Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Donald Trump Jr., son of President Donald Trump and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, criticized The New York Times for its report that portrayed his father’s business dealings negatively.
The younger Trump explained how what is on tax returns does not necessarily reflect the health of a business or the amount of taxes paid by that business.
“Listen, it’s ridiculous, my father’s paid tens of millions of taxes,” he said. “If he does things in certain years where you get depreciation, where you get the write-off, where you get historical tax credits like we did when we took on the risk of building the Old Post Office in D.C., it’s the perfect example. That was literally a government contract. We bid against every hotel company in the world, historical tax credits that you use to offset tax payments for taking the risk to build that. That was done under the Obama administration. It literally took an act of Congress to get it done. So with that comes historical tax credits. That’s the reality. People don’t understand what goes into a business.”
“It doesn’t include property taxes, it doesn’t include payroll taxes, it doesn’t include real estate taxes, it doesn’t include so many of the things that he’s been paying taxes on forever, as he’s also putting thousands and thousands of people to work on an annual basis,” Trump continued. “But, of course, The New York Times does this, they put out a selective, you know, picture of all of these things the day before a debate to try to give someone like Joe Biden, you know, an attack line to come up with one or two catchy sound bites and that’s the game. We’ve seen it. We saw it two weeks ago with the debunked claim about the military. We’ve seen it for four years about the Russia hoax. If only they spent as much time looking for maybe, I don’t know, Hunter Biden’s tax returns and the Biden family issues, where Hunter’s taking money from a known associate of Vladimir Putin, $3.5 million and no one has any interest. Money that’s linked to human trafficking and prostitution rings in Eastern Europe. Think about that.”
“Brian, imagine if I did that, imagine the story it would be,” he added. “So, the Kremlin, direct ties to Vladimir Putin has influence over Hunter Biden. You don’t think that’s the collusion that they were worried about with Donald Trump? You don’t think it’s right there with the Biden family? And we don’t even have to get into Ukraine and a billion five from China. But again, that’s the problem. That’s the lens by which the media looks at anything that they can try to spin about Donald Trump who’s actually created jobs, who’s actually created business, who hasn’t just talked about it for 50 years like Joe Biden but not actually achieved anything, that’s the difference.”
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