1ºNewsweek
News Legend Barbara Walters Recalled for Savage Trump Takedown
By Aila Slisco On 12/31/22
The death of groundbreaking broadcast journalist Barbara Walters has inspired tributes that include the sharing of a brutal 1990 interview with future President Donald Trump.
Walters, the first American woman to work as an evening television news anchor, died at the age of 93 on Friday. Her career in journalism spanned over 60 years and included hosting multiple primetime news shows and specials, as well as hosting the daytime talk show The View, which she also created.
Cindi Berger, Walters' publicist, said in a statement that she had "passed away peacefully in her home surrounded by loved ones." Berger added that Walters "lived her life with no regrets," while praising her as "a trailblazer not only for female journalists, but for all women."
Tributes to Walters poured in on social media shortly after her death was announced on Friday night. Some were accompanied by the video clip of her tense interview with Trump, which featured Walters challenging the future president on his finances after he offered rhetoric that previewed his now-frequent "fake news" claim.
"I've never seen press reporting as I have with regards to me," Trump said during the interview. "I hope the general public understands how inherently dishonest the press in this country is."
Walters quickly responded by offering to "try to clear up some of the things" that he claimed were dishonest, going on to say that Trump was on the "verge of bankruptcy" and had been "bailed out by the banks" despite Trump claiming that bankers had told him that he was "stronger than ever."
"Skating on thin ice and almost drowning, that's a businessman to be admired?" asked Walters.
"You say on the verge of bankruptcy, Barbara, and you talk on the verge, and you listen to what people are saying," Trump shot back, before Walters revealed that she had personally spoken to his banker.
Trump continued to argue that his bankers were saying that he had recently made a "great deal." Walters bluntly responded, "No, they're not."
"Barbara Walters knew Donald Trump was a FRAUD," author Don Winslow commented while sharing the clip to Twitter on Friday.
"Barbara Walters had Donald Trump's number in 1990," communications consultant Scott Monty tweeted. "She did her research, backed up her claims and did not back down. Ironic that she died on the same day his tax returns were released."
"Remembering Barbara Walters: A legendary journalist, Walters took Donald Trump to task years before he became President when he tried to disparage journalists even back then," tweeted journalist Shakari Briggs while sharing the video. "Her interview skills were top-notch & could've been studied as a class."
"Barbara Walters showed that Trump was a fraud many years ago," journalist Lana Montalban tweeted. "Why so many refused to see the truth? #RIPBarbaraWalters You will be missed, lady."
Walters conducted interviews with Trump multiple times during her long career, with the first coming in 1987.
Her last interview with Trump, alongside future first lady Melania Trump in 2015, was far less contentious. It featured questions on how the then-presidential candidate was handling his role as "Grandpa Trump."
Trump praised Walters as "the great Barbara Walters" while promoting the interview on social media at the time.
Newsweek has reached out to the office of Trump for comment.
2ºPolitico
Trump taxes show foreign income from more than a dozen countries
Read Trump’s unsealed tax returns
BY POLITICO STAFF
His far-flung concerns, foreign and domestic, are nested in more than 400 separate business entities. A 2019 report by the watchdog group OpenSecrets said he had more than $130 million in assets in more than 30 countries.
The six years of tax returns disclosed Friday show that Trump received extensive income from Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom — including gross business income of at least $35.3 million from Canada in 2017, the year he entered office.
That year, Trump also brought in $6.5 million from China, $5.8 million from Indonesia and $5.7 million from India.
By 2020, his last full year in office, Trump reported $8.8 million in income from the U.K. and another $3.9 million in Ireland.
It’s not a surprise that Trump continued to receive money from foreign interests while he was president, since he kept ownership of the company.
Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, ran the company while their father was president. Trump pledged his company wouldn’t enter into any new foreign deals while he was president. But POLITICO and other news organizations reported inconsistencies between that pledge and the Trump family’s business activities abroad, including embarking on expansions at some existing properties.
In September 2019, for instance, Eric Trump announced on Twitter “we received full & total approval for a new phase of development,” including 500 homes and a second golf course, at their property in Scotland. In addition, state-owned companies in China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea constructed Trump resorts while other countries built roads and donated public land for new developments.
At the same time, previous leaks of the former president’s tax returns to The New York Times and required annual disclosure forms also showed that the Trumps had ties to more autocratic countries, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
3ºHuffPost
Trump Declared In Presidential Debate He Shut Down Chinese Bank Account. He Didn't.
The Trump Organization also collected millions in income from more than a dozen foreign nations while Trump was president, according to his tax returns.
By Mary Papenfuss
Dec 30, 2022
Donald Trump, in response to a question during a 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden, insisted that he closed down his bank account in China before his first campaign. But six years’ worth of Trump’s tax records, released Friday, reveal that wasn’t true.
“[I] had an account open, and I closed it,” Trump said with some irritation to moderator Kristen Welker, NBC White House correspondent, in the final debate of the campaign in October 2020. “I closed it before I even ran for president, let alone became president.”
Rep.-elect Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, noted that the former president had bank accounts in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to his tax records.
“Generally, you only have bank accounts in a foreign country if you are doing transactions in that country’s currency,” Goldman tweeted Friday. “What business was Trump doing in China while he was President?”
Trump, who had accounts in a number of countries and collected income from more than a dozen foreign nations while in office, paid more in taxes in 2020 to the Chinese government than he did in American federal income tax that year, his returns revealed.
Trump also lied a month earlier to then-Fox News commentator Chris Wallace, who pointedly asked him during the first presidential debate in 2020 if he’d paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, as The New York Times had reported (which Trump immediately blasted as “fake news”).
Trump angrily responded — twice — that he had paid “millions of dollars.” His returns revealed that indeed he had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in each of those years. Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income tax in 2020, the last full year he was in office, according to the tax records.
In addition, Trump did not annually donate his $400,000 presidential salary to charity, as he has claimed. He declared no charitable contributions of any kind on his 2020 returns.
Among the early revelations emerging in Trump’s tax records, some of the most troubling involve his financial entanglements abroad while he was president,
“highlighting a string of potential conflicts of interest,” Politico noted.
Trump had multiple bank accounts in a number of foreign countries, and collected millions of dollars in income from more than a dozen nations ― including Panama, the Philippines (whose onetime dictator, former President Rodrigo Duterte, he has praised) and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.
While presidents routinely place assets in blind trusts while they’re in office, Trump’s eldest sons continued to openly operate the Trump Organization and forged deals around the world with nations affected by the Trump administration’s policies and expenditures.
Trump’s returns reveal hefty financial losses in the two years before he became president, some of which he carried forward to reduce tax bills.
Trump enjoyed an adjusted gross income of $15.8 million during his first three years in office. He paid $642,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $750 in 2016 and in 2017, just under $1 million in 2018, $133,000 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.