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Donald Trump’s real-estate and golf-resort empire was found guilty on Tuesday for tax crimes committed by the company’s two top financial executives, a verdict that followed a six-week trial in state court in Manhattan.
The Trump Organization now faces up to $1.6 million in penalities when it’s sentenced on January 13. But there’s another threatened cost, and it’s something government spending watchdogs have been urging for years.
The conviction could prompt the government to bar the Trump Organization from doing business as a federal contractor, including cutting off the spigot of Trump’s lucrative — and critics say exorbitant — billing of Secret Service agents who stay at his properties while protecting the former president and his family.
Trump is hardly the ideal government contractor as it is, watchdogs say, after his many brushes with fraud allegations and given federal regulations requiring “an impeccable standard of conduct.”
Those regulations also recommend “debarment,” or blacklisting, of any company convicted of such business-related crimes as “forgery, bribery, falsification or destruction of records, making false statements [and] tax evasion.”
The conviction from this payroll tax-fraud trial could only increase calls to blacklist Trump, according to Steven L. Schooner, who teaches government procurement law at George Washington University Law School.
Schooner has complained stridently over the years as the feds continued to do business with Trump despite two impeachments, an inauguration scandal, questions over his Trump International Hotel in DC, and the forced dissolution of Trump University and the Trump Foundation by the same New York attorney general’s office now alleging he pocketed $250 million through financial fraud.
Add to that the recent news that the Trump Organization had billed the Secret Service more than $ 1.4 million to stay at Trump properties during the former president’s time in office.
The Secret Service paid Trump as much as $1,185 per night for a single room at his DC hotel, and once signed a $179,000 contract for golf cart rentals at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“The rules that apply to typical government contractors have never applied to Trump Organization, and frankly, that’s the most depressing and pernicious aspect of this pathetic saga,” Schooner said.
“It’s as mind-boggling as it is heart-breaking,” he said of the government’s apparent unwillingness to stop stuffing taxpayer dollars into Trump’s pocket.
Within 10 hours of deliberation, a jury determined that the Trump Organization defrauded tax authorities by paying executives some of their compensation off the tax books, in the form of perks like free apartments and cars.
