Is This the Real Reason Why Trump's Freaking Out About the Defense Bill? - 2020-12-10

Is This the Real Reason Why Trump's Freaking Out About the Defense Bill? December 10, 2020, Martin Sheil, Opinion, Daily Beast

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None of that explains why he'd risk a humiliating veto override to shoot down a popular bipartisan bill. One thing that would explain his bizarre position here is another add-on: one that could expose financial arrangements that Trump would prefer to keep hidden.

That's a bill that emanated from the House of Representatives, was folded into its Senate analog called the Corporate Transparency Act that was then attached to the NDAA after passing the Senate on a veto-proof 86-14 vote. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney started working on the Illicit Cash Act—a mouthful of an acronym for Improving Laundering Laws and Increasing Comprehensive Information Tracking for Criminal Activity in Shell Holdings—in 2007 to modernize federal money-laundering laws. It requires shell companies to report their beneficial owners, thus preventing exploitation of U.S. companies by shell companies controlled by rogue nations, terrorists, drug traffickers, weapons smugglers, sex traffickers, and other criminal operators—maybe even vainglorious tax-evading money launderers.

If this legislation had been in place in the mid-1990s, the Trump family may have been inhibited from setting up the shell company All County Building Supply & Maintenance whose main purpose, according to epic reporting by The New York Times, was "to enable Fred Trump to make large cash gifts to his children and disguise them as legitimate business transactions thus evading the 55 percent tax." Who knows what shell companies profiting Donald Trump have yet to be exposed, and could be with the passage of this Act?

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Martin | last = Sheil | title = Is This the Real Reason Why Trump's Freaking Out About the Defense Bill? | url = https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-this-the-real-reason-why-trumps-freaking-out-about-the-defense-bill | work = Opinion | publisher = Daily Beast | date = December 10, 2020 | accessdate = December 24, 2020 }}