I’m still working through the deposition transcript by reading a few minutes at a time with long breaks between reads, a strategy necessary to keep my head from exploding.
So far I’ve learned—
That the disclaimers on his financial statements are also known as “worthless clauses” because they are broad enough to make the entire document worthless. Lawyers from all over the world call Trump to tell him his worthless clauses are the best ever, and because of these beautiful worthless clauses his financial statements are just another way of saying “if you want to know what my properties are worth, you have to figure it out yourself”.
That people far and wide, many people, from all the places where there are people, are always calling him offering to buy his all properties for unimaginably large amounts of money, or maybe they just want to buy Mar-a-Lago. Trump doesn’t know who these people are, only that there are lots of them and they are all rich. But his properties are like the Mona Lisa and he could sell them to many people for lots of money, even if he doesn’t know who these people are, because they are rich.
Good God, that is above and beyond the call… many thanks for takin’ one for the team. If you’ll give us an address, we’ll have a case of ibuprofen, a case of Tums, and a case of scotch delivered right away.
When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.
–Isaac Asimov, Foundation
The big takeaway in general is that every financial statement ever issued by The Trump Organization not only ignored all accepted accounting standards but was pretty much completely made up. But the banks should have known not to give any paperwork issued by The Trump Organization any credence whatsoever because of his brilliant “worthless clauses. This supports my long-standing belief that The Trump Organization is a criminal organization masquerading as a legitimate business.
He claims his Bedford County NY property would be worth what he claims if not for those crime loving liberals who love crime. Prosecution attorney was like ……”In Bedford?”
He claims Mar-a-Lago is worth 1.5 billion dollars. He also claims a mythical buyer could keep it as a golf club (retaining the tax advantages, I presume) and be the only member, a club of one.
He also went on a rant about wind turbines being bad for the environment. He claims wind turbines in the ocean are killing whales like no one has ever seen before. I think he’s right about no one ever seeing it.
Whales are hard to see. It’s dark once you get down very far in the ocean. And their skin is cleverly the same color as the absence of light. Very tricky critters those whales.
I can see Jeffrey Clark seems to have a lot of free time to be a bigoted jerk.
Now he’s suggesting that a fellow lawyer named Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, “realize that the only path is through and to our Lord. ”
Although given that that post led me down a link path to some right wing memes which I was depressed to learn existed maybe thanks aren’t actually in order.
