid substantial federal income taxes for the first time in his life: a total of $70.1 million.

As his celebrity income swelled, Trump went on a buying spree unlike any he had had since the 1980s, when eager banks and his father’s wealth allowed him to buy or build the casinos, airplanes, yacht and old hotel that would soon lay him low.

When “The Apprentice” premiered, Trump had opened only two golf courses and was renovating two more. By the end of 2015, he had 15 courses and was transforming the Old Post Office building in Washington into a Trump International Hotel. But rather than making him wealthier, the tax records reveal as never before, each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.

Consider the results at his largest golf resort, Trump National Doral, near Miami. Trump bought the resort for $150 million in 2012; through 2018, his losses have totaled $162.3 million. He has pumped $213 million of fresh cash into Doral, tax records show, and has a $125 million mortgage balance coming due in three years.

His three courses in Europe — two in Scotland and one in Ireland — have reported a combined $63.6 million in losses.

Overall, since 2000, Trump has reported losses of $315.6 million at the golf courses that are his prized possessions.

For all of its Trumpworld allure, his Washington hotel, opened in 2016, has not fared much better. Its tax records show losses through 2018 of $55.5 million.

And Trump Corp., a real estate services company, has reported losing $134 million since 2000. Trump personally bankrolled the losses year after year, marking his cash infusions as a loan with an ever-increasing balance, his tax records show. In 2016, he gave up on getting paid back and turned the loan into a cash contribution.

Trump has often posited that his losses are more accounting magic than actual money out the door.

Last year, after The Times published details of his tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s, he attributed the red ink to depreciation, which he said in a tweet would show “losses in almost all cases” and that “much was non monetary.”

“I love depreciation,” Trump said during a presidential debate in 2016.

Depreciation, though, is not a magic wand — it involves real money spent or borrowed to buy buildings or other assets that are expected to last years. Those costs must be spread out as expenses and deducted over the useful life of the asset. Even so, the rules do hold particular advantages for real estate developers like Trump, who are allowed to use their real estate losses to reduce their taxable income from other activities.

What the tax records for Trump’s businesses show, however, is that he has lost chunks of his fortune even before depreciation is figured in. The three European golf courses, the Washington hotel, Doral and Trump Corp. reported losing a total of $150.3 million from 2010 through 2018, without including depreciation as an expense.

To see what a successful business looks like, depreciation or not, look no further than one in Trump’s portfolio that he does not manage.

After plans for a Trump-branded mini-city on the Far West Side of Manhattan stalled in the 1990s, Trump’s stake was sold by his partner to Vornado Realty Trust. Trump objected to the sale in court, saying he had not been consulted, but he ended up with a 30% share of two valuable office buildings owned and operated by Vornado.

His share of the profits through the end of 2018 totaled $176.5 million, with depreciation factored in. He has never had to invest more money in the partnership, tax records show.

Among businesses he runs, Trump’s first success remains his best. The retail and commercial spaces at Trump Tower, completed in 1983, have reliably delivered more than $20 million a year in profits, a total of $336.3 million since 2000 that has done much to help keep him afloat.

Trump has an established track record of stiffing his lenders. But the tax returns reveal that he has failed to pay back far more money than previously known: a total of $287 million since 2010.

The IRS considers forgiven debt to be income, but Trump was able to avoid taxes on much of that money by reducing his ability to declare future business losses. For the rest, he took advantage of a provision of the Great Recession bailout that allowed income from canceled debt to be completely deferred for five years, then spread out evenly over the next five. He declared the first $28.2 million in 2014.

Once again, his business losses mostly absolved his tax responsibilities. He paid no federal income taxes for 2014.

Trump was periodically required to pay a parallel income tax called the alternative minimum tax, created as a tripwire to prevent wealthy people from using huge deductions, including business losses, to entirely wipe out their tax liabilities.

Trump paid alternative minimum tax in seven years between 2000 and 2017 — a total of $24.3 million, excluding refunds he received after filing. For 2015, he paid $641,931, his first payment of any federal income tax since 2010.

As he settled into the Oval Office, his tax bills soon returned to form. His potential taxable income in 2016 and 2017 included $24.8 million in profits from sources related to his celebrity status and $56.4 million for the loans he did not repay. The dreaded alternative minimum tax would let his business losses erase only some of his liability.

Each time, he requested an extension to file his 1040; and each time, he made the required payment to the IRS for income taxes he might owe — $1 million for 2016 and $4.2 million for 2017. But virtually all of that liability was washed away when he eventually filed, and most of the payments were rolled forward to cover potential taxes in future years.

To cancel out the tax bills, Trump made use of $9.7 million in business investment credits, at least some of which related to his renovation of the Old Post Office hotel, which qualified for a historic-preservation tax break. Although he had more than enough credits to owe no taxes at all, his accountants appear to have carved out an allowance for a small tax liability for both 2016 and 2017.

When they got to line 56, the one for income taxes due, the amount was the same each year: $750.

The $72.9 Million Maneuver

“The Apprentice” created what was probably the biggest income tax bite of Trump’s life. During the Great Recession bailout, he asked for the money back.

Testifying before Congress in February 2019, the president����ap estranged personal lawyer, Cohen, recalled Trump’s showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury some years earlier and musing “that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”

In fact, confidential records show that starting in 2010 he claimed, and received, an income tax refund totaling $72.9 million — all the federal income tax he had paid for 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

The legitimacy of that refund is at the center of the audit battle that he has long been waging, out of public view, with the IRS.

The records that The Times reviewed square with the way Trump has repeatedly cited, without explanation, an ongoing audit as grounds for refusing to release his tax returns. He alluded to it as recently as July on Fox News, when he told Sean Hannity, “They treat me horribly, the IRS, horribly.”

And while the records do not lay out all the details of the audit, they match his lawyers’ statement during the 2016 campaign that audits of his returns for 2009 and subsequent years remained open, and involved “transactions or activities that were also reported on returns for 2008 and earlier.”

Trump harvested that refund bonanza by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years.

But to turn that long arc of failure into a giant refund check, he relied on some deft accounting footwork and an unwitting gift from an unlikely source — Obama.

Business losses can work like a tax-avoidance coupon: A dollar lost on one business reduces a dollar of taxable income from elsewhere. The types and amounts of income that can be used in a given year vary, depending on an owner’s tax status. But some losses can be saved for later use, or even used to request a refund on taxes paid in a prior year.

Until 2009, those coupons could be used to wipe away taxes going back only two years. But that November, the window was more than doubled by a little-noticed provision in a bill Obama signed as part of the Great Recession recovery effort. Now business owners could request full refunds of taxes paid in the prior four years and 50% of those from the year before that.

Trump had paid no income taxes in 2008. But the change meant that when he filed his taxes for 2009, he could seek a refund of not just the $13.3 million he had paid in 2007 but also the combined $56.9 million paid in 2005 and 2006, when “The Apprentice” created what was likely the biggest income tax bite of his life.

The records reviewed by The Times indicate that Trump filed for the first of several tranches of his refund several weeks later, in January 2010. That set off what tax professionals refer to as a “quickie refund,” a check processed in 90 days on a tentative basis, pending an audit by the IRS.

His total federal income tax refund would eventually grow to $70.1 million, plus $2,733,184 in interest. He also received $21.2 million in state and local refunds, which often piggyback on federal filings.

Whether Trump gets to keep the cash, though, remains far from a sure thing.

Refunds require the approval of IRS auditors and an opinion of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan panel better known for reviewing the impact of tax legislation. Tax law requires the committee to weigh in on all refunds larger than $2 million to individuals.

Records show that the results of an audit of Trump’s refund were sent to the joint committee in the spring of 2011. An agreement was reached in late 2014, the documents indicate, but the audit resumed and grew to include Trump’s returns for 2010 through 2013. In the spring of 2016, with Trump closing in on the Republican nomination, the case was sent back to the committee. It has remained there, unresolved, with the statute of limitations repeatedly pushed forward.

Precisely why the case has stalled is not clear. But experts say it suggests that the gap between the sides remains wide. If negotiations were to deadlock, the case would move to federal court, where it could become a matter of public record.

The dispute may center on a single claim that jumps off the page of Trump’s 2009 tax return: a declaration of more than $700 million in business losses that he had not been allowed to use in prior years. Unleashing that giant tax-avoidance coupon enabled him to receive some or all of his refund.

The material obtained by The Times does not identify the business or businesses that generated those losses. But the losses were a kind that can be claimed only when partners give up their interest in a business. And in 2009, Trump parted ways with a giant money loser: his long-failing Atlantic City casinos.

After Trump’s bondholders rebuffed his offer to buy them out, and with a third round of bankruptcy only a week away, Trump announced in February 2009 that he was quitting the board of directors.

“If I’m not going to run it, I don’t want to be involved in it,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m one of the largest developers in the world. I have a lot of cash and plenty of places I can go.”

The same day, he notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that he had “determined that his partnership interests are worthless and lack potential to regain value” and was “hereby abandoning” his stake.

The language was crucial. Trump was using the precise wording of IRS rules governing the most beneficial, and perhaps aggressive, method for business owners to avoid taxes when separating from a business.

A partner who walks away from a business with nothing — what tax laws refer to as abandonment — can suddenly declare all the losses on the business that could not be used in prior years. But there are a few catches, including this: Abandonment is essentially an all-or-nothing proposition. If the IRS learns that the owner received anything of value, the allowable losses are reduced to just $3,000 a year.

And Trump does appear to have received something. When the casino bankruptcy concluded, he got 5% of the stock in the new company. The materials reviewed by The Times do not make clear whether Trump’s refund application reflected his public declaration of abandonment. If it did, that 5% could place his entire refund in question.

If the auditors ultimately disallow Trump’s $72.9 million federal refund, he will be forced to return that money with interest, and possibly penalties, a total that could exceed $100 million. He could also be ordered to return the state and local refunds based on the same claims.

In response to a question about the audit, Garten, the Trump Organization lawyer, said facts cited by The Times were incorrect, without citing specifics. He did, however, write that it was “illogical” to say Trump had not paid taxes for those three years just because the money was later refunded.

“While you claim that President Trump paid no taxes in 10 of the 15 previous years,” Garten said, “you also assert that President Trump claimed a massive refund for tens of millions for taxes he did pay. These two claims are entirely inconsistent and, in any event, not supported by the facts.”

House Democrats who have been in hot pursuit of Trump’s tax returns most likely have no idea that at least some of the records are sitting in a congressional office building. George Yin, a former chief of staff for the joint committee, said that any identifying information about taxpayers under review was tightly held among a handful of staff lawyers and was rarely shared with politicians assigned to the committee.

It is possible that the case has been paused because Trump is president, which would raise the personal stakes of reelection. If the recent Fox interview is any indication, Trump seems increasingly agitated about the matter.

“It����ap a disgrace what����ap happened,” he told Hannity. “We had a deal done. In fact, it was — I guess it was signed even. And once I ran, or once I won, or somewhere back a long time ago, everything was like, ‘Well, let����ap start all over again.’ It����ap a disgrace.”

The 20% Solution

Helping to reduce Trump’s tax bills are unidentified consultants’ fees, some of which can be matched to payments received by Ivanka Trump.

Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income: In Azerbaijan, Trump collected $5 million on a hotel deal and reported $1.1 million in consulting fees, while in Dubai it was $3 million with a $630,000 fee, and so on.

Mysterious big payments in business deals can raise red flags, particularly in places where bribes or kickbacks to middlemen are routine. But there is no evidence that Trump, who mostly licenses his name to other people’s projects and is not involved in securing government approvals, has engaged in such practices.

Rather, there appears to be a closer-to-home explanation for at least some of the fees: Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ivanka Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

Ivanka Trump had been an executive officer of the Trump companies that received profits from and paid the consulting fees for both projects — meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father’s business.

When asked about the arrangement, the Trump Organization lawyer, Garten, did not comment.

Employers can deduct consulting fees as a business expense and also avoid the withholding taxes that apply to wages. To claim the deduction, the consulting arrangement must be an “ordinary and necessary” part of running the business, with fees that are reasonable and market-based, according to the IRS. The recipient of the fees is still required to pay income tax.

The IRS has pursued civil penalties against some business owners who devised schemes to avoid taxes by paying exorbitant fees to related parties who were not in fact independent contractors. A 2011 tax court case centered on the IRS’ denial of almost $3 million in deductions for consulting fees the partners in an Illinois accounting firm paid themselves via corporations they created. The court concluded that the partners had structured the fees to “distribute profits, not to compensate for services.”

There is no indication that the IRS has questioned Donald Trump’s practice of deducting millions of dollars in consulting fees. If the payments to his daughter were compensation for work, it is not clear why Trump would do it in this form, other than to reduce his own tax liability. Another, more legally perilous possibility is that the fees were a way to transfer assets to his children without incurring a gift tax.

A Times investigation in 2018 found that Trump’s late father, Fred Trump, employed a number of legally dubious schemes decades ago to evade gift taxes on millions of dollars he transferred to his children. It is not possible to discern from this newer collection of tax records whether intra-family financial maneuverings were a motivating factor.

However, the fact that some of the consulting fees are identical to those reported by Trump’s daughter raises the question of whether this was a mechanism the president used to compensate his adult children involved with his business. Indeed, in some instances where large fees were claimed, people with direct knowledge of the projects were not aware of any outside consultants who would have been paid.

On the failed hotel deal in Azerbaijan, which was plagued by suspicions of corruption, a Trump Organization lawyer told The New Yorker the company was blameless because it was merely a licenser and had no substantive role, adding, “We did not pay any money to anyone.” Yet, the tax records for three Trump LLCs involved in that project show deductions for consulting fees totaling $1.1 million that were paid to someone.

In Turkey, a person directly involved in developing two Trump towers in Istanbul expressed bafflement when asked about consultants on the project, telling The Times there was never any consultant or other third party in Turkey paid by the Trump Organization. But tax records show regular deductions for consulting fees over seven years totaling $2 million.

Ivanka Trump disclosed in her public filing that the fees she received were paid through TTT Consulting LLC, which she said provided “consulting, licensing and management services for real estate projects.” Incorporated in Delaware in December 2005, the firm is one of several Trump-related entities with some variation of TTT or TTTT in the name that appear to refer to members of the Trump family.

Like her brothers Donald Jr. and Eric, Ivanka Trump was a longtime employee of the Trump Organization and an executive officer for more than 200 Trump companies that licensed or managed hotel and resort properties. The tax records show that the three siblings had each drawn a salary from their father’s company — roughly $480,000 a year, jumping to about $2 million after Donald Trump became president — although Ivanka Trump no longer receives a salary. What����ap more, Donald Trump has said the children were intimately involved in negotiating and managing his projects. When asked in a 2011 lawsuit deposition whom he relied on to handle important details of his licensing deals, he named only Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric.

On Ivanka Trump’s now-defunct website, which explains her role at the Trump Organization, she was not identified as a consultant. Rather, she has been described as a senior executive who “actively participates in all aspects of both Trump and Trump branded projects, including deal evaluation, predevelopment planning, financing, design, construction, sales and marketing, and ensuring that Trump’s world-renowned physical and operational standards are met.

“She is involved in all decisions — large and small.”

The Art of the Write-Off

Hair stylists, table linens, property taxes on a family estate — all have been deducted as business expenses.

Private jets, country clubs and mansions have all had a role in the selling of Donald Trump.

“I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It����ap an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

If the singular Trump product is Trump in an exaggerated form — the man, the lifestyle, the acquisitiveness — then everything that feeds the image, including the cost of his businesses, can be written off on his taxes. Trump may be reporting business losses to the government, but he can still live a life of wealth and write it off.

Take, for example, Mar-a-Lago, now the president����ap permanent residence as well as a private club and stage set on which Trump luxury plays out. As a business, it is also the source of millions of dollars in expenses deducted from taxable income, among them $109,433 for linens and silver and $197,829 for landscaping in 2017. Also deducted as a business expense was the $210,000 paid to a Florida photographer over the years for shooting numerous events at the club, including a 2016 New Year’s Eve party hosted by Trump.

Trump has written off as business expenses costs — including fuel and meals — associated with his aircraft, used to shuttle him among his various homes and properties. Likewise the cost of haircuts, including the more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during “The Apprentice.” Together, nine Trump entities have written off at least $95,464 paid to a favorite hair and makeup artist of Ivanka Trump.

In allowing business expenses to be deducted, the IRS requires that they be “ordinary and necessary,” a loosely defined standard often interpreted generously by business owners.

Perhaps Trump’s most generous interpretation of the business expense write-off is his treatment of the Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, New York.

Seven Springs is a throwback to another era. The main house, built in 1919 by Eugene Meyer, the onetime head of the Federal Reserve who bought The Washington Post in 1933, sits on more than 200 acres of lush, almost untouched land just an hour’s drive north of New York City.

“The mansion is 50,000 square feet, has three pools, carriage houses, and is surrounded by nature preserves,” according to The Trump Organization website.

Trump had big plans when he bought the property in 1996 — a golf course, a clubhouse and 15 private homes. But residents of surrounding towns thwarted his ambitions, arguing that development would draw too much traffic and risk polluting the drinking water.

Trump instead found a way to reap tax benefits from the estate. He took advantage of what is known as a conservation easement. In 2015, he signed a deal with a land conservancy, agreeing not to develop most of the property. In exchange, he claimed a $21.1 million charitable tax deduction.

The tax records reveal another way Seven Springs has generated substantial tax savings. In 2014, Trump classified the estate as an investment property, as distinct from a personal residence. Since then, he has written off $2.2 million in property taxes as a business expense — even as his 2017 tax law allowed individuals to write off only $10,000 in property taxes a year.

Courts have held that to treat residences as businesses for tax purposes, owners must show that they have “an actual and honest objective of making a profit,” typically by making substantial efforts to rent the property and eventually generating income.

Whether or not Seven Springs fits those criteria, the Trumps have described the property somewhat differently.

In 2014, Eric Trump told Forbes that “this is really our compound.” Growing up, he and his brother Donald Jr. spent many summers there, riding all-terrain vehicles and fishing on a nearby lake. At one point, the brothers took up residence in a carriage house on the property. “It was home base for us for a long, long time,” Eric told Forbes.

And the Trump Organization website still describes Seven Springs as a “retreat for the Trump family.”

Garten, the Trump Organization lawyer, did not respond to a question about the Seven Springs write-off.

The Seven Springs conservation-easement deduction is one of four that Donald Trump has claimed over the years. While his use of these deductions is widely known, his tax records show that they represent the lion’s share of his charitable giving — about $119.3 million of roughly $130 million in personal and corporate charitable contributions reported to the IRS.

Two of those deductions — at Seven Springs and at the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles — are the focus of an investigation by the New York attorney general, who is examining whether the appraisals on the land, and therefore the tax deductions, were inflated.

Another common deductible expense for all businesses is legal fees. The IRS requires that these fees be “directly related to operating your business,” and businesses cannot deduct “legal fees paid to defend charges that arise from participation in a political campaign.”

Yet the tax records show that the Trump Corp. wrote off as business expenses fees paid to a criminal defense lawyer, Alan S. Futerfas, who was hired to represent Donald Trump Jr. during the Russia inquiry. Investigators were examining Donald Jr.’s role in the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians who had promised damaging information on Clinton. When he testified before Congress in 2017, Futerfas was by his side.

Futerfas was also hired to defend the president����ap embattled charitable foundation, which would be shut down in 2018 after New York regulators said it had engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality.”

The Trump Corp. paid Futerfas at least $1.9 million in 2017 and 2018, tax records show. Also written off was at least $259,684 paid to Williams & Jensen, another law firm brought in during the same period to represent Donald Trump Jr.

A President and a Businessman

Deals in countries led by strongmen, tenants who have business before the federal government, and hotels and clubs that draw those seeking access or favor.

In May, the chairman of a trade group representing Turkish business interests wrote to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross urging support for increased trade between the United States and Turkey. The ultimate goal was nothing less than “reorienting the U.S. supply chain away from China.”

The letter was among three sent to Cabinet secretaries by Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, chairman of the Turkey-U.S. Business Council, who noted that he had copied each one to Trump.

The president needed no introduction to Yalcindag: The Turkish businessman helped negotiate a licensing deal in 2008 for his family’s company to develop two Trump towers in Istanbul. The tax records show the deal has earned Trump at least $13 million — far more than previously known — including more than $1 million since he entered the White House, even as his onetime associate now lobbies on behalf of Turkish interests.

Yalcindag said that he had “remained friendly” with Trump since their work together years ago but that all communications between his trade group and the administration “go through formal channels and are properly disclosed.”

The ethical quandaries created by Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

The tax records for Trump and his hundreds of companies show precisely how much money he has received over the years, and how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president. The records also provide the first reliable window onto his finances before 2014, the earliest year covered by his required annual disclosures, showing that his total profits from some projects outside the United States were larger than indicated by those limited public filings.

Based on the financial disclosures, which report much of his income in broad ranges, Trump’s earnings from the Istanbul towers could have been as low as $3.2 million. In the Philippines, where he licensed his name to a Manila tower nearly a decade ago, the low end of the range was $4.1 million — less than half of the $9.3 million he actually made. In Azerbaijan, he collected more than $5 million for the failed hotel project, about twice what appeared on his public filings.

It did not take long for conflicts to emerge when Trump ran for president and won. The Philippines’ strongman leader, Rodrigo Duterte, chose as a special trade envoy to Washington the businessman behind the Trump tower in Manila. In Argentina, a key person who had been involved in a Uruguayan licensing deal that earned Trump $2.3 million was appointed to a Cabinet post.

The president����ap conflicts have been most evident with Turkey, where the business community and the authoritarian government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have not hesitated to leverage various Trump enterprises to their advantage. When Turkish-American relations were at a low point, a Turkish business group canceled a conference at Trump’s Washington hotel; six months later, when the two countries were on better terms, the rescheduled event was attended by Turkish government officials. Turkish Airlines also chose the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia to host an event.

More broadly, the tax records suggest other ways in which Trump’s presidency has propped up his sagging bottom line. Monthly credit card receipts, reported to the IRS by third-party card processing firms, reflect the way certain of his resorts, golf courses and hotels became favored stamping grounds, if not venues for influence-trading, beginning in 2015 and continuing into his time in the White House.

The credit card data does not reflect total revenue and is useful mainly for showing short-term ups and downs of consumer interest in a business. While two of Trump’s marquee draws — the Washington hotel in the Old Post Office and the Doral golf resort — are loaded with debt and continue to lose money, both have seen credit card transactions rise markedly with his political ascent.

At the hotel, the monthly receipts grew from $3.7 million in December 2016 shortly after it opened, to $5.4 million in January 2017 and $6 million by May 2018. At Doral, after Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, credit card revenue more than doubled, to $13 million, for the three months through August, compared with the same period the year before.

One Trump enterprise that has been regularly profitable and is a persistent source of concern about ethical conflicts and national security lapses, is the Mar-a-Lago club. Profits there rose sharply after Trump declared his candidacy, as courtiers eagerly joining up brought a tenfold rise in cash from initiation fees — from $664,000 in 2014 to just under $6 million in 2016, even before Trump doubled the cost of initiation in January 2017. The membership rush allowed the president to take $26 million out of the business from 2015 through 2018, nearly triple the rate at which he had paid himself in the prior two years.

Some of the largest payments from business groups for events or conferences at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties have come since Trump became president, the tax records show.

At Doral, Trump collected a total of at least $7 million in 2015 and 2016 from Bank of America, and at least $1.2 million in 2017 and 2018 from a trade association representing food retailers and wholesalers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce paid Doral at least $406,599 in 2018.

Beyond one-time payments for events or memberships, large corporations also pay rent for space in the few commercial buildings Trump actually owns. Walgreens, the pharmacy giant that resolved an antitrust matter before federal regulators in 2017, pays $3.4 million a year for a lease at 40 Wall Street, a Trump-owned office building in Manhattan.

Another renter at 40 Wall, for $2.5 million a year, is Atane Engineers, which changed its name in 2018 after a corruption scandal that culminated in two former top executives’ pleading guilty to paying bribes for city infrastructure contracts. Despite the criminal case — which landed the company on New York state’s list of “non-responsible entities” that require a waiver to obtain state contracts — the newly christened Atane registered as an eligible federal contractor with no restrictions listed in its file.

Rental income overall at 40 Wall has risen markedly, from $30.5 million in 2014 to $43.2 million in 2018. The tax records show that the cost of existing leases there has risen. and at least four law firms appear to have moved in since Trump ran for president.

In addition to buildings he owns outright, there is the president����ap stake in the Vornado partnerships that control two valuable office towers — 1290 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and 555 California Street in San Francisco. Vornado’s chief executive, Steven Roth, is a close Trump ally recently named to the White House economic recovery council. Last year, the president appointed Roth’s wife, Daryl Roth, to the Kennedy Center board of trustees.

Vornado tenants include a roster of blue-chip firms paying multimillion-dollar leases, many of whom regularly do business with, lobby or are regulated by the federal government. Among the dozens of leases paid in 2018 to Trump’s Vornado partnerships, according to his tax records, were $5.8 million from Goldman Sachs; $3.1 million from Microsoft; $32.7 million from Neuberger Berman, an investment management company; and $8.8 million from the law firm Kirkland & Ellis.

The Gathering Storm

Threats are converging: mounting business losses, the looming IRS audit and personally guaranteed debts coming due.

When Trump glided down a gilded Trump Tower escalator to kick off his presidential campaign in June 2015, his finances needed a jolt.

His core businesses were reporting mounting losses — more than $100 million over the previous two years. The river of celebrity-driven income that had long buoyed them was running dry.

If Trump hoped his unlikely candidacy might, at least, revitalize his brand, his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.

Now his tax records make clear that he is facing a battery of threats to his business and his own financial well-being.

Over the past decade, he appears to have filled the cash-flow gaps with a series of one-shots that may not be available again.

In 2012, he took out a $100 million mortgage on the commercial space in Trump Tower. He took nearly the entire amount as a payout, his tax records show. His company has paid more than $15 million in interest on the loan but nothing on the principal. The full $100 million comes due in 2022.

In 2013, he withdrew $95.8 million from his Vornado partnership account.

And in January 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds, his biggest single month of sales in at least the last two decades. He sold $54 million more in stocks and bonds in 2015, and $68.2 million in 2016. His financial disclosure released in July showed that he had as little as $873,000 in securities left to sell.

Trump’s businesses reported cash on hand of $34.7 million in 2018, down 40% from five years earlier.

What����ap more, the tax records show that Trump has once again done what he says he regrets, looking back on his early 1990s meltdown: personally guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a decision that led his lenders to threaten to force him into personal bankruptcy.

This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win reelection, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.

There is, however, a tax benefit for Trump. While business owners can use losses to avoid taxes, they can do so only up to the amount invested in the business. But by taking personal responsibility for that $421 million in debt, Trump would be able to declare that amount in losses in future years.

The balances on those loans had not been paid down by the end of 2018. And the businesses carrying the bulk of the debt — the Doral golf resort ($125 million) and the Washington hotel ($160 million) — are struggling, which could make it difficult to find a lender willing to refinance it.

The unresolved audit of his $72.9 million tax refund hangs over his head.

The broader economy promises little relief. Across the country, brick-and-mortar stores are in decline, and they have been very important to Trump Tower, which has in turn been very important to Trump. Nike, which rented the space for its flagship store in a building attached to Trump Tower and had paid $195.1 million in rent since the 1990s, left in 2018.

The president����ap most recent financial disclosure reported modest gains in 2019. But that was before the pandemic hit. His already struggling properties were shut down for several months earlier this year. The Doral resort asked Deutsche Bank to allow a delay on its loan payments. Analysts have predicted that the hotel business will not fully recover until late 2023.

Trump still has assets to sell. But doing so could take its own toll, both financial and to Trump’s desire to always be seen as a winner. The Trump family said last year that it was considering selling the Washington hotel but not because it was losing money.

In Trump’s telling, any difficulty in his finances has been caused by the sacrifices made for his current job.

“They say, ‘Trump is getting rich off our nation,’” he said at a rally in Minneapolis last October. “I lose billions being president, and I don’t care. It����ap nice to be rich, I guess, but I lose billions.”

A look at some of the rhetoric Thursday from Trump and his supporting speakers at Republican National Convention proceedings:

COVID-19

TRUMP: “Instead of following the science, Joe Biden wants to inflict a painful shutdown on the entire country. His shutdown would inflict unthinkable and lasting harm on our nation’s children, families, and citizens of all backgrounds.”

THE FACTS: That����ap false. Biden has publicly said he would shut down the nation’s economy only if scientists and public health advisers recommended he do so to stem the COVID-19 threat. In other words, he said he would follow the science, not disregard it.

Speaking Sunday in an ABC interview, Biden said he “will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives” when he was asked if he would be willing to shut the country again.

“So if the scientists say shut it down?” asked ABC’s David Muir.

“I would shut it down,” Biden responded. “I would listen to the scientists.” The former vice president has said repeatedly that no one knows what January would look like.

___

TRUMP: “For those of you that still drive a car, look how low your gasoline bill is. You haven’t seen that in a long time.”

THE FACTS: Trump seems to be taking credit for lower prices that were the byproduct of a pandemic that has killed more than 180,000 Americans.

Gasoline prices didn’t fall because of the Trump administration. They plunged because of the coronavirus forcing people to abandon their offices, schools, business trips and vacations.

As more people worked from home, they needed to fill up their cars less frequently. Airlines didn’t need to burn through as much fuel. Here’s the statement from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: “Reduced economic activity related to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused changes in energy demand and supply patterns in 2020.” World demand for oil has fallen by 8 million barrels a day, according to that agency’s estimates.

___

TRUMP: “The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates of any major country anywhere in the world.”

THE FACTS: Not true. Not if you consider Russia, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and India to be major countries.

The U.S. sits right in the middle when it comes to COVID-19 mortality rates in the 20 nations most impacted by the pandemic, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.

Of the 20, Mexico has the highest mortality rate at 10.8 deaths for every 100 confirmed COVID cases, followed by Ecuador at 5.8. Saudi Arabia had the lowest rate of the 20 nations at 1.2, followed by Bangladesh, the Philippines, Russia, Morocco, India, Argentina, South Africa and Chile.

The U.S. had the 10th lowest of the 20 nations, with a mortality rate of 3.1.

When the center looked at the data in another way, analyzing the COVID death rate for every 100,000 residents, the U.S. fares even worse. Only three nations — Brazil, Chile and Peru — posted higher death rates.

Understanding deaths as a percentage of the population or as a percentage of known infections is problematic because countries track and report COVID-19 deaths and cases differently. Many other factors are in play in shaping a death toll besides how well a country responded to the pandemic, such as the overall health or youth of national populations.

___

BLACK LIVES MATTER

RUDY GIULIANI, Trump’s personal attorney and former New York mayor: “Black Lives Matter and antifa sprang into action and, in a flash, they hijacked the peaceful protest into vicious, brutal riots.”

THE FACTS: That����ap a hollow claim.

There’s no evidence that Black Lives Matter or antifa, or any political group for that matter, is infiltrating racial injustice protests with violence.

In June, The Associated Press analyzed court records, employment histories and social media posts for 217 people arrested in Minneapolis and the District of Columbia, cities at the center of the protests earlier this year.

More than 85 percent of the people arrested were local residents, and few had affiliation with any organized groups. Social media posts for a few of those arrested indicated they were involved in left-leaning activities while others expressed support for the political right and Trump himself.

Local police departments across the country were forced to knock down widespread social media rumors that busloads of “antifa,” a term for leftist militants, were coming to violently disrupt cities and towns during nationwide racial justice protests. In June, Twitter and Facebook busted accounts linked to white supremacy groups that were promoting some of those falsehoods online.

___

EDUCATION

TRUMP: “Biden also vowed to oppose school choice and oppose all charter schools.”

THE FACTS: That����ap false. Biden doesn’t oppose charter schools. He opposes federal money going to for-profit charter companies.

Such firms are only a slice of the charter school market, meaning Biden’s position wouldn’t substantially alter the charter landscape that is dominated by non-profit organizations.

Biden does oppose federal money for tuition vouchers.

___

MILITARY

TRUMP: “We have spent $2.5 trillion on completely rebuilding our military, which was very badly depleted when I took office, as you know.”

THE FACTS: That����ap an exaggeration.

His administration has accelerated a sharp buildup in defense spending and paused spending limits but a number of new Pentagon weapons programs, such as the F-35 fighter jet, predate Trump.

The Air Force’s Minuteman 3 missiles, a key part of the U.S. nuclear force, for instance, have been operating since the early 1970s and the modernization was begun under the Obama administration.

___

VETERANS

TRUMP: “We also passed VA accountability and VA Choice, our great veterans. We are taking care of our veterans.”

THE FACTS: False. He didn’t get Veterans Choice approved; President Barack Obama did in 2014. Trump expanded it, under a 2018 law known as the MISSION Act. It allows veterans to get health care outside the VA system at public expense under certain conditions.

___

ENERGY

TRUMP, claiming to have “secured for the first time American energy independence.”

HOUSE MINORITY LEADER KEVIN MCCARTHY, R-California: Under Trump, “we … achieved energy independence.”

THE FACTS: This is misleading. The pandemic has severely lessened the demand for crude oil. But through June, the United States was still importing more crude oil than it was selling overseas, according to the Census Bureau.

While the United States has become less reliant on foreign oil, it only produces 11.3 million barrels a day and consumes 18.5 million barrels of liquid fuels daily, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Technological advances like fracking and horizontal drilling have allowed the U.S. to greatly increase production, but the country still imports millions of barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iraq and other countries. One reason is that foreign oil is more affordable. Another is that much of what the U.S. produces is hard for domestic refiners to convert to practical use. So the U.S. exports that production and imports oil that is more suitable for American refineries to handle.

___

VIRUS TESTING

IVANKA TRUMP: “Our president rapidly mobilized the full force of government and the private sector to produce ventilators within weeks — to build the most robust testing system in the world.”

THE FACTS: Her assertion of superior U.S. testing for COVID-19 is dubious. The U.S. repeatedly stumbled with testing in the early weeks of the outbreak, allowing the virus to quickly spread in the U.S. His own experts say the U.S. is nowhere near the level of testing needed to control the virus.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently testified that health officials are still working to significantly increase testing capacity, calling such expansion a “critical underpinning of our response.”

The U.S. currently is conducting nearly 750,000 tests a day, far short of what many public health experts say the U.S. should be testing to control the spread of the virus. Looking to the fall, some experts have called for 4 million or more tests daily, while a group assembled by Harvard University estimated that 20 million a day would be needed to keep the virus in check.

Redfield has said the U.S. was aiming to boost testing to 3 million daily by “pooling” multiple people’s samples, a technique that is still under review by the FDA. He stressed the need for expanded surveillance because some people who get infected may not show symptoms.

“We still have a ways to go,” Redfield said.

Frequent shortages also spurred the CDC to quietly issue new guidance on testing. While in the early months of the outbreak Trump repeatedly insisted that “anybody” who wants a test can get a test, Redfield issued a statement this week that “’Everyone who wants a test does not necessarily need a test.”

The U.S. stumbled early in the pandemic response as the CDC struggled to develop its own test for the coronavirus in January, later discovering problems in its kits sent to state and county public health labs in early February.

It took the CDC more than two weeks to come up with a fix to the test kits, leading to delays in diagnoses through February, a critical month when the virus took root in the U.S.

___

IRAN

SEN. TOM COTTON of Arkansas: “Joe Biden sent pallets of cash to the ayatollahs.”

THE FACTS: This is a distorted tale Trump and Republicans loves to tell. Yes, the U.S. flew cash to Iran in the Obama years, but it was money the United States owed to that country.

Cotton also played into the convention’s pattern of attributing every questionable action of President Barack Obama’s administration to Biden personally.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

___

Seitz reported from Chicago; Klepper from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writers Hope Yen, Bill Barrow and Cal Woodward contributed to this report.

It����ap easy, observing all of this, to say that the Republican Party has fallen fully into a cult of personality around Trump and his family, a shocking number of whom have featured speaking roles at the convention. It����ap also easy to say the party has no ideas or plans for the future. But that would be a mistake. For the Republican Party, the situation now isn’t too different from what it was in 2016. Trump lacked a serious agenda then just as he lacks one now. Rather than bring a new program to bear on the party, he has made the equivalent of a trade: total support for his personal and political concerns in exchange for almost total pursuit of conservative ideological interests.

The last 3 1/2 years have only shown the wisdom of this pact. Republican indifference to the president����ap corruption, criminality (yet another former campaign adviser was arrested last week) and prejudice — which freed him to profit from the office and turn the bureaucracy into an instrument of his will — has been rewarded with deregulation, cuts to the social safety net and the installation in the federal judiciary of a large new cohort of reliably conservative judges.

In which case, why fix what isn’t broken? If there’s no platform for the Republican National Convention, if the party has agreed to simply support the president����ap second-term agenda, it is because the basic arrangement between Trump and the Republican Party is still intact. Should he win a second term, we’ll see more of the same: an administration that pursues as much of the party’s agenda — redistribution to the wealthy, deep reductions in the state’s ability to solve problems for the general welfare — as possible, and a Republican Party that looks the other way as Trump turns the federal government into a patronage machine for himself, his family and his allies.

It is noteworthy that under Trump the Republican Party has abandoned the rhetoric of limited government and natural rights. But this has less to do with the party’s agenda than it does its public image. Gone is the militarism and evangelical piety of George W. Bush’s Republican Party or the libertarian-inflected outrage of the Tea Party. Instead, predictably, we have the Fox News aesthetics of a president who rose to political power via the cable news channel and who exists in a codependent relationship with the network. He relies on its coverage for ideas, messaging and even personnel, and Fox, in turn, tailors its coverage and commentary to his preferences. It is not for nothing that when Fox breaks with Trump, it����ap a story.

You can see the Fox Newsification of the Republicans in their choice of speakers for this year’s convention. Whereas the 2012 convention saw speeches from a wide range of Republican lawmakers and officials, Trump’s event is a glorified cable news panel, with appearances from figures like Charlie Kirk — the pugilistic founder of Turning Point USA, an activist group for young conservatives, who let the convention know that “Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization” — and Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a couple filmed pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis.

We had other Fox News guests like Rudy Giuliani, Franklin Graham, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, and of course, the president����ap children, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump. There were a few traditional Republican lawmakers in speaking roles, like Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, but they aren’t part of the core message.

It is not news that the Republican Party has a stagnant governing agenda cobbled together from the long-discredited dogmas and shibboleths of the conservative movement.

“The current iteration of the GOP is indifferent to the substance of government,” Steve Benen, a political writer and producer for The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, writes in “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics”: “It is disdainful of expertise and analysis. It is hostile toward evidence and arithmetic. It is tethered to few, if any, meaningful policy preferences. It does not know, and does not care, about how competing proposals should be crafted, scrutinized or implemented.”

What is news is the extent to which the Republican Party has embraced the trappings of its leader, which is to say, the trappings of a right-wing cable news network: a nonstop parade of conspiracy, demagoguery and grievance, in service to a cult of personality, all for the sake of a politics of plunder, theft and extraction.

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times ����ap columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Down in the polls and facing the headwinds of a coronavirus-battered economy, Trump made the case that the White House is the easiest location for the Secret Service and law enforcement to secure for his acceptance speech after Republicans were forced to scale back their convention because of the pandemic.

Left unsaid was that the Executive Mansion offers Trump a grand setting as he attempts to make his case that voters should stick with him in the midst of a health catastrophe that has touched nearly every aspect of American life.

“What makes this particularly galling is that the president owns a hotel four blocks away from the White House that he’s shown no qualms about profiting from over the course of his presidency,” said Donald Sherman, deputy director of the nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Now he feels compelled to use the White House grounds to deliver this political speech?”

That����ap not the only mixing of government and politics this week: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is among the Trump Cabinet officials who will address the convention, in his case a recorded address from Jerusalem while on a taxpayer-funded trip to the region. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue talked up Trump’s reelection during an “official” visit Monday to a North Carolina farm with the president.

Under a federal law known as the Hatch Act, civilian employees in the executive branch cannot use their titles when doing political work. They are also prohibited from taking part in any partisan activity while on the clock. The president and the vice president are exempt from the rules.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign criticized Pompeo’s speech, which is to air Tuesday evening. “Secretary Pompeo’s decision to address the Republican convention from Jerusalem isn’t just an abuse of taxpayer dollars, it undermines the critical work being done by the State Department,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager.

The independent Office of Special Counsel advised lawmakers earlier this month that White House advisers would not be in violation of Hatch Act rules by taking part in the convention if the event was held on the lawn or in the residence and they attended while off-duty. But if the event were held in the West Wing or in another area of the White House that is regarded as a federal room, White House officials would be prohibited from attending even while off-duty.

In addition to Pompeo, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson as well as White House senior advisers Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump and Ja’Ron Smith are all slated to address the convention. The administration officials are expected to not use their titles to avoid violations, and all — with the exception of Ivanka Trump — are slated to deliver their remarks live or pre-recorded from a location outside the White House complex.

Traditionally, the big four Cabinet members — the secretaries of state, defense, treasury and attorney general — have not attended the convention. Multiple officials involved in the planning process insisted that teams of lawyers from the White House, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee reviewed convention plans to avoid any Hatch Act violations. The officials said the events on the White House grounds were consistent with previous presidents using the White House residence for political videos.

It����ap only the second time that a president will deliver his acceptance speech at the White House. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his acceptance speech from the White House via radio to the Democratic convention that nominated him for an unprecedented third term.

“Any government employees who may participate will do so in compliance with the Hatch Act,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement.

Ivanka Trump, who in addition to her White House role is the president����ap daughter, is scheduled to introduce her father before his acceptance speech on Thursday.

Her office said in a statement that she will be participating outside of normal working hours and will be speaking in her personal capacity as the president����ap daughter.

Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel in the President Barack Obama administration, however, said that while Ivanka Trump and others can take part in the convention while staying on the right side of the law, “it����ap completely contrary to the norms.”

“People talk about the White House as the People’s House,” Eggleston said. “Political parties come and go, but it doesn’t belong to one political party or the other.”

The Trump administration is hardly the first to mix business with politics.

Obama, for instance, allowed five members of his Cabinet to address the party’s 2012 convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, as he sought reelection. Four years later, as his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, sought the White House, Obama decided to prohibit Cabinet members from taking part.

In 2012, Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s health and human services secretary, was cited for violating federal law prohibiting Cabinet members from engaging in politics on the clock when she called for the president����ap reelection and touted the candidacy of another Democrat at an event she was attending in her official capacity.

In 2011, a report by Office of Special Counsel found that during the George W. Bush administration, senior staff members at the Office of Political Affairs violated the Hatch Act by organizing dozens of political briefings from 2001 to 2007 for Republican appointees at top federal agencies in an effort to enlist them to help elect Republicans to Congress.

The Trump administration has repeatedly stepped over the line, ethics experts said.

Perdue stepped into politics on Monday during a visit with the president to Mills River, North Carolina, to spotlight a federal food distribution program to assist workers impacted by the virus. Perdue noted appreciatively the many Trump supporters who lined the motorcade route en route to the event.

“Those were part of those forgotten people that voted for you for 2016,” Perdue said. “And I’ve got better news for you: They and many others are going to vote for you for four more years in 2020.”

In November 2018, the Office of Special Counsel found six White House officials in violation for tweeting or retweeting the president����ap 2016 campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” from their official Twitter accounts. Most notably, the office recommended in June 2019 that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway be fired.

Trump refused to take action against Conway, suggesting that the office was trying to take away her right to free speech. Conway, who announced this week she will be leaving the White House for personal reasons by the end of the month, is scheduled to deliver remarks to the convention on Wednesday.

Democrats have also pointed to other alleged abuses of power by Trump that had a political slant. In July, Attorney General William Barr deployed National Guard troops to clear the area outside the White House of demonstrators protesting police brutality minutes before Trump decided to stroll to a nearby historic church for a photo op.

The president acknowledged earlier this month — before altering his public position — that he’s starving the U.S. Postal Service of money to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.

Richard Painter, who served as the White House chief ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said it����ap unlikely that Trump’s use of the White House backdrop to help his reelection effort will make a difference to the outcome of the election. But the deliberate thumbing of his nose at ethics rules and historic norms points to a “great danger.”

“It goes to the core problem that the government — including the State Department and Department of Justice — are being used as extensions of the Donald Trump campaign,” Painter said. “This is about a lot more than Kellyanne Conway or Ivanka Trump or someone else in the administration showing up to give a campaign speech on the White House lawn.”