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Showing posts with label tax evasion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tax evasion. Show all posts

21 June 2026

The Unquiet American: Charles Kushner Brings Trump Diplomacy to France 20JUN26

 


CHARLES Kushner is a repulsive drippings*, self-centered, self-righteous, greedy, without any redeeming social qualities and and a raging holocaust hypocrite. It is no surprise NOT MY pres drumpf/trump appointed him as an ambassador since kushner's son married a spawn of drumpf/trump and they share the no class all trash characteristics of corrupt narcissistic families. Apologies to our French friends for sending kushner to you, please forgive us. ( *Drippings-the best part of him / her ran ( dripped ) down someone's leg )This from the New York Times.....


Ivanka & Jared: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 23APR17


The Unquiet American: Charles Kushner Brings Trump Diplomacy to France


The U.S. envoy to Paris has emerged as the embodiment of combative diplomacy in the age of President Trump, riling the French establishment notably with his accusations of antisemitism.


Four days before marking the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, Charles Kushner, President Trump’s ambassador to France, made a quieter pilgrimage to a military cemetery in eastern France. There, he recited the Kaddish prayer over the graves of five Jewish American soldiers killed in World War I.

It was a solemn act of commemoration for Mr. Kushner, an Orthodox Jew who puts his faith at the heart of his diplomacy. But it is his full-throated advocacy on behalf of Jews living in today’s France that has drawn more attention, and reproach, in Paris, where he has cut a Trumpian swath through its decorous salons.

Mr. Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, clashed with his French hosts weeks after arriving last July when he accused them of not doing enough to combat antisemitism. Nearly a year later, he contends the problem has gotten worse — so much so that he has suggested the Trump administration grant refugee status to French Jews, even as it otherwise scales back asylum provision.

“It would be an objective of mine to have, for the Jewish population here, more options to go to America rather than the option of only going to Israel,” Mr. Kushner said in an interview last week in his baronial residence in Paris. “They live in fear and they feel abandoned by this government.”

Statements like that, which he first put in an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron last August, have burned his bridges with the French Foreign Ministry. Mr. Kushner, 72, has been summoned twice to be rebuked for interfering in France’s internal affairs — snubbing both requests — after which the foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, threatened to forbid him from meeting with French officials.

In February, he was called in after the U.S. Embassy reposted State Department comments that raised concerns about the beating death of a young far-right activist by far-left gangs. Mr. Barrot rejected what he called efforts to politicize a tragedy, saying, “We have no lessons to learn from the reactionary international movement.”

Such clashes, which once would have raised doubts about Mr. Kushner’s suitability for a diplomatic post, mark him as a fitting emissary for the age of Trump. He is not merely an in-law given a plum job but also a faithful messenger of Mr. Trump’s hostility toward Europe, whether that means pushing the fight against antisemitism or meeting with far-right political leaders. Mr. Kushner is among the best connected of a corps of ambassadors who have cast aside diplomatic niceties to channel a disdainful president.

“You know, America and France disagree on a lot of issues,” Mr. Kushner said in our interview. “This is not Charlie Kushner versus Barrot or Macron. America has a lot of issues in the world now that they have a very different opinion on than Europe and France, in particular.”

Mr. Kushner — joined in the interview by his wife, Seryl, and his influential chief of staff, Gabriel Scheinmann — was unrepentant about refusing to report to the French Foreign Ministry. Being summoned, he said, was “disrespectful to me personally” and “disrespectful to the United States government.”

A billionaire real estate developer from New Jersey, Mr. Kushner served more than a year in prison after he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and witness tampering, having hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with investigators against him, and then sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister. He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Regarding his post in Paris, Mr. Kushner conceded that he did not have the “natural ingredients for diplomacy.” But he said, “We’re very results-oriented, so if that shakes things up sometimes, maybe we shake them up.”

Mr. Kushner and Mr. Barrot have since talked by phone, and Mr. Kushner’s access to French officialdom appears intact. He met for breakfast recently with Mr. Macron, accompanying Tom Barrack, who is Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Iraq. Mr. Kushner said he had a constructive relationship with the economics minister, Roland Lescure, for whom he organized a round table with executives from American technology companies.

Mr. Lescure said in an interview that he appreciated that Mr. Kushner did not impose the White House’s views at that session. But he said he shared his colleagues’ dismay at some of Mr. Kushner’s public statements.

“I don’t know any real estate guy who has become an ambassador,” Mr. Lescure said. “I’m not sure he’s fully learned to behave like one.”

Mr. Macron’s top advisers still steer clear of one-on-one meetings with Mr. Kushner, current and former French diplomats said, because they viewed his letter to the president as a personal attack on their boss. The French officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The tensions with Mr. Barrot, according to a senior American official, began after he did not warn Mr. Kushner at their first meeting in July 2025 that Mr. Macron planned to announce that evening that France would recognize the state of Palestine. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said that there was no intention to conceal and that France’s movement toward recognition was well known. The ministry declined to comment more broadly on its relations with Mr. Kushner; Mr. Macron’s office did not answer requests for comment.


The Trump administration has voiced no misgivings about Mr. Kushner’s conduct. A spokesman for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, said, “From his leadership in commercial diplomacy to his strong advocacy against antisemitism, Ambassador Kushner is committed to advancing the ‘America First’ foreign policy vision.”

Few French officials dispute that Mr. Kushner has a point in warning about antisemitism in France. According to the French Interior Ministry, the number of violent acts against Jews rose sharply after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, even if the rate dropped slightly last year.

Antisemitism is on the rise across Europe and in the United States. In France, which has large Jewish and Muslim populations, the debate is especially layered in history. In World War II, the Nazi-backed regime that controlled southern France helped to deport French Jews to concentration camps. More recently, France’s recognition of Palestine — which Mr. Kushner called “a gift to Hamas” — stirred questions about whether the move would fuel anti-Jewish feeling in the country.

Yet experts contend that Mr. Kushner is wrong to say that the French government is not doing anything to counter antisemitism. France, they say, possesses a stronger legal arsenal to combat antisemitism than almost any other country, and it has significantly reinforced security at Jewish institutions.

“The ambassador, who is right to take an interest in this issue and who hopes that France could improve its measures, should use more diplomatic language if he wants to be heard,” said Marc Knobel, a historian and expert on antisemitism in France. Mr. Kushner, he added, would be well advised “to also concern himself with the antisemitism taking place in his own country.”

Mr. Kushner granted that. “If you told me 10 years ago that we would have the antisemitism here today, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy.’” He said the difference was that Mr. Trump had taken robust action against it. The administration has sued institutions like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania on the contested claim that they tolerated antisemitism on their campuses — while, Mr. Kushner noted, France had not taken comparable steps against French universities.

Mr. Kushner’s strong words have made him a hero among some Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. Before the ceremony at the military cemetery, American Jews lined up to thank him for his advocacy.

“He didn’t say it like the French would have liked, and it wasn’t very diplomatic,” said Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, a former director of the Europe branch of the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group. “But to have a U.S. ambassador who says he clearly cares about it, and this is a No. 1 priority — that is very reassuring,” she added.


As a child of Holocaust survivors, Mr. Kushner said that he deplored acts of hatred against any people of any religion. He said he had met with Catholic priests and Muslim clerics to discuss interfaith tensions. Hassen Chalghoumi, an imam in Paris known for his outreach to Jews, said that Mr. Kushner’s family ties to Mr. Trump gave his efforts greater impact.


“The ambassador is not just an ambassador,” Mr. Chalghoumi said. “He is directly linked to the president’s family.”


During Mr. Trump’s first term, Jared Kushner helped engineer the Abraham Accords, agreements under which several Arab countries normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. Unabashedly proud of his son’s achievement, the ambassador gives visitors signed copies of his son’s memoir, “Breaking History.” Mr. Kushner is cultivating Middle East ambassadors in Paris, he said, in the hope of persuading more countries to join the accords.

One of those envoys, Rabih El Chaer of Lebanon, said that Mr. Kushner had floated a meeting in the United States between Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, an old friend of Mr. Kushner’s. When Mr. El Chaer hesitated, he recalled Mr. Kushner telling him, “I am a man of deals.” Mr. El Chaer said he replied, “I come from the Middle East, where we don’t simply skip over history.”

For Mr. Kushner, too, history hangs over this assignment. Next month, he will celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence with a party at his residence, at which guests will be serenaded by the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. Mr. Kushner has renovated the building, an 18th-century villa that was once owned by the Rothschilds and requisitioned by the Nazis during their occupation of Paris.

To fund the repairs, Mr. Kushner said that he had raised $10 million, much of it from the chiefs of France’s largest companies, whom he asked to contribute $250,000. Other diplomats said that such high-dollar donations were unusual, at least before Mr. Trump became president. Mr. Kushner is, he joked, the project’s “site super.”


There is a measure of rehabilitation for Mr. Kushner himself.

“If somebody wrote my story,” he said of the twists that carried him from prison to Paris, “I’d probably be put in the fiction section of a store rather than nonfiction.”

Yet when asked whether he viewed his ambassadorial post as a chance to write a different ending, Mr. Kushner shook his head.

“This is not retribution for me,” he said.

Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

Mark Landler is the Paris bureau chief of The Times, covering France, as well as American foreign policy in Europe and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.

The Latest on the Trump Administration


  • Kennedy’s Special Education Role: Alienated by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims about autism, advocates for disabled students are sounding the alarm about the Trump administration's shifting of special education programs to his department.

  • New Air Force One: President Trump has unveiled the red, white and blue 747 Boeing jetliner donated by the government of Qatar, and he said he expected the plane to lead a flyover of Washington on July 4.

  • Ambassador to France: Charles Kushner has emerged as the embodiment of combative diplomacy in the age of Trump, riling the French establishment notably with his accusations of antisemitism.

  • Frayed Relationship with Giorgia Meloni: Trump said the Italian leader had “begged” him to take a photo together at the Group of 7 summit in France. Meloni called Trump’s statements “totally invented.”

  • Military Budget: Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are resisting Trump’s calls to raise the Pentagon’s budget to its highest level in modern history, signaling a looming fight over military spending as the administration refuses to detail the cost of the war with Iran.

  • National Intelligence Agency: With Bill Pulte, one of Trump’s aides who has most relentlessly pursued the president’s passions for retribution, likely to take over the agency, officials are bracing for the potential for even more efforts by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to influence the midterms. Some lawmakers want to shrink the office.

12 November 2011

Credit Suisse To Disclose Names Of U.S. Clients Suspected Of Tax Evasion 11NOV11

Finally! Make these greedy pigs pay!!!!

Credit Suisse AG, Switzerland's second-largest bank, has begun notifying certain U.S. clients suspected of offshore tax evasion that it intends to turn over their names to the Internal Revenue Service, with the help of Swiss tax authorities.
Credit Suisse's notification by letter, a copy of which was obtained on Monday by Reuters, says the handover of names and account details will take place following a recent formal request for the information by the IRS.
The move by Credit Suisse to disclose American client names and account information is the latest twist in a showdown between Switzerland and the United States over the battered tradition of Swiss bank secrecy.
U.S. authorities, who suspect tens of thousands of wealthy Americans of evading billions of dollars in taxes through Swiss private banks in recent years, are conducting a widening criminal investigation into scores of Swiss banks, including Credit Suisse.
The letter, on Credit Suisse letterhead, is dated November 2, comes from the bank's Zurich headquarters and is signed by two senior Credit Suisse executives. It cites a formal request made by the IRS to the Swiss Federal Tax Administration, or SFTA, via a tax treaty between the two countries.
SEEKING INFORMATION
"The I.R.S. is seeking information with regard to accounts of certain U.S. persons owned through a domiciliary company (as beneficial owners) that have been maintained with Credit Suisse AG," the letter said. It added that the recipient of the letter, whose name was redacted in the copy obtained by Reuters, fell into the category of clients sought by the IRS. Domiciliary companies are a type of shell company.
"In connection with the IRS treaty request, the SFTA has issued an order directing Credit Suisse to submit responsive account information to the SFTA," the letter said. "This order is immediately executable and Credit Suisse as an information holder has no right to appeal."
It was unclear how many U.S. clients had been sent the letter. David Walker, a spokesman for Credit Suisse, declined to comment on the matter.
The letter says that the IRS request covers accounts maintained at any time over the period from January 1, 2002, through December 31, 2010. The letter was signed by Michel Ruffieux and Stephan Gussman, both managing directors at Credit Suisse.
Credit Suisse in July received a target letter from the U.S. Justice Department notifying it that it was the subject of a federal criminal investigation into its offshore private banking services.
Switzerland is trying to craft a deal with the United States that would cover its entire banking industry of some 355 banks.
It is unclear how many American clients of Credit Suisse hold private banking accounts that have gone undeclared to U.S. tax authorities.
TWO CHOICES
The Credit Suisse letter gives the client two choices: either agree in writing to the turnover of the client's data to the Swiss tax authorities, which will then forward it to the IRS, or hire a lawyer in Switzerland and contest the process. Under U.S. law, contesting a handover requires the American client to inform the U.S. attorney general that he is doing so --- a move that effectively discloses the identity of the suspected tax evader to U.S. authorities.
Switzerland has broadly interpreted its tax treaty with the United States to mean that the United States must generally already possess the names of suspected American tax evaders in order to gain further information on their Swiss bank accounts.
Switzerland recently showed signs of softening on that interpretation. In August, Swiss government officials said they would consider processing treaty requests based on "behavioral patterns," as opposed to concrete names. Many Swiss banks turned over broad statistical data, meaning behavioral patterns, for their American clients in September, following a request from the U.S. Justice Department's second in command, Assistant Attorney General James Cole, to do so.
Scott Michel, a tax lawyer with Caplin Drysdale in Washington, D.C., said that the letter could mean one of two things: either the United States was taking softer steps to bolster the thrust of its target letter to the bank, or Credit Suisse was in the process of reaching a settlement with U.S. authorities. Such a settlement, following the receipt of a target letter, would typically be a deferred-prosecution or non-prosecution agreement.
He said the fact that the Swiss tax authorities had ordered Credit Suisse to provide it the data to hand over to the IRS represented "a further erosion of longstanding Swiss bank secrecy."
(Reporting by Lynnley Browning in Tulsa, Okla; Editing by Howard Goller, Gary Hill)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters

02 July 2010

Cash Business In Gulf Makes Compensation Difficult 29JUN10

SORRY, I can not support any plan for a tax amnesty for these people who have gone their entire working life cheating the system by not reporting their income and not paying taxes like the rest of us have to. NOBODY claims all their income on their taxes, be it from your yard sale or an occasional side job. But to not claim any income, or very little income to avoid paying taxes and then have it come back to bite you now.......well, too bad. The people in the Gulf region are generally the type that run their mouths about big government and all the waste of tax payers dollars (BUT hey, it turns out not their tax dollars because they haven't been paying their taxes!!!), and they are the type to run their mouths about welfare queens and the such.....while they are cheating the system! No, there shouldn't be any tax amnesty for them. Let them estimate their income, sign up for compensation from BP, and then set up a payment system for them to pay their back taxes, with interest, from the last seven years. Make the tax payment affordable, do not send them into poverty, but NO TAX AMNESTY, NO TAX BREAKS, NO PARTIAL TAX PAYMENTS. 
Shrimp boats sit in the Pass 
Christian Harbor in Pass Christian, Miss.
Enlarge Dave Martin/AP Shrimp boats sit in the Pass Christian Harbor in Pass Christian, Miss. Many fishermen, seafood buyers and others in the Gulf operate with cash, which may cause problems when they cannot present the documents needed to receive government compensation.
Shrimp boats sit in the Pass Christian Harbor in Pass 
Christian, Miss.
Dave Martin/AP
Shrimp boats sit in the Pass Christian Harbor in Pass Christian, Miss. Many fishermen, seafood buyers and others in the Gulf operate with cash, which may cause problems when they cannot present the documents needed to receive government compensation.
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June 29, 2010
Cash is king in the Gulf fishing industry. And many fishermen and residents say a large, if unquantifiable, amount of the Gulf Coast's economy operates with cash. It's a segment of the economy that, for generations, has been kept in the shadows of the Internal Revenue Service.
That's a sore subject now. Since the oil spill began, many of the fishermen haven't been able to work. And they want to collect payment from the $20 billion compensation fund BP set up.
'A Cash Business'
Bobby Barnett is a veteran fisherman in Pass Christian in southern Mississippi. The waters there are mostly closed for fishing. But normally, Barnett would be catching oysters and shrimp, and selling them at the dock.
Some of that income is in documents. But "we sell a lot of cash — cash shrimp," Barnett says.
Danny Lee is a representative of Boat People SOS, a Vietnamese-American community group that, along with other similar nonprofits, offers free legal advice for fishermen in Biloxi, Miss.
"Basically it's a cash business, and they don't keep track of how much they're selling," Lee said. "But the big concern is they don't know how they can come up with the proper documentation to show they have a certain income."
Not paying taxes is, of course, illegal. But St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro says it would be unfair to penalize the fishermen now for past misdeeds.
Taffaro, who was at a recent open house for parish residents in Chalmette, La., would like to see Washington implement a tax amnesty program for oil spill victims who've been operating under the table.
I don't think there's a solution. I think the senators and representatives want to help their constituents, but I think their constituents are behind the eight ball here.
He says it would be an opportunity for people who haven't declared their income to collect payment in exchange for coming clean.
"You get in the game — you get financially compensated for your losses," Taffaro says. "But now you're in the system, and now you're going to have to live by all the tax codes that everyone else lives by."
No Solution
Chad Lauga, a political director for a Louisiana chapter of the AFL-CIO, says the cash ecosystem extends far beyond just the fishermen and shrimpers. Seafood buyers at the docks, for example, offer more per pound if they can pay fishermen with cash.
"So if [the dock buyer is] avoiding his taxes by paying this shrimper with cash, and the shrimper [is] saying, 'Man, I'm getting more money for my product if I take cash' — Well, I mean, it's a no-brainer what everybody's going to do," Lauga says.
That's not all, Lauga says. Many lawn workers and boat repair people are also mostly paid in cash and therefore don't get 1099 tax forms in the mail at the end of the year.
As a taxpaying citizen himself, Lauga says he doesn't think skirting taxes is right. But he also doesn't want to see his friends and neighbors go to financial ruin because they can't collect from BP. Lauga has talked to members of the Louisiana Legislature about this, but he is not encouraged.
"I don't think there's a solution," he says. "I think the senators and representatives want to help their constituents, but I think their constituents are behind the eight ball here."
Kenneth Feinberg, who now runs the independent, $20 billion oil spill compensation fund, says that by law, he cannot offer amnesty himself to those who can't document their income.
"If Congress wants to modify the tax law to provide for such payment, that's fine with me," Feinberg says. "I just have to make sure the facility is complying with all applicable laws."
Until now, all the compensation checks have been for initial, emergency payment, with only minimal documentation required. And so far, Feinberg says he hasn't fielded requests for compensation from people with undocumented cash income. As the fund starts to focus more on longer term compensation, he says, that might change.